Bloodsucking Bastards and the Daily Drain
Brian James O’Connell and Fran Kranz talk about the tricky business of horror/comedy and the fun of dumping buckets of blood on people.
The workaday drudgery of cubicle culture drains the life out of people, so it was only a matter of time until a movie was literal about it. Billed as “Office Space meets Shaun of the Dead,” Brian James O’ Connell’s raucous horror/comedy Bloodsucking Bastards turns a typical white-collar, corporate environment into a natural feeding ground for undead go-getters. The film makes an effort to get both sides of the equation right, capturing the toxic atmosphere of a company that swirls with gossip and empty ambition before morphing into an action-packed bloodbath as vampires take over upper management. It’s a tricky balance to strike for O’Connell and his improv troupe Dr. God, members of which collaborated on the script and perform in several roles, but O’Connell has a ringer in Joss Whedon favorite Fran Kranz, who starred in the recent horror/comedy standard-bearer The Cabin in the Woods.
Kranz plays put-upon hero Evan Sanders, the type of guy who’s regularly humiliated by his co-workers and always gets passed over for the big promotion. With tension still lingering over a botched romance with his co-worker Amanda (Emma Fitzpatrick), Evan suffers through the spectacle of his boss handing his college nemesis (Pedro Pascal) the management post he expected for himself, but his suffering is not over. When the new hire starts assembling a vampire army, it’s up to Evan and Amanda to stake their colleagues, who pop like engorged mosquitoes. With Bloodsucking Bastards poised to make a run at cult audiences this week, Paste spoke to O’Connell and Kranz about the vampire metaphor, the tricky business of horror/comedy, and the vast quantities of blood dumped on the cast.
Paste: What makes the vampire myth such a strong metaphor for the workplace?
Fran Kranz: As the movie points out really nicely, the work is soulless. There’s no connection to it. There are no windows in the office, just florescent light. Everyone gets pale. There’s no sunlight. This is the first movie I can remember where I’ve seen the two combined this way. Is there some deeper connection to it? Or did we come up with something nice and original here?
Brian James O’Connell: When we got the script, it’s just like Fran said—we’d never seen that before. It just seemed so obvious that we were kind of stunned that nobody had done it yet. I have a bunch of friends who used to work at 1-800-DENTIST, which is the perfect job for actors and comedians and improvisors, because you can set your own hours. Then Mitt Romney’s company [Bain Capital] took over 1-800-DENTIST and they got a company-wide memo on Friday that said, “Don’t worry. Nothing’s going to change. We bought the company because we believe in what it does.” My buddy, who worked there as a manager, came back on Monday morning, and it was a complete lie. They had stripped everything personal in the place. They had painted the walls gray. And that’s where it’s moving now: If your job doesn’t go overseas, if you’re lucky enough to have a job that stays here in a corporate environment, it’s going to be Mr. Anderson in The Matrix. It’s going to be cubicle farms and gray and death. So “Let’s make this office a coffin” is not far off.
Paste: To me, the first monster that comes to mind for an office horror movie would be a zombie, because you can associate them with “office drones.” The interesting thing about vampires is they add that element of aggression.
Kranz: Yes. There’s a cutthroat, competitive nature to it. You think of Wall Street hedge funds and people doing whatever it takes to get ahead of one another, this über-competitive environment. [The film] does give you this zombie culture, this mindless work and counting the minutes to get home. But I love this twist that the vampires thrive in this environment. [Vampirism] was a decision that came from management in order to get the company back on track. We need this kind of competitive edge.
O’Connell: It’s all about the bottom line, about profits by any means necessary. I like to call Boiler Room “Scarface for white dudes.” They all look at it and get jacked about it. “Yeah, bro! That’s what I wanna do! They’re making all that money. They’re bucking the system. They’re doing cocaine.” It’s the same with every rapper and Scarface. Has anyone watched the end of these movies? It doesn’t end well. These are bad people. They die or go to jail. We wanted to tap into this culture of consumption, and vampires seemed to be the perfect monster for that. Once you’re immortal and once you start feeding on people—and you used to be a person—all the empathy just goes away.
Paste: Have either of you had experiences in these sort of white-collar office jobs?
Kranz: No. I got lucky. I’m spoiled. I got my first acting job right after my senior year in high school. But isn’t “the bad job” fairly universal? At least in the zombie sense of it, the boring aspect, the counting the minutes to get through a day. That I think we all know whether it’s in a cubicle or outdoors or what. That cutthroat, Boiler Room nature of the movie… I’ve definitely had friends who have worked in hedge funds or private equity banks and you can see how it consumes them and takes a toll of them.
O’Connell: I have six generations of my family in the restaurant business, so that was always your summer job or part-time job—to work in a kitchen or wait tables or bartend. But I did have a lot of weird, shitty jobs early on. I was born and raised in North Carolina, and one summer in high school, I worked in a factory that made church pews. There were guys in there who had missing teeth and club feet, and there were like chemicals and shit where if you stuck your hand in, it turned white for a day. The first time I looked around, I thought, “Fuck this. I’m going to fucking pay attention in school. I’m not dicking around with this shit for the rest of my life.” Justin [Ware] worked in advertising in Chicago, which is why there are so many marketing jokes in the movie. All the language gets boiled down to what’s buzz-worthy and what’s going to resonate in the marketplace. Not to kick anybody while they’re down, but you look at what happened to Relativity—a lot of their business plan was based on, “We’re going to look at these numbers and see which of these communities are being underserved. And we’ll put this piece together and this piece together and this piece together, and that movie will fit this niche and we’ll make money off it.” And that’s just not true, because you have to be passionate about something. Something has to fucking speak to you, you know?
Paste: Horror-comedy can be tricky because comedy tends to break tension and fear is something horror relies upon. How did you solve for that?
O’Connell: That’s the toughest needle to thread, which is why there are so few [horror-comedies] and why there are so few that do well internationally. Somebody told me that Shaun of the Dead didn’t make any money internationally, and that sounded ludicrous to me. Because that movie is nearly perfect.
The biggest thing is to be honest to both things. My mentor once told me the invention of laughter came through fear. Like there’s a caveman out there hunting and he hears a rustle in the bushes and he’s like, “Oh shit! Oh shit! It’s a fucking saber-toothed tiger. I’m gonna die.” And it’s just his buddy Og, standing up, eating berries. “I thought you were a saber-toothed tiger!” “I thought you were gonna stab me with a spear!” So I always reminded myself of that when we were filming. I didn’t mind if we got a laugh here, so long as it’s a reprieve from, “Oh God, I’m gonna fucking die again.” I think Fran really did an amazing job of tying that all together and being that sort of central core that we can always come back to. There are times when he makes jokes and times when he’s scared, and it always looks real. I can’t imagine anyone but Fran in that role. Horror-comedies are really difficult and if we didn’t have the right guy in the center, it could have gotten off track real fast.
Kranz: I agree with everything Brian said. [Laughs.] The caveman analogy is perfect. To me, the best follow-up to fear is laughter. That was probably how it came to be. They’re so intertwined, they’re so closely connected that there must be some sort of concentric emotional circle there. I feel that the release with laughter is about as pleasurable as entertainment gets, so it’s odd that [horror-comedy] is such a subgenre. When it works, it’s so good, but it’s really hard to get right. On set, Brian would direct me in degrees on playing for horror or playing for laughter. It might even be impossible thing to know on set. It’s something they [the director and editor] have to find later on. Take after take, you give different options. But it would be foolish to answer that question on set [of how much to play for horror or comedy]. With Brian’s direction, we were able to keep our options open. It also helps that the Dr. God guys were so good at improv that the set was already a loose environment. You never felt constricted about hitting a certain emotion or level of terror. And that served us well in the long run.