Frankie Freako, the latest by Astron-6 alum Steven Kostanski (The Void, Psycho Goreman, Father’s Day) recently screened at Fantastic Fest and given my love of the Tiny Monster subgenre, I couldn’t have dug it more. The film seamlessly transposes the familiar plot of those films, where someone’s life is upended by troublemaking critters, here called the Freakos, but instead of a kid, it’s an adult, hitting folks like me who grew up with these films square in the nostalgia. If you’re a fan of this vastly underrated subgenre, you’re in luck, because this film gets everything right, while introducing us to a new crew of critters with a bad attitude.
Seriously, it’s so much fun!
I caught up to Steven after catching the film and we chatted not only about where Frankie Freako came from, but Boglins – which offers up its own mini-twist, our love of tiny monster films in particular Ghoulies Go to College, and for you hard core Astron-6 fans like myself – an update, as it is on the infamous, still unreleased doc, No Sleep No Surrender.
First Off Steven, congrats on the film. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for giving late 80s early 90s monster kids some representation! First off I have to ask. Boglins appear to definitely be an inspiration here, did you ever call the Boglin 1-900 number?
Steven Kostanski: For the Boglins 900 number, no.
I mean boglins were in the periphery and like full disclosure years ago I was poking around to see what the right situation was with Boglins.
Oh really!?
Steven Kostanski: Yeah. I mean it seems like the rights for that are kind of tied up in knots. So, I just decided to make my own original thing. There’s a lot of things that contributed to this movie’s existence, but Boglins was an early point of like, I want to make a little monster movie. I remember when I was early in development on this, I ordered one off eBay and was like dismantling it and playing with the inner mechanisms and stuff just to be like can I make something like this in terms of like the simplicity of its mechanics for the Freako puppets.
So yeah, Boglins were definitely an influence on this project.
I dug that instead of going to gremlins you went to the more direct to video fare for inspiration, what’s your first experience with the Tiny Monster genre and why did you decide to pay homage to it with your own film?
Steven Kostanski: Well, it’s a super underrepresented genre right now and it’s annoyed me to no end for years, because I’ve been pushing little monster movies on people for a long time. Other filmmakers are like, ‘nobody wants to see that, that’s not like the hot creature right now, people want witches or people want zombies or whatever’ and I want little trouble making critters like – seems obvious.
My history with it goes back pretty far. I mean, as a kid, I remember loving gremlins and then growing up and like in my teens, when I started discovering the Full Moon movies, like, I became obsessed with Puppet Master. I feel like those are kind of the top tier for me. That franchise does the thing that I like to do in my movies, you kind of present your characters as villains for the first part and then they become the heroes at the end of the movie – it’s my like Terminator 2 logic. Puppet Master does that progressively over like the first 5 movies, they go from being killers to working with our protagonists to fight a worse villain.
So that’s what I wanted Frankie Freako to encompass especially and the diversity of the looks of the puppet master, puppets really impresses me. I am all about iconography, and as a kid it was all about what are the exciting designs that catch my eye. You look at the variety of the puppets in Puppet Master and they’re just so iconic in their own way, and they’re all totally different. So I want to emulate that with Frankie as well, where each character feels like they’re coming from their own universe.
Like there’s a general consistency, but each one clearly has their own life, does their own thing and has their own special set of skills. So yeah, I really pulled from Puppet master a lot, but then also like, and this is only fairly recently, but Ghoulies Go to College. I’ve become obsessed with because it’s just such a bizarre choice for a third movie in a franchise, like ‘let’s go to college’, other franchises are going to space and we’re going to do college.
A couple of Christmases ago, we were watching just streaming every little monster movie there is and watching them back-to-back. So it’s like they all kind of gelled together in my brain, and I barfed out Frankie Freako.
Yeah, I just watched Ghoulies Go to College recently too, they dulled the Satanic undertones and were summoned by a comic book; and they also add the toilet to the lore officially at that point, that was a bit part of the marketing campaign.
Steven Kostanski: Yeah, a lot of bold choices in that movie. I love that it has the Dean that becomes an end boss monster at the end and you can see a bit of a reference to that in Frankie Freako. But I just love that movie is a college sex comedy derailed by puppets that puts way more effort into its lore and its world building than any movie called Ghoulies Go to College ever should.
(Laughs) Yeah!
Steven Kostanski: I think that sums up my tastes pretty well and kind of what I’m doing with Frankie Freako, which is like I wanted to feel like a De Palma thriller in the 1st 15 minutes, that gets derailed by little creatures. It’s very much in line with my sensibilities of like a bunch of college frat guys chasing around babes is all fun and games, but like, I really just want to watch these monsters get into shit.
I really dug how you just sort of transpose the plot of these films from a kid to an adult without skipping a beat. How did you come up with that approach to your script? And it was surprisingly wholesome as well.
Well, that was like a bit of an intentional troll on my end, as I was making it like people kept talking about like it was going to be a horror movie and like it’s gonna be so violent and gory.
Yeah.
Steven Kostanski: I don’t know. I feel that’s like the easy way out nowadays. To me, the ultimate challenge is to make a kids movie that adults can watch. So I really approached this movie with the attitude of like, I want parents to not really have an excuse not to show this to kids. Like, aside from some bursts of violence and insinuation of potential sexual assault of our protagonist. I feel like it doesn’t go harder than something like Ghostbusters or Gremlins, and it was a very deliberate choice because I just feel like it’s the tone of this type of movie. It keeps it feeling childish, without feeling juvenile, if that makes sense.
I didn’t want to make a thing where it’s just gross out gags and just people cussing constantly like that. That bores me, and I feel like there’s so much stuff out there that leans into that. I like that it delights some people and annoys others, that I don’t really lean into those tropes as much.
So you’re an FX guy, but you also do a lot of directing. What’s your process like, do you design the monsters first and then do the script or do the script and then do the monsters. What’s your process?
Steven Kostanski: I mean, I have no set workflow. I don’t enjoy writing particularly, so usually when I’m writing scripts, I’m procrastinating and making monsters at the same time. So I’m kind of like designing and writing simultaneously. Sofor this movie I actually built like a proto Frankie, an early version of him that didn’t end up getting used as Frankie, but he pops up as an assorted Freako later on in the movie. So when I got tired of writing, I would go sculpt a bit and do a bit of shop work and that stuff helps me wrap my brain around what I’m writing as well, because I can really get a sense of like just scale and like how this thing exists in a space.
I’m a very tactile filmmaker, I don’t love words on a page. I like seeing things, I like holding and operating and manipulating things. I feel my brain doesn’t fully turn on until I’m like in the set with the actors, with the creatures. So I try to inject that into the development process as much as possible, where I’m trying to also build things, while I’m writing so I can have the things sitting there staring at me while I’m putting words on the page.
There’s an innocence, but there’s also a darkness to Frankie Freako. Was it hard balancing that tone and did you ever feel the film went too far in any direction? The film had an interesting ebb and flow, like when Conor is beating up Boink, you’re not sure where it’s going to go.
Steven Kostanski: I mean, that’s something that I’ve adopted from my fellow Asteron 6 members, especially having Connor and Adam around on set and just talking over the project with Matt who voices Frankie. It’s very much in line with their sensibilities, the idea of like, kind of jumping the line, going back and forth. Lulling people into a sense of security and then doing something really hard and intense and real, and then pulling back immediately.
It’s the concept that I’ve become fascinated with recently. I’ve been listening to a lot of The Simpsons commentary tracks and Matt Groening talks about elastic reality. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this concept. It’s like Homer can go to space and crazy shit can happen, but he always ends up back at home in suburbia, with his family and kind of everything always gets pulled back to a place.
So in this movie, I was trying to do that where it’s like the grounded reality is just kind of like this fun light tone. But occasionally we’ll fly away somewhere else. But then just naturally get pulled back. We always end up back in the same place, like it doesn’t go hard, and then we’re like living with it being hard for the rest of the movie, if that makes any sense.
Definitely, it was a fun ride. So finally being a big Astron-6 fand I have to ask, will we ever see No Sleep, No Surrender?
Steven Kostanski: I feel like every few months in our Astron-6 group chat, somebody will bring that up. Like what are we doing with this? I think the issue is we don’t have a master file of it. I think there was like a rough export at one point and we just have it floating around on a hard drive somewhere.
So it’s not like a thing that we can fully mix and master and have ready to put out there. I think it’s like the actual project file I think, is lost to time.
Oh wow.
Steven Kostanski: It’s like a real non answer and I apologize, I wish I could tell you what we’re doing with that. But, it’s once a year at least we’re like, should we just put this thing out on YouTube? I know there’s talk of that for a bit for this kind of unfinished version that we have. That’s the only thing that’s left, but yeah, I don’t know. Like, keep an eye out. Maybe it’ll just end up on YouTube at some point because I would like people to see it. It’s pretty fun.
Yeah, I feel like I need to just put it out there in the ether as a fan and hopefully one day we’ll get to see it.
Well, this is a good reminder. I’ll throw it at the guys later today and be like, hey, I was getting asked about no sleep, no surrender. We should throw it up again. Maybe it’ll be another dead end conversation, but maybe this time we’ll actually do it. We’ll see.
