Killer job

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This article was published 01/06/2024 (681 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Emerging from the primordial ooze of the fabulous Winnipeg film collective Astron-6, Steven Kostanski would seem to have risen to the top of his game with the news that he is currently directing Deathstalker, a reboot of the Roger Corman-produced swords-and-sorcery adventure from 1983 that spawned three sequels.

Bear in mind: Kostanski and his Astron-6 buddies paid non-stop homage to Corman-esque material in their Winnipeg work, including titles such as Manborg, Father’s Day and the giallo pastiche The Editor.

And Kostanski is duly humbled by the achievement, which lands a little harder given that Corman himself died on May 9 at the ripe old age of 98. (Instead of Corman, Kostanski has been working with Slash, the Guns ‘N Roses guitarist turned horror producer.)

“It was really unfortunate timing that he passed away right at the end of our shoot,” the Torornto-based Kostanski says during a break in shooting in Sudbury, Ont.

“Of course, I hoped that I would be able to show him the movie, but I will do my best to honour his legacy, which I’m pretty confident we’re doing because it’s a very (low) budget movie, and we’re doing all the indie stuff that I’m sure he would have approved of.”

Kostanski has been directing a lot of non-Astron films in the past few years, including the Lovecraftian thriller The Void (2016), franchise reboot Leprechaun Returns (2018), Psycho Goreman (2020) and most recently the as-yet unreleased Frankie Freako, a homage to the demon puppet movies of the ’80s (encompassing Gremlins, Ghoulies and more).

But Kostanski is on the phone to talk about his work in visual effects, specifically designing the gory mayhem of In a Violent Nature, a twisted horror film from director Chris Nash that essentially tells its story almost entirely from the perspective of its Jason Vorhees-like stalker.

The film earned its horror bona fides at Sundance earlier this year and opened across North America this weekend.

So why is he lugging prosthetic body parts and gallons of fake blood through the Canadian forest settings of In a Violent Nature? Because Kostanski doesn’t consider being a director as an endgame in his film career.

“It’s a financial thing. I went into special effects, in prosthetics, because it’s the closest thing to a day job in the film industry,” he says.

Directing, in short, doesn’t pay the bills.

“I genuinely love making creatures and gore and things that I can slot into when I need to get a paycheque, whereas in directing, it’s a little bit more of a process to get to that paycheque. That’s why I straddle both fields,” says Kostanski, incidentally the head of his own new company, Action Pants FX Shop.

If the gory excesses of his Astron past were generally created with tongue-in-cheek, the requirements of In a Violent Nature are decidedly darker, more likely to elicit gross-out awe than laughs.

“Part of the fun of doing creature effects is being challenged with different ways of doing things,” Kostanski says. “I worked in the industry long enough that I’ve had to do the types of effects that are In A Violent Nature. On plenty of other projects, realistic violence is pretty standard in my world, so it wasn’t a big stretch for me to do that.”

To his mind, film’s gags operate at a heightened level.

“Despite the grim realism of it, there are some deaths in the movie that are pretty insane … and maybe not totally anatomically feasible,” he says.

“Trying to sell it to the audience is half the fun for me of doing effects. It’s a bit of a magician’s trick: how do you convince the audience that this is happening? And that’s part of the fun.”

In a Violent Nature opened Friday at Polo Park.

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