James Marsters details the makings of Abruptio and how the new puppetry horror story challenges the genre. As the horror genre has continued to evolve in Hollywood, 2024 is bringing a new twisted experience through the magic of puppetry. However, rather than focus on a serial killer targeting an ensemble, the Abruptio movie takes a very twisted approach.
Directed and written by Evan Marlowe, Abruptio chronicles an ordinary guy with a very quiet life until one day, he discovers that someone has planted an explosive device in his neck, with the mystery player forcing him to commit a terrible crime, making it a game with a matter of life and death. Abruptio’s theatrical release marks the conclusion of a long filmmaking process as the horror project has been in the works since 2015, which includes a major and ambitious production journey.
Screen Rant recently sat down with Marsters for an exclusive interview to break down the long journey of getting attached to Abruptio as the protagonist while also making his horror debut. Marsters detailed the creation of Les Hackel, the idea of exploring a horror plot through puppetry, and what he hopes the industry will learn from Abruptio as it makes its mark in Hollywood. Marsters also touched upon his legacy as the DC villain Brainiac on Smallville and whether or not he would be open to taking part in Tom Welling and Michael Rosenbaum’s upcoming animated sequel.
James Marsters On Bringing A New Horror Concept To Life With Abruptio
“I always wanted to try to do as many different genres in film as I could.”
Screen Rant: I love horror films, but this is something very different, can you take me back to when you first got attached to this project? You’ve done so much over your career, but this feels very, very different because I don’t think anyone’s gonna look at puppets the same way after this.
James Marsters: Correct. I always wanted to try to do as many different genres in film as I could. I want to do comedy. I want to do drama, melodrama, historical. I want to do it all. But I had never done horror and the truth is, I’m not like you, Andy. I’m actually not a horror fan. I like a lot of different movies, but I find that if I want to be terrified, I watch the news, but nevertheless, I mean, I know that horror has its place.
I know that it can be a really cathartic experience to experience fear in the safety of a story, and that can be psychologically can be really, really good. I just don’t get that when I watch horror. So I had passed on a lot of horror projects just because I read them. I was like, ‘Oh, no, dear! and I read the script for Abruptio, and it was terrifying. It was horrifying and then the thought came to me, ‘Well, they’re going to do this with puppets. It’ll be more palatable. There’ll be something special about it that will make the horror a little easier to take. And I can see myself doing a project like that.
One of my favorite films is Team America by the people who do South Park and they do the whole thing with puppets. There’s something about that makes it just delicious, so I signed on and I have a soft spot in my heart for independent film production. One of my favorite films is Star Wars, I don’t know if a lot of people know that that was an independent film that was produced by George Lucas and I think all of the Star Wars movies are produced without the help of a studio financially. I have done different independent projects for the last twenty years because I used to produce theater. I like it when artists find the tools they need and get to work and are able to do the project that they imagined and not have interference from studios. I thought this would be a fun ride.
I can only imagine what it must have been like to have read the script for the first time. Because even without seeing the imagery, I imagine reading it must have been very intense? Because I feel everything Les does gets worse and worse and worse. How was it reading for the first time?
James Marsters: Well, that was the thing, the horror of the script for me is…Are human beings that selfish? We all wonder, are human beings good, intrinsically good or are we intrinsically evil? Or are we neutral? We go round and round about this and this script seems to say that if you are under the gun…let’s just say…The story is a world where a group of people found a way to implant bombs in the carotid artery of their victims. They plant these bombs in their sleep, and then they call them up the next day and say, ‘We put a bomb, and unless you kill this family, we’re going to kill you right now.’ And faced with that choice, I would like to think that I would say, ‘You know what, just kill me. I’m not going to go out. I’m not going to become a mass murderer. I don’t want that kind of life. I’d rather die.’ I’d like to think that I was like that, I think we all do. We all would like to think that.
But there is the other possibility….I don’t know till I get there and what if I got that phone call? Would I be willing to do that? And the film says, yes, there’s a lot of people who would decide to do that and that is truly horrifying. When I was reading the script, I had to put it down. I did not want to [keep reading,] it was too much. It was too intense. It was too horrifying. A lot of horror films are just running away from some maniac, and we hope we survive. But Abruptio, I think, opens a bigger can of worms than that and I think that the true horror is that I may not be the kind of good person that I think I am. That was too much for me and I had to remember, ‘Hold on, buddy. We’re doing this with puppets.’
This movie is going to make people very uncomfortable, but the puppets are going to help. Then I saw it, and the puppets don’t take away at all from the horror. In fact, I think the puppets probably make it more horrifying. I don’t know why. I think because of the kinds of puppetry they were using, it doesn’t lessen the horror at all. And when I watched it, I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ What did you think? Was it more horrifying to you than a normal horror film?
Yes, because of the way that they produce these puppets, they look like human flesh, it doesn’t look animated. It doesn’t look CGI – I’m very pro-practical effects, especially with how people rely too much on CGI these days. So for me, seeing it as very realistic as possible. It did make it more terrifying, in my opinion, there were times when I’m thinking, ‘What is the blood gonna look like?’ But I was like, ‘No, it’s human blood,’ That’s why I love that it’s not animation. It is live-action, but essentially, if we all look like puppets.
James Marsters: Yeah, and as a horror fan, did you find yourself thinking, ‘Okay this is too much’?
You were talking about how most horror films deal with people running away from something, but Les has to run towards something because, otherwise, he’s gone. That’s why I love when films like this can come around and stand out from what has come before. I feel horror is now becoming bigger and bigger. A lot of factors are coming back on both in film and TV, but with this, it felt like a very new experience that I think is going to throw off a lot of people initially, in a good way.
James Marsters: Yeah, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before and a very surprising take on the horror genre. You just wouldn’t think to do it with puppets and to be able to do that and keep it just as horrifying, if not more horrifying, than it had been done with live actors. The movie Henry[: Portrait of a Serial Killer,] the lead character [who] was the slasher [where] you just follow him around as he’s murdering people. The film is able to put you behind the eyes of the lead. That’s how storytelling gives the audience a vicarious experience and a rollercoaster ride, so to speak. We tempt the audience to climb behind the eyes of the lead, and Henry was horrifying, because it tempted me behind the eyes of a killer of a horrible monster, and I was that person.
I think that Abruptio is a little bit similar, there is this group that are able to plant the bombs, yes, but the hands that are killing people are mine. Everyone, hopefully, who’s watching the film we made to become have to wonder, ‘Is that me? Can I do that?’ Which I think is a much harder and steeper mountain to climb. It’s very easy to get the audience to climb behind the eyes of a beautiful, charming, funny character. It’s a lot harder to get the audience to climb behind the eyes of someone who’s doing horrific things.
How James Marsters Brought Les Hackel To Life In Abruptio
“We all paint a portrait of ourselves that’s very flattering.”
I felt conflicted a lot of times when I’m like, ‘Yeah, this is just an ordinary guy, who doesn’t have the best life, but he’s now in the situation.’ But again, he’s doing all these things, and I was almost hoping that somehow, some way, someone was going to come and save him, that he was going to survive it somehow. In the end, when we learn about what his true confession was, it’s definitely an interesting way to portray a protagonist in that way. Because, he’s not a good guy, but he’s not necessarily evil. It’s very much in the middle because what would we do if this happened to us?
James Marsters: We all paint a portrait of ourselves that’s very flattering, ‘I’m a good person. I would never do that.’ It’s only when we get in those situations that we really find out who we really are. Being that I’m unlikely to be in that situation, I hopefully will die not knowing what I would do if I was put in that situation and I can just keep my fantasy that I’m a good man. I hope I am.
I know you’ve done a lot of voice roles in your career, but I know sometimes, when you do animation, you don’t always get to see what the final animation is going to look like. But with this, did the creative team give you any concept or images to look at to inform your performances of, ‘How is my voice going to fit with Les?’ Or was it just going to the recording booth, and then you go to see what it all looked like?
James Marsters: What I was told was that these puppets were going to be life-size puppets. They were going to be as big as people. That’s all I knew at [that] point, the first thing one does, either in cartoon or any other animation, or I guess puppetry works, you get the performance from the actors. Then you craft, either animate or do your puppetry following that performance. So we recorded at the very beginning of this years-long process. I think that they were still wondering, ‘Are we going to put life-size actors in costumes and then put a puppet head on them, and then with animatronics, put expressions on those puppets?,’ which is, I think, what they did most of all. Although they mixed up a bunch of different techniques to get these shots.
I think that’s what they were hoping to be able to do, but they didn’t know if they were going to be able to pull it off. There was also maybe [the idea of] ‘These are just going to be oversized puppets with strings,’ and they were going to get into it and figure out what was going to work. But having life-size puppets means that you have to have bigger sets, which is more money. It also can save money if you want to go on location, if you can make that work, and I think that they did build sets and then location work. But they were figuring it out, so no, I didn’t know a whole lot. For me, it was just being directed, trying to find the character in the same way as if I was filming, trying to find Les, not judging him, letting him be normal, letting him be me, and not really putting too much on it,
But sometimes having that information would be really important. I was doing a video game for DC called DC Universe Online. It’s still up and running, by the way. They were having me play Lex Luthor, and I had just done an animated film called [Superman] Doomsday where I played Lex Luthor, and in the feature, Lex was always hitting on Lois Lane in not quite creepy, but he was always trying to hit on her and I thought, ‘It would be fun to do a quasi-Hugh Hefner sort of Lex Luthor,’ it was very subtle and slightly oily and charming at the same time, kind of soft tones and trying to seduce somebody is how I approached it.
I thought that they wanted to hire me for the video game based on that performance [in Superman Doomsday] so I came in and started reading in that way, and I heard, ‘James, have you seen the character rendering for Lex Luthor for the video game? Come into the booth, please,’ and I see the character rendering, or mock-up and Lex has got battle armor on, he’s got rocket launchers on both shoulders. I’m just like, ‘Oh, you want me to butch it up a little bit,’ and they’re like, ‘Yeah, maybe a little bit!’ So I started talking like that.
So it’s important sometimes to know how they’re going to treat the character, and they may have had some sketches of Les that I could look at, and it was pretty obvious, from the sketches, from whatever they showed me, it was pretty obvious that we were going to go for just a normal, average person.
That’s what I loved when I was watching it – when we’ve seen other puppet films or TV shows before, we always see the strings or whatever, but this, I couldn’t tell, like, ‘Is James in a suit? Is he wearing a mask?’ I couldn’t tell because it was very realistic, which is why I love practical effects. I understand why this film took as long as it did to me. I read somewhere that they started in 2015, or 2016?
James Marsters: Yeah, they’ve been at this a long time and I agree with you. If you’re going to approach puppetry and make it hyper-realistic, as strange as that sounds, the mastery of the puppetry to be very subtle. It’s not a project where you’re getting wide-puppet eyes, and then they shake, and they go off. It’s just a slight tilt of the head and a slight fluttering of the eyes. It’s very subtle and it works to actually the point that I forgot that what I’m watching – or I think what I was watching, and the filmmakers might correct me – but I think I was watching an actor in a costume with an animatronic puppet head on that was the expressions, for which were being controlled by puppeteers off-camera, I just had to imagine.
Because the actor has to tilt their head slightly down in a thoughtful way so that the eyes can flutter. Someone else does that and it’s normal to have a team working on a puppet to get everything working and the physical expression and the facial expression blending. But to do that on that subtle of a level, I thought, was something I hadn’t seen before.
Abruptio’s Release Has A Valuable Place In Cinema In The Wake Of The SAG-AFTRA Strike
I think it’s interesting that this film is now arriving in theaters after the strikes because this is a medium that these studios can’t necessarily control. You can’t replace puppetry with A.I.; you have to do it all physically. What do you hope studios take away from Abruptio when they see it?
James Marsters: I think it’s a great argument against A.I., actually, because A.I. is, by its nature, derivative. A.I. is being trained by everything that’s come before, and it is referencing and remixing, basically, things that have come before. But what it’s not good at…all artists do this, we watch a lot of films, and we reference a lot of films, but there’s a creative spark that happens where something new happens, and the human brain can do that. AI doesn’t do that, so what we’re gonna get with A.I. is a bunch of stuff we’ve seen before on some level. Abruptio is something that we have never seen before.
It’s an entirely different kind of thing, it’s nothing that an A.I. would ever have thought of, so it’s a great argument for… I think that A.I. is gonna be great at telling stories that other A.I. are going to enjoy very much. But if I want a story that’s gonna affect me as a human being, it has to be driven by a human being at the end of the day. I think if we lean too much into A.I., we’re just not going to be surprised as much as audience members. There’s not going to be that fresh thing that flips everything on its head, it’s going to be kind of like, ‘Yeah, I kind of saw that before. I’ve seen that before,’ and it might be impressive, but it might be a little boring, too.
The other thing you were talking about [was] practical effects – anytime you use a computer, it gets dated pretty quickly. Because computer animation gets better every year. So what fooled me back in the nineties doesn’t really fool me anymore. One of the reasons that [the original] Jurassic Park works so well [was because] most of that stuff was not computer. We went crazy for the computer shots, but most of those shots were puppets and the things that the projects that hold up the best that are 10 or 20 years old are the ones with practical effects because that stuff is still real, A.I. can’t do practical effects. It has to do computer-animated effects, and I was talking with somebody about this, and I was like, ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid just turned Hollywood on its head.’
It was this cowboy movie with Robert Redford and [Paul Newman,] they filmed the entire movie on location. There was not one shot that was done in the studio. They just had everybody camping in the desert, and they were just riding horses and they all got dusty and it was all real. The audience just ate it up, with a spoon. Suddenly, everybody wanted to get out and do location filming. The whole old model of faking it and making your sunrise on a screen and making wind with a big fan, all of that stuff, was just not good enough anymore.
We may pass through a similar time where we’re back to faking it, and at some point, there’s going to be a movie that comes out that doesn’t fake it at all, the audience is just going to be so thirsty for that. They’re going to say, ‘That’s what we want.’ It’s going to make a ton of money, and everyone’s going to want to go away from it again. But yeah, the camera wants something real. It doesn’t want to lie, it wants something to actually happen for the first time in front of the camera. It wants to document a real event, and the camera knows computerized dust, and the camera knows real dust in the sunbeam, and you clock it. Even if you’re not conscious of it as an audience member, you clock it.
Now that you’ve broken into horror in this capacity, would you want to revisit horror again? Whether it’s through more puppetry or animation, depending on what the product is?
James Marsters: It depends on the project – what I do is I read a script and if I find it interesting, if I find it to be something that I would want to watch, if I’m basically entertained as I’m flipping the pages and I’m wanting to flip the next page and find out what’s happening rather than just get through this script, then I’m interested. That cuts across how much money they have, it cuts across who’s working on it, that stuff’s important, too. But it really starts with, ‘am I entertained when I read the thing?’ If there’s a horror film that I find interesting, then I’ll do it, with the caveat that I simply am not drawn to horror as a genre and it’s a weird thing to say in this interview, but I don’t want to lie. and I don’t judge horror at all. I think, as I said before, I think it serves a really good purpose, so I guess it would have to be a horror film with something extra, like Abruptio, [with] something more to say.
Because Abruptio is not satisfied with simply repeating the recipe of there’s a bunch of charming, pretty people in a place, and then there’s a horrible monster who’s gonna kill them one by one. Those films are exciting, and it can be fun to go watch those films. It’s all great, but Abruptio is cooking up, for me anyway, a more interesting stew, [by] making me look at myself and question myself. So if a horror film – and there are horror films like that that are addressing larger issues – There are filmmakers who are using horror to really talk about society and I haven’t seen the movies, but I hear that they’re really cool, so, yeah, I’m open to it. I don’t want to say no to anything.
What Is Next For James Marsters After Abruptio?
What’s coming up for you now? Where can we look forward to seeing or hearing you next?
James Marsters: I’ve got a show on Amazon Prime called Casa Grande, which is not genre. It’s an update of Upstairs, Downstairs, which was an English TV series about rich people living in a manor with a privileged life and the servants who served them in that manner. Both sides were human, and neither side understands each other. There’s a cultural gulf, there’s a wall between them, and they don’t understand each other. There’s no judgment on either side, so this updates that idea into the Napa Valley, present-day, where the rich people are the ranchers and the wine growers and the servants of the Latinos that work the land.
I just thought that was a really interesting update, so we did one season of that, and I’m hoping to hear that we’re doing another season. I wish I could remember her name; I believe she was from Argentina. She was just an award-winning director from Argentina, and she was just absolutely fabulous, I would love to work with her again. I’m ashamed that her name is not coming to me.
Then there’s an [animated] show that I’m doing on Apple TV+ called Curses!, it’s for kids and I get to play a pirate skull named Larry that I’m having the best time doing. It’s so fun, and the people working on it are just at the top of their game. Everybody who’s very good at their job, they make it very easy to have fun, so I just go in and have a bunch of fun and then, when I watch it, it’s delightful. I read the Harry Dresden books, which are audiobooks, and at one point, thirteen of the top fifteen audiobooks in America were all Dresden books. I have people come in costume to conventions dressed as characters and I’m awaiting the next book in that series. I’ve been reading those for, I don’t know, fifteen years – I’ve read about twenty of them so far, I love them.
I’m in a band, we’re working on our seventh album, it’s called Ghost of the Robot. You can get our stuff on Spotify and iTunes. You can come see us live if you want. I have a podcast called Schmactors, where I sit down with the funniest man I know in the world, and we just take questions from the audience, trying to answer the questions if our actors have any brains, to speak of, or are we just a bunch of privileged idiots? I think we prove that both are true. [laughs]
James Marsters Reflects On His Smallville Legacy & Future Hopes For Brainiac
I’ve seen you back now with the guys on Talk Ville and Inside of You. It’s always great seeing all of you guys reunite after all these years. I know that Tom and Michael have talked a lot about how they want to bring back the show as an animated sequel that they’re trying to develop right now. Have you talked about you maybe getting involved? With your new version of Brainiac, would you want to revisit that character after all these years?
James Marsters: Oh, yes, definitely. Definitely. I think that Smallville was the most intelligent character version of Superman that I’ve ever seen . Superman is a very difficult character to write because he’s invulnerable. Heroism is when I help somebody, even when I have to sacrifice something to help them. That’s the definition, and when you have a hero movie, you have the very most exciting part [which] is when the hero has to risk his life to save someone or help someone. And that’s just impossible with Superman. He’s invulnerable. He’s going to be fine unless you pull out Kryptonite. Every Superman movie does that.
There’s Kryptonite somewhere, and he’s got to risk death to do his thing. But with the television series, you can’t pull out Kryptonite every week. It gets redundant so fast. It gets cheesy. They sidestepped all that by not focusing on Clark’s physical vulnerability, which there is almost none of. It was all about the fact that he was a teenager and he was vulnerable to everything, and they could explore [the] emotional vulnerability for Superman. I just thought, ‘Okay, you’ve solved it. That’s what to do.’ And they were able to go ten years on that show and not be redundant, not be repetitive. Following that, I would love to do more of that .
What do you remember from that final time shooting? Because you came back for a very instrumental episode with episode 200 – you took him for a very important journey for his past, present, and future. so what
James Marsters: I just remember standing next to Tom and I’m asking him, ‘When am I going to screw you over, man?’ and Tom’s like, ‘You read the script?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m really confused. I didn’t get that part of it. Am I missing something?’ He’s like, ‘Dude, you’re a good guy! Relax. You’re good.’ I’m like, ‘Really, like fully good? Not bad at all?’ He’s like, ‘Nope, you’re just good now.’ It was amazing.
I was hoping that you would come back during that final season a little bit more, but if that was the last time, that was a great way to go out. But hopefully, if the Smallville animated show happens, we get to hear more of you because there’s so much the show didn’t get to touch upon. Once you were saved and restored by the Legion, you know, I understand that there wasn’t so much time left to explore that. But hopefully, you get to revisit that because I think a lot of people got introduced to Brainiac, just in general.
Fortunately or unfortunately, I have a very good agent and a very good manager, and they tend to get a high price when I come on a show. So what happened, I think, with Smallville is since Brainiac can morph and look however he wants, he can look like any human being that he wants, they just had their main cast play Brainiac. They saved a lot of money by doing that over the years, but I’m glad that they finally had me back for the 200th episode. Yeah, I’d love to come back again.
More About Abruptio (2024)
Abruptio is a feature film distributed by Anchor Bay Entertainment starring James Marsters (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Robert Englund (A Nightmare on Elm Street), Jordan Peele (Get Out, Nope), Hana Mae Lee (Pitch Perfect), Christopher McDonald (Hacks) and Sid Haig (The Devil’s Rejects). The surrealistic thriller/horror is performed by lifelike puppets, making it the first of its kind.
Les Hackel (Marsters) is a guy down on his luck who wakes to find an explosive device has been implanted in his neck. He must carry out heinous crimes in order to stay alive while trying to identify the mastermind manipulating the now twisted and strange world around him.
Abruptio
is now playing in theaters.
Source: Screen Rant Plus
