Pillars of horror

Full Moon Horror Roadshow
Madame Walker Theatre
Oct. 20

When I was young, for weeks I couldn’t go to the bathroom without deep fear, and it was all Charles Band’s fault.

A display of props used in some of Charles Band's horror movies, including 'Blade,' fan-favorite killer puppet of the 'Puppet Master' series.

Stick with me here, it makes sense. Band was the brains behind the movie Ghoulies back in the early 1980s, with an advertising campaign that focused on a creepy little gremlin jumping out of a toilet. Freaked me the hell out — and I wasn’t the only one.

“I got 500 pieces of hate mail,” Band said at his appearance at Madame Walker Theatre last week. “All of them saying, ‘You Hollywood bastard, we spent all these years trying to potty train our kids and now they won’t go near the bathroom.’”

But then, freaking people the hell out has been Band’s forte for decades now, as the master of low-budget, straight-to-video horror and head of Full Moon Pictures. We’re talking about the mind behind more than 240 movies, and cranking them out nearly monthly today.

“What are the three pillars of horror? Dolls and monsters and freaky things, people getting killed in unusual ways — the blood and guts — and the third pillar is hot chicks,” Band said. It’s hard to argue with his logic, as the most popular parts of his presentation included things like locals modeling his latest invention, the “Monster Bra,” or his on-the-spot direction of a horror/ravishment scene.
The whole point behind the Full Moon Horror Roadshow is to get himself back in touch with the horrorstream after years of producing and staying, in his own words, behind an office desk for far too long. “I’m trying to go back to what it was like in the early days. My whole new thing, why I’m coming out on the road and meeting you guys, is being very much involved myself and shooting on 35 millimeter, like it was in the old days.”

He takes some time explaining how in his latest film, Gingerdead Man, Gary Busey plays a killer who guns down a bakery, but misses the baker’s daughter, who ends up testifying against him and sending him to the electric chair, but his mother’s a witch and so she bakes his ashes into cookie dough at — dum dum dum — the VERY SAME BAKERY! And he comes back as an evil, pissed-off cookie. In the world of Charles Band, this sort of thing makes a great deal of sense. And he has a way of selling it. Gingerdead Man! Why NOT? After a blue million Demonic Toys movies, you gotta come up with something somehow.

And his thoughts on getting into film? “You can go to film school and spend $100,000 and all that stuff, but practically speaking, you’ve gotta get on a movie set. You’ve got to be where the action is. Apprentice, get on a set and just do it. There’s nothing like practical experience. We’re in an era where the price of admission is nothing. You get yourself a digital camera and a decent computer, and you can make a demo reel.”