Larry Cohen

by Michael Doyle

  Who played the adult monsters?

  We put out a casting call for little people, and so the adult monsters were usually played by diminutive people: midgets or dwarves, and in some cases body-builders, who preferred to call themselves “little people.” They were built very sturdily even though their stature was very small. I think in total we constructed about four or five monster suits for the performers to wear and each of them were fairly detailed with claws, musculature, and the large dome-like heads. It can sometimes be difficult and even dangerous to perform in a monster suit, as they can be quite cumbersome. I remember we were shooting a scene featuring Neal Israel, who is himself a director of some note having made Bachelor Party with Tom Hanks. Neal was playing one of the scientists, and, at one point, his character was supposed to be taking a bath in a pond. Unbeknownst to him, one of the monsters was to rise up out of the water behind Neal and attack him. We had the monster there and we had Neal there, and I said to the guy in the suit, “Okay, submerge yourself, count to ten, and then rise up behind Neal and grab him.” So, we rolled the camera and the monster sank out of sight under the water. Ten seconds passed and the monster did not come back up. Then thirty seconds passed …then forty seconds …then a minute …and all this time Neal kept soaping himself, waiting for the monster to suddenly rise. We were still waiting for the creature to appear when I said, “Hey Neal, you better dive down there and get the monster!” Neal plunged down under the water and the next thing we knew he was dragging the monster out of the pond. What had happened was the monster’s rubber suit had quickly filled up with water and had become extremely heavy. The performer couldn’t make it back to the surface again and was quietly drowning. So, Neal had in effect saved the life of the very monster that was about to take his.

  I know that you have kept some of the models and props from your movies including the monster babies from It’s Alive and It Lives Again.

  Yeah, I do have a closet here full of models and props. I like to look at them and even talk to them on occasion. I like to express my gratitude for all the joy and success they have brought me. Over the years, some of this stuff has deteriorated and has not held up well at all. Some of it falls apart and you have to throw it out, but most of the monsters are incredibly sturdy and still look remarkably fresh, even after all this time. I do have everything here and I figure that some day my family will sell all of these items off on the Internet to fans and collectors.

  In your experience, it is true that some special effects artists are sensitive about relinquishing possession of their work after a film has been completed?

  I’ve never had that problem with any of the makeup artists I’ve worked with, not that I can recall. In fact, when we were doing It’s Alive, Rick Baker knew very well that I would be keeping the original monster baby elements. Rick had no issues with that. Coincidentally, I actually ran into Rick just a few weeks ago at the Academy of Science Fiction and Horror Awards dinner and he was interested to know how the monster baby model was holding up. He asked me if it was still viewable and I told him that it looks almost exactly as it did when he first made it back in the early 1970s. Back then, Rick knew I would be keeping the baby and that it was part of the arrangement, as was the arrangement with all of the special effects people on each of the three movies. If any of them were unhappy about it, they certainly never expressed that view to me.

  Did you use everything you shot for Island of the Alive?

  I believe so. I don’t think there is anything we shot that is deleted from the final cut. The whole picture is right up there on the screen. There were probably ideas and scenes that I wasn’t able to do in It’s Alive and It Lives Again that I included in Island of the Alive, simply because I could. It was interesting to see the monsters as adults and also have the courtroom debate about whether or not they should continue to exist. Those were always ideas that interested me and seemed to be a perfectly logical extension of the first two movies.

  All three It’s Alive films are studies in familial stress and conflict, and how any deviation from the norms of society is viewed as both destructive and perverse. Why are you so intent on continually exposing our pieties and prejudices?

  I guess my movies allow me to comment on some of the injustices and hypocrisies of life as I see them. The way in which we are quick to condemn people for living their lives as they would like — as long as it isn’t harmful to others — is abhorrent to me. A lot of it also has to do with the sick fear people have of themselves and each other. As you know, I’m always interested in writing scenes that act as allegories for other things. In Island of the Alive, Moriarty is the father of the monster and is ostracized because of that. He meets a girl played by Laurene Landon, who is a hooker and goes to bed with her. The hooker remains interested until she recognizes her latest client from the newspapers and television, and realizes that she has in fact slept with the father of one of these creatures. She is immediately horrified that somehow this awful taint might rub off on her. That was intended as an allegory for the then-newly discovered AIDS virus, which, at that time, was becoming an epidemic that was earning enormous press attention. People were terrified of this disease and as a result did not want to get close to those who were suffering with it. They didn’t understand what it was and they didn’t want to know. All they wanted was for as much distance as was humanly possible to be put between them and the victims of AIDS. Compassion was very far from their minds. They only felt terror, revulsion, and a hysterical sense of self-preservation. That attitude is exactly the same as society’s reaction to the monster babies and the parents that produced them. If this situation was to actually occur, people would probably want these children to be isolated or destroyed as soon as they were being born and their parents to be locked away. It’s that cold, unreasoning fear and sense of outrage we have of anything that’s different that is the most destructive aspect of human life. But hey, that’s who we are.

  The climax of Island of the Alive is far more upbeat than the conclusions of It’s Alive and It Lives Again. Indeed, the final image is of the family united, hinting at a better understanding and a brighter future for the mutant species. Why did you decide to end the series on such an optimistic note?

  I thought it brought a touch of hope that maybe the humans and the monsters could learn to get along. I felt this baby could be developed with love and affection and grow into something that could be dealt with and wouldn’t be a killer after all. Who knows what it could become? Who knows what its intelligence potential could be? Of course, that’s another movie entirely. It’s Alive and It Lives Again do have rather bleak endings as we always killed the monsters at the climax and left the families in despair. Those endings were real downers, but for this particular movie (yes, we did kill a lot of the monsters) but we see that this one baby survives. Then Moriarty and Karen Black come together again as man and wife and ride off in the car with their grandchild. As you say, the family is reunited. This time the unit survives the horror intact and probably not before time.

  Some critics felt that this third entry was the most muddled and unfocused of the trilogy. How do you respond to those assessments?

  I don’t agree with them. I don’t think that’s the case at all. I don’t understand what is “muddled and unfocused” about the picture. It’s a very, very clear story. I thought the character development of the father was actually more interesting than what was featured in the other pictures, because Jarvis went in a direction that was highly unusual but not untrue. Many people go nuts when they go through a traumatic situation like that, and so for me it felt particularly authentic. There is a lot of emotional truth in Island of the Alive, and everything makes perfect sense to me.

  Don’t you think there are too many disparate elements in the story as well as some unnecessary diversions? For example, at one point Jarvis unexpectedly floats off in his makeshift raft to Cuba and falls in with some of the militia there.

  Well, he had to be rescued somehow af
ter drifting from the boat. I also thought it would be interesting for Jarvis to be saved by the enemies of America rather than by our sympathetic friends. I liked the idea that he would be rescued by a group of people who were supposedly dangerous and then safely returned to American shores. I thought that would be something different, rather than having him being picked up by a boat or something. I didn’t think that would be particularly interesting.

  It also ties in with the film’s themes of tolerance and acceptance.

  That’s right. It deals with the whole concept of sitting in judgement of people and deciding who our enemies are, who is bad, and who is good. Because human beings like to deal in absolutes. The entire film is about the fact that these babies are different and different is seen as being bad and threatening. If you are different then you have got to be destroyed. Naturally, this idea is allied with the Cubans, who are also perceived as being bad and dangerous. We are constantly being told that these are our enemies. They couldn’t possibly do anything good because they are so irredeemably evil. Well, that’s just not true. As it shows you in Island of the Alive, they are capable of sympathy and humanity, too, and they save this man’s life. Why do Cubans have to be bad merely because we think they are going to be bad? So, that scene in particular deals with the suppositions of everyone’s insistence on pre-judging someone else’s morality, character, and sense of decency. Again, it reinforces what the whole picture is concerned with. It’s about reassessing who somebody is, not by virtue of the fact that they look and sound different, but by their actions and how they behave.

  How do you rate the third film against the first two?

  I happen to like the third picture a lot. I liked the fun we had making it. I also liked the fact that we got to venture off somewhere different to shoot the movie; and that we came back and took over the Santa Monica pier to shoot the scene where there is the rumble — the big gang-fight. That was all great production value and it added to the picture. I knew that making Island of the Alive would be an entirely new experience for me and I embraced that experience. I think the third picture holds up really well against the first two. It’s Alive was almost totally concerned with the monster baby’s father and mother. We then opened up the story a little bit more with It Lives Again with the three monster babies being rescued and taken to a place of sanctuary. Island of the Alive goes even further by dealing with the fate of an entire generation of adult monsters, expanding the moral discussion in a more profound way. So, I think all three films offer the audience something new and they fit together nicely as a trilogy and as a continuing story. I’m very glad I made all three movies.

  Do you feel you have concluded the series satisfactorily or will there be a fourth Alive film?

  Well, you never can tell. I have had some thoughts and ideas, but we would have to see if there is any interest from studios or producers for the financing of a fourth film. We could certainly make one.

  In which direction would you take a fourth instalment?

  Oh, I’m not going to tell.

  Can’t you give me a little hint? What ideas have you got?

  No, I couldn’t possibly tell.

  Do you think that ultimately It’s Alive — the film that started it all — will be the movie that you will be most remembered for?

  It’s certainly possible, but I’ll probably be most remembered for Phone Booth.

  Do you really think so?

  Yeah, I do, if only because Phone Booth was a more recent movie and a percentage of the modern audience tend to have short memories. Actually, I’ll probably be remembered for both It’s Alive and Phone Booth. They will possibly be mentioned together. But I would have no complaints if people only remembered me for the It’s Alive pictures. I mean, some directors would have given their right arm to taste that kind of success, so I’m very proud to be associated with them.

  A Return to Salem’s Lot (1987)

  After agreeing that A Return to Salem’s Lot would become the second film of your two-picture deal with Warner Bros., did you have any reservations about creating a sequel to the well-received 1979 miniseries?

  No, none at all. My take on the sequel didn’t have much to do with Tobe Hooper’s miniseries or Stephen King’s original novel upon which it was based. When I was given the freedom by Warner Bros. to do what I wanted with their property, I quickly decided that the best way to go was to create a new set of characters and a new story. Salem’s Lot concerned only one rather monstrous-looking vampire who is infecting a whole town, but my film was about a whole community of vampires that had been established for hundreds of years. Not only that, I think that my vampires were a little more human and didn’t reveal their true monstrousness until quite late in the picture when it became necessary. So, it was an entirely different approach to what Tobe had taken. Actually, in many ways, I think of A Return to Salem’s Lot as more of an original film rather than a direct sequel.

  I understand that you worked on your own cinematic adaptation of Stephen King’s novel back in the late 1970s. Is that right?

  Yeah, I wrote a screenplay of Salem’s Lot for Warner Bros. It was around 140 pages long and followed King’s novel quite closely. Unfortunately, I believe they thought my script was too long and too expensive for a theatrical feature, so they abandoned it. Warner Bros. later hired Tobe to direct from an entirely new script and that became the two-part miniseries. I only saw a segment of Salem’s Lot on TV, but I thought it was okay. From what I did see, I didn’t think it really captured the sense of a town and its inhabitants being devastated by this evil presence in their midst. In King’s novel, the vampire was kind of rotting the town out from the inside and there was a tragic element to it. I don’t think that was fully exploited as it could have been in the mini-series. Despite that, I do seem to recall that it had one or two scary sequences in it. The only idea they retained from my script was to make the lead vampire look demonic like Max Schreck in Nosferatu, which I always thought would be terrifying. Actually, I don’t know for sure if they got that notion from my script or whether Tobe and the writer [1] came up with that approach independently, but it was an idea that I’d conceived before them. Apart from that, I don’t think there was anything in the miniseries that wasn’t taken directly from King’s book.

  Did you limit the ambitions of your script in any way knowing that the finished film was destined for the shelves of a video store rather than the projection room of a movie theater?

  No. I wrote and directed the film the same way I would have if I’d shot it under any circumstances — based on budget. I couldn’t do any more with the money I had to spend, but we did the best we could. My hope was that if we made a good enough movie, Warner Bros. would play it in theaters. After we finished the picture and I delivered it to them, I prevailed on the studio to distribute the film theatrically. They opened it up in Massachusetts or some other place in New England — maybe it was Cape Cod — and it did quite well. I think we did about $75,000 a theater. When I came back to discuss this with Warner Bros., they said, “Well, the film only did that business because it played up in New England, which is Stephen King country. It couldn’t possibly do that well anyplace else.” I said, “Okay, but can’t you at least try it out someplace else?” The head of distribution really didn’t want this picture in his schedule and there was some word coming down that the studio wanted to cancel the video division. In fact, after Island of the Alive and A Return to Salem’s Lot came in, they fired the guy who had hired me and did indeed terminate the video division. The theatrical division did not want to be competing with movies being made for home video which might turn out to be better than the pictures they were making for a theatrical audience at ten times the money.

  So, there were internal conflicts over the video division?

  Well, politically, it just wasn’t a sound choice to make those pictures as it irritated the theatrical people. They didn’t even want to play my two movies theatrically, even though they had both tested well.
So, when I asked Warner Bros. to give A Return to Salem’s Lot another test, they took it down to some Midwest college town and opened it during the first week of the college semester. The picture did no business whatsoever because in a college town — after the first week of registration — nobody is going to the movies. So, A Return to Salem’s Lot more or less bombed down there and that was the end of the theatrical distribution of the film. I guess it was what they call in the movie business “a self-fulfilling prophecy.” When the distribution people don’t believe in a picture, they can make it work so that the film won’t do any business. By doing that, it allows them to ensure that their prediction comes true. All they have to do is make certain that there is a lack of advertising and put the movie into areas and theaters where they know there won’t be any activity. And that’s exactly what they did. They deliberately killed the picture.

  A Return to Salem’s Lot begins with Michael Moriarty’s anthropologist filming a tribal sacrifice and justifying it by saying, “It’s their society, their rules.” Do you think he applies that same dispassionate logic and study to the vampire society?

  I think he does to some degree, but then he stays there and involves himself in chronicling the vampire’s way of life by agreeing to write their “Bible.” He doesn’t leave or try to flee right away. He’s fascinated with this secret society that exists and learns that it’s just as vicious and bizarre as the people in the jungle he was filming. I was trying to say that there are all kinds of societies and cultures in the world that perform actions that we might consider horrendous, but are perfectly normal for them. They may appear to do terrible things by our own standards, but that is simply the way they live. For example, the manner in which they treat women or animals might seem horrific to us but is perfectly acceptable behaviour to them. I always find the idea that we sometimes sit in judgement of other cultures and measure them by our own morals and ideals, quite fascinating. But in truth, I would imagine that a vampire society would be no worse than a lot of other societies, including our own.