I was a fan of David F. Sandberg from the very first time I saw the short film “Lights Out.” And when he brought that creep factor to the big screen, and followed it up with Annabelle: Creation, I continued to be impressed. When Mr. Sandberg took on Shazam! it became pretty apparent the filmmaker had a few more tricks up his sleeve. As a storyteller, the man has a knack for balancing humor and horror. And he is certainly having a bit of fun bringing that to the big screen. And yes, he did it again in Shazam! Fury of the Gods.

We recently spent some time at the junket for the new sequel. David was in attendance to talk about his latest supersize sequel. He opened up about bringing in assorted monsters, and working off of Chris Morgan and Henry Gayden’s script. The filmmaker talked about his approach to creatures, and bringing in a little mythology into the mix. It’s always a pleasure talking to David. Make sure you check out the engaging new sequel, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, currently playing at a theatre near you.

How did you approach this sequel, and how involved were you in the script? Because the first one was very much a horror-centric film, as well.

This is very much the same thing. I mean, the script was sort of a bit of a collaboration. We were talking early on what it would be, and then Henry Gayden would go off and write. And Chris Morgan came in and did an operation as well, or did some work on it. No, but I love those horror pieces and I love the monsters to design it, and it adds a lot to the movie in the form of a real sense of danger and a threat. And I could do that stuff all day. I mean, we actually did shoot a lot of stuff with just random people reacting to monsters all around Philadelphia. But it was like, “well, the movie is about Shazam, and we should probably get back to them a little quicker,” so we cut some of it out.

I love that stuff because, I think, it also makes for a more complete movie when you have that. That’s the kind of movies that I grew up and love like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jaws and things like that where it’s, particularly with Raiders where it has a mix of everything.

You have a way of making even the smallest characters count. How much of that is in the script? How much is that in you going, we need this, we need some of that, we need all these characters represented.

Yeah, I mean, that’s the big part of it. The characters reacting to it, even if it’s not our main characters, you want to see how people get affected by it to be invested. And yeah, a lot of that was added because, in the script, it was not a lot. It was sort of just like, oh, the pods open up, and monsters run amuck. So, it’s like, this needs to be more than the, just that one sentence, you know.

Yeah, and you even make a little cameo.

Which was really fun to do. I got to do a little bit of stunt work and get hoisted up on wires, and I kept doing it take after take. Because they’d say, “Hey, aren’t you happy?” And I was like, “well, almost. I can do a little better. I can throw myself more.” No, that was a lot of fun. I was actually all bruised afterward from the harness and everything.

Wow.

Yeah.

It’s a tricky time for DC and you guys are facing a lot of new content coming up. Did you feel all the chatter and all the stuff that was going on? Did it interfere in any way with you focusing on the story you’re trying to tell?

No, because I mean, Shazam has always been a little bit of a standalone thing where we haven’t been tied into the bigger mythology of it, which is sort of the case with this one as well, which is probably in our favor because DC, they’ve told us now that what we’re doing, with Shazam, doesn’t interfere or contradict anything that they have planned for the future.

Yeah.

So they don’t have to reboot Shazam or anything like that. So we’ll see what happens. I don’t know what the full plans are, but it’s good to know that there weren’t any changes needed or anything like that.

What was it about this story, telling this tale for Fury of the Gods and Shazam?

Well at first, we looked at what the comic books were doing, the new 52 version, the later issues, and it felt like they went much more in this fantasy direction where they go into all these doors in the room of the Rock of Eternity and everything. And we felt that we wanted to have something that was more like the first movie in that it is in our real, grounded world, and we bring the fantastic elements into that.

So we started talking about this whole thing about, well, his powers come from God’s and mythological characters, and what if the powers were stolen from them and given to Shazam? Because that gives the motivation to the bad guy that you can understand. But Shazam didn’t steal it, but it’s not his. Of course, they want it back. I thought that was really interesting. And it’s cool to bring mythology and superheroes together because they’re very related in some ways.

But then we had the Daughters of Atlas. And then it was like, who can we cast for that? And had, especially for Hespera, we were like, what’s the best we could aim for? And our aim was for someone like Helen Mirren, but I didn’t think we’d get her, but it was like, let’s try, and then we’ll move on and go down the list. And she said yes right away, which was amazing.

And then that actually changed our casting for Calypso, which we started out looking at just doing auditions and finding someone lesser known, but once we got Helen Mirren, it was like, oh, we need to step it up and get someone who can act against her. And that’s when we started talking about Lucy. And the great thing was then when we went to her, we could say, oh, you get to act with Helen Mirren, be her sister. And yeah, Rachel, we just found. I wasn’t familiar with her because West Side Story hadn’t come out yet, so she just was one of many who auditioned, but she really stood out because she’s just such a star.

Well, the cast here is great, uniformly great.

Yeah.

I think a lot of it may be because they all get a chance to shine. Is it difficult finding that vibe? Was it difficult kind of reconnecting them so easily? It looked effortless.

Yeah. I mean, they love each other. I mean, on the first movie, they really became a family. So, for this one, it was just like a big family reunion, and I think that’s helped with the new actors coming in, that they were just welcoming right away. You’ve seen they hang out together, they love each other, and so I’ve been very happy about that. So you don’t have to worry about the cast in any way.

Have you thought specifically about where you would go with a third film?

No. I mean, I would love to see more of Mr. Mind, not just because I’m the voice of him, but I think it’s such a unique character in that you have a little worm, but who’s actually really dangerous and can do some really cool stuff.

Yeah.

He was originally supposed to be in this one. It was Mr. Mind that got the Goddesses into our world, but it was too much story to tell for this movie, so he had to take a backseat for a bit.

Well, I think you said it, you’re dealing with not only the history of the comics, the history of Shazam, but you’re dealing with mythology. I feel like that opens your world up in a way.

Yeah. That you could do a lot of things. This is a world where Manticores exist, so you know. Yeah.

Was there a creature you were really happy with that you created here?

Well, I do really like the Harpes because they’re kind of scary. They’re probably the scariest ones. The way they look. But I think Manticore is something I haven’t really seen in another movie, so that was cool. Just a lion with a scorpion tail and bat wings that breathes fire and stuff.

It was fun to see that. Now Zach and Asher have such a good partnership. In a way, they work so well together, even though they’re not on screen together. How easy was it to see them both continue to grow in the role?

Yeah, I mean that’s a trick to cast. You cast people who are very much like their characters because it makes your job so much easier. You can just like, “yeah, you just go, just do your thing.” I mean, they bring so much to it; they’re coming up with their own new lines and things like that. There’s a moment when Jack/Freddy is in a prison cell, and he finds a tooth on the ground. And he starts like, “there’s a tooth in here?” And that was something he made up on the day because the production designers had put little teeth and bones and things in there, and they’re fantastic to work with because, yeah, it makes my job very easy, and then I can focus on all the technicalities and difficulties.

The penultimate entry of the Fast & Furious franchise will leave audiences stunned with a shocking cliffhanger, according to Rodriguez.

We’re in the final two laps. This May will see the release of Fast X. Vin Diesel has confirmed that the tenth entry in the Fast & Furious series will actually be split into two parts. Usually, when a single narrative installment of a franchise is split into two, especially if they film back-to-back, you can bet that the first part will end on some sort of stinger to get you curious and hyped for the next part. This seems to be the case for the upcoming film. ScreenRant reports on franchise star Michelle Rodriguez as she teases the cliffhanger ending to Fast X, which will lead into the second part. I predict the next one will likely be titled Furious X.

Michelle Rodriguez is currently doing promotion for her other big movie, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which I’m sure her Fast co-star Vin Diesel is excited about, being a D&D head himself. In a recent interview, she talked about how hard the Fast X cliffhanger will hit audiences. “I think people are gonna be really, really surprised, and we’re gonna get a lot of open mouths at the end of Fast X. Let’s just put it that way. It’s gonna be like, ‘Really? What?’ Like that! Like that’s how I was in the theater. I was like, ‘Oh my god. What have we done?’”

This sequel adds Jason Momoa to the series as the new villain, Dante. According to the trailer, he is on a quest for revenge against the family after the events of Fast Five, where Dante’s father was killed during the big heist finale. Momoa has mentioned how fun it was to play such a ruthless yet quirky villain that’s “pure chaos”, and Rodriguez previously boasted about how Dante is the best male villain they’ve had.

The hype that Rodriguez is building for the ending gives the impression that it would leave audiences in a shock similar to Avengers: Infinity War, when many of the characters were perceived to be dead. In a franchise where the outrageousness gets turned up with every entry, especially considering the last installment had them going into space, there’s no telling where they could possibly go, and anything is possible. A fun twist would be if Dwayne Johnson came back as the ultimate villain against Diesel since their behind-the-scenes clash was made very public. Although, Johnson would not want to lose in the end, so perhaps that won’t happen.

Netflix has released a teaser trailer for Sweet Tooth season 2, announcing that the new season will premiere in April

A couple weeks ago, we learned that several cast members from the Netflix series Sweet Tooth, which is an adaptation of the DC Vertigo comic book that ran from 2009 to 2013 for a total of 40 issues, had been promoted to series regular status for the upcoming second season of the show. Those promoted cast members were Naledi Murray, Neil Sandilands, and Marlon Williams, who play Wendy, General Abbot, and Johnny Abbot. Now Netflix has released a teaser trailer for Sweet Tooth season 2, announcing that the new season will premiere on Thursday, April 27th! The teaser trailer can be seen in the embed above.

Created by Jeff Lemire, Sweet Tooth was a coming-of-age fable of Gus, a boy/deer hybrid who leaves home to find the world ravaged by a cataclysmic event. He joins a ragtag family of hybrids and humans searching to find answers behind the event… ultimately discovering a vast conspiracy that forces him to question his very existence.

The cast of the series adaptation also includes Christian Convery as Gus, Nonso Anozie as Jepperd, Adeel Akhtar as Dr. Singh, Will Forte as Richard, Stefania LaVie Owen as Bear, Dania Ramirez as Aimee Eden, Aliza Vellani as Rani Singh, with James Brolin as the voice of the narrator.

Christopher Sean Cooper Jr. (Circle Of Sisters Expo) and Yonas Kibreab (Blood Moon) have joined the cast as new series regulars, playing Teddy Turtle and Finn Fox.

Jim Mickle is the showrunner on Sweet Tooth and executive produces the show alongside Susan Downey, Robert Downey Jr., Amanda Burrell, and Linda Moran. The series is produced by Team Downey, in association with Warner Bros. Television. Team Downey’s Evan Moore is co-executive producer.

Sweet Tooth season 2 has the following synopsis: As a deadly new wave of the Sick bears down, Gus (Convery) and a band of fellow hybrids are held prisoner by General Abbot (Sandilands) and the Last Men. Looking to consolidate power by finding a cure, Abbot uses the children as fodder for the experiments of captive Dr. Aditya Singh (Akhtar), who’s racing to save his infected wife Rani (Vellani). To protect his friends, Gus agrees to help Dr. Singh, beginning a dark journey into his origins and his mother Birdie’s (Amy Seimetz) role in the events leading up to The Great Crumble. Outside the Preserve, Tommy Jepperd (Nonso Anozie) and Aimee Eden (Ramirez ) team up to break the hybrids free, a partnership that will be tested as Jepperd’s secrets come to light. As the revelations of the past threaten the possibility of redemption in the present, Gus and his found family find themselves on a collision course with Abbot and the evil forces that look to wipe them out once and for all.

What did you think of the Sweet Tooth season 2 teaser trailer? Will you be watching this new batch of episodes on Netflix? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

New Orleans is a city of mystery and the supernatural.  It’s filled with legends, history, and quite a lot of voodoo.  And now you can add Renfield and Dracula to the mix.  

Renfield hits theaters this April (and has a brand-new trailer coming out tomorrow) and stars Nicholas Hoult as Renfield and Nicolas Cage as his master, Dracula.  It’s a monster of a relationship and it has spanned for over a hundred years.  And now Renfield has had enough of bringing his master his dinner and then cleaning up after him.  

Directed by Chris McKay (director of the underrated The Tomorrow War) from an idea by Robert Kirkman and written by Ryan Ridley, Renfield is a mix of classic Universal horror, silent film style, splatter, and comedy.  The cast is top tier with Hoult and Cage joined by Ben Schwartz, Awkwafina, and Shohreh Aghdashloo.  

It was a dream come true to get to go on the set of the shoot in New Orleans and worth the battle through a massive thunderstorm (a tornado had happened only a few days prior which had delayed things a bit).  Within a massive soundstage the filmmakers had built Dracula’s lair and on that day Dracula and Renfield were doing battle with some very brave vampire hunters who are having a very bad day.

The set was beautiful and filled with a dilapidated regality that matches Dracula’s own life in the film where the vampire has seen better days.  Renfield has messed up and is having to run through a rampant fire (Nicholas Hoult doing some impressive stunt work) to come to his boss’s aid.  Dracula for his part (Nick Cage also does some of his own stunts) is battling it out in snarling, raging fashion while in a satin dressing the color of blood.  

Watching this scene be shot, with Nick Cage getting himself ready for the fight and coming at the camera in full fanged and frothing fury was amazing.  I’m not ashamed to say I may have been cheering a little too loudly and had to quiet down because it was Nick Cage as Dracula beating down wannabe Van Helsing’s on the other side of the wall.  How do you not geek out?

Getting to see the costumes and the paraphernalia being worn and used by the actors, and the amount of detail that was being worked onto the screen was amazing.  These are fans of the genre and the characters bringing them to life and they are doing it with a lot of love and a lot of talent.  And when I say love I mean the real thing.  The crew rescued a bulldog that was found wandering around near filming and they got him vet treatment, cleaned up and fed and now he’s being adopted by one of them.

Oh and bugs…It’s Renfield after all and yes…I ate bugs with Renfield AKA Nicolas Hoult who actually did eat some real bugs.  Unlike his co-star who ate a live cockroach though in Vampire’s Kiss, Hoult’s bugs are all dead and some of them are fake.  I ate the fake ones (sorry I’m not that hardcore) but I did see one of our guides on set eat a rather crunchy real bug that I feel she immediately regretted.  It was loud.

And oh yeah, yours truly got to wear THE CAPE (and yes, all caps is what that deserves).

For the first part of our set-visit, we got to chat a bit production designer Alex Hammond, who gave us some insight about the film’s setting and style. One thing that’s noteworthy is that the film, is some ways, is a continuation/hommage to the classic 1931 Bela Lugosi version.

Alec Hammond: We’re actually using some direct references to the original films, and to some of the actual Universal horror movies. The original ones.  So, the — so, we established for the audience those actual film — and some of those actual film images early, with this sort of, semi-unaltered.  So, what — in some ways I have no choice but to — as, sort of as a designer, play off the visual world that is established in those films.  We don’t go into them in depth.  We definitely use some of those frames.  So, even if you’d never seen the 1931 Dracula movie.  If you’ve never seen Bela Lugosi, you will.  And you will a little bit, in terms of — of those, sort, of cinematic images.  So, everything that we do after that is a direct play off of them.  One of the things I was — because we’re contemporary, obviously.  

So, one of the things that I was interested in doing is maintaining the scope, the scale — those are big spaces.  Like, that staircase, when he first meets Renfield is gigantic.  You have a — and it sets up a couple of things.  It sets up the — we’re — we need to see an en — we need to see an event.  We need to see an event movie, but we also, and we — it tells who the character is.  It tells us who Dracula is.  It gives us a lot of information about Renfield being a real estate agent in London, coming and being sort of over — personally overwhelmed.  It gives you character ideas as you’re watching the film, about who he is.  And that has a direct relationship of his conflict right now — and who Dracula was.  And, so one of the things that I did with those movies is more than trying to ape the design that happened, I tried to figure out what the — what was really happening with the characters and who the characters were in those, and then how the environments in those original films added to that and helped tell that story.  And then, take those same things and apply them to our version, or our film, which is in the same linear — not with the same tone, but in the same linear world as those.  So, when you see — think about Renfield, ‘cause I have spaces to design for Renfield for those movie that are really his — contemporary spaces they’re his.  You have to, then, put yourself — okay, he’s been working with Dracula since 1931.  He’s been procuring victims for him and he’s in a very different place in his life right now.  But, in order to not have him just be an ass who brings people to this monster to be killed, you have to sort of get yourself into who that character is.  And when you do that, you realize he’d never seen anything like that.  He was being taken to, in a time where we don’t Twitter and we don’t have, you know, television, and we haven’t seen house — you know, houses of the rich and famous.  He gets to go to this place that he’s never been.  He’s completely overwhelmed.  

Hammond also discussed the challenge of bringing Dracula to the 21st Century, and how, in the end, Nicolas Cage was born to play the role.

One of the things that I talked to McKay about when I first read the script before knowing any of the cast or any of this is Dracula is a movie star.  You know, he has to be a movie star.  And, not in terms of the casting, but just who that character is because we have to feel like, oh, my God, I’d do anything to work with him.  The charisma of that character has to be — because you gotta do it for a long time.  You brought him a lot of people to be sucked dry and eaten in the last 99 years.  And so, if it’s not somebody who has that — I mean, he’s in the most wonderful — thankfully not political, but the most wonderful narcissist you’ve ever met.  And, you have — but you have to — with all those characters there has to be an end to it.  So, in some ways, what I — and I think what I always try to do is, I try to build the designs from the characters out.  Because nobody is coming to watch the scenery.  I hope that the scenery adds to that, and they actually are — we have some wild moments in this film, in terms of what the design does, but we’re coming to watch the characters.  We’re coming to watch a Dracula movie.  We’re coming to watch a Renfield movie.  I am a designer, and I don’t — maybe Dune, but other than Dune — other than Dune, I don’t know that I’d go to the movies to watch the scenery.  Definitely went to Dune to watch the scenery.  

Hammond also discussed what made the Renfield team choose New Orleans as their setting:

I like designing genre movies and I like designing theatrical genre movies because they distill down the things that we all go through on a day-to-day basis and make them so much larger than life that, in some ways, the scenery and the designs have to come up to that.  So, it allows us to do, you know, I never want to live there.  That’s my — I’d never want that to be my office, but damn was it fun to design.  For — Ella Lobo.  And, you know, you get to do things that are larger than life — excuse me — that are, sort of, over scaled, that match the — match the extreme behavior and situations of the movie.  You have someone who lives on, you know, drinking — that lives from drinking somebody else’s blood.  I mean, it — and you deal with that in a very straightforward way, which we also got to do.  How does that work?  How does it work when some — when Dracula’s reduced to needing to be nursed back to health?  How would you go about, you know — you can’t breast feed the guy.  How do you actually get — how do you get blood in him?  And, in some ways, from sort of, these first images, which are Dracula still with some of his trappings of grandeur.  Then, where he ends up, when we set him in New Orleans, is sort of, hints on the tone of this film, which is, you think of castles in Transylvania Roman — Transylvania region of Romania.  I’ve been to the Vlad Dracul castle scouting for another film and they’re fantastic.  But, you have that kind of bold, European grandeur and then you have the place where the movie is set, in the United States, the most — the epitome of what we would think of — the American gothic.  You know?  It’s — it’s the home of Lestat.  It’s the home of mid — all of the vampire lore.  There aren’t a lot of vampires that exist in Alburquerque.  But it not a lot of historic ones.  If we — if we all — if you pulled everybody in the United States and said, ‘where would a vampire live in the United States,’ they’d probably say New Orleans.  And, what we get to do, in this film, and what I go to do as a designer, is go into the place where you think, great, we’re gonna go down magazine street straight and take right into the upper garden district and there’s one of those great old mansions.  Got a huge, live oak in front.  It has moss dropping down from everywhere, so that all falling down, it’s all boarded up, and we go directly toward it and take a left-hand turn and end up in an abandoned hospital.  And, how far Dracula has fallen.  But we found an abandoned hospital that looks like a castle.  You know, it’s 1930s — 1932 — completely symmetrical.  Feels like it could be one of those European castles.  And then, he lives in the basement.  And, he — it has all fallen down and how far the mighty have fallen.  And, you know, there’s — I don’t know if it’s stage direction or a line, but you know Marverel’s of Ishford (ph) — vampires.  Now, with Twitter and TrueCrime and, you know, in New Orleans, if you drive around here too much, you’ll probably get a speeding ticket because there’s cameras on every corner.  And it’s — it would be a tough place to actually have to find victims.  

Next up, we had a little impromptu group chat with writer Ryan Ridley, who explains the delicate mix of genre the filmmakers are trying to pull off with this blend of horror, action and comedy.

So, you’ve written a lot of animation.  Writing live action versus animation — does it make it easier for you to have a more — physically having to be able to control the environment or are you more happy when it’s, like broad strokes that you can do?

Ryan Ridley: Well, I’d prefer live action, fundamentally, just ‘cause I like the live — liveness of it, like being a set, work with actors in real-time and the moments they can create.  Whereas, like animation is just a long, I don’t want to use the word slog, but you know, it’s n — you’re not immersed in the process as much in the real-time process of it.  But you can also do much crazier things, in theory, with animation that would be much more expensive in live action.  So, it’s always a pro and con, but I prefer live action for many reasons.

Can you talk about striking the tone between, you know, we hear there’s lots of limbs flying.  So, between the horror and the humor.

I think they go hand in hand, pretty — severed hand in severed hand, pretty well.  You know, it’s like the darker the, you know, the darker the violence than the funnier the comedy will be, often times, you know.  So, and that’s certainly my, like inspiration is like Sam Ramey and early Peter Jackson and Return of the Living Dead.  So, that’s just, like in my, you know, creative DNA.  So, it was easy, in theory.

So, when you were creating the relationship between Dracula and Renfield, in the original film, their relationship didn’t end great.  They — he was murdered.  So, can you talk about how that works in this film and writing for Nick and Nick.

Yeah, well, I guess, so, now I’m feeling busted.  Renfield dies in the original film?

Yes.

Well, let’s pretend that was — you know what, what we’ll learn is that through supernatural abilities, he’s never really dead, or at least he can come back from — he’s really wounded.  So, you know, the idea is, like what if, after that first movie, throughout the next x-amount of decades, they continue to have adventures together and continued the cycle of what we’re going to see in this, you know, scene that’s being shot today.  Like, the ultimate, you know, the destruction of Dracula once his enemies — vampire enemies find him, and then Renfield’s always trying to — always picking up the pieces.  And so, it’s like the relationship is like, you know, kind of just like being the personal assistant to, like the most self-destructive, like rock star, movie star, whatever, in history and so, it’s sort of, like intertwining that classic Dracula familiar — am I allowed to still talk — relationship with the classic, like, modern contemporary assistant-boss relationship.  You know?  So.  Yeah.

The latest trailer for Renfield comes out tomorrow! Read our interview with Nicolas Cage here. More to come later this week from director Chris McKay and Awkwafina!