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Movies & TV

Slash

Actor, writer, Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Famer, guitar god – now Slash can add “horror movie producer” as another a feather in his trademark top hat.

In the supernatural thriller Nothing Left To Fear, the legendary Guns n’ Roses guitarist peels back the gore and guts that have come to dominate horror cinema, shooting for an old-school, Baptist Gothic feel.

How’d you go from being a fan of horror movies to wanting to produce one?

I was given the opportunity to produce by another producer who thought I had the aptitude for it, being knowledgeable about horror movies because I’m such a fan. I don’t know anything about producing, so he started giving me these scripts and I absorbed them. Eventually, I got to a handful I actually liked.

Your production company is Slasher Films, so I thought this would be a slasher film. But it’s not really.

Ironically enough, “Slasher” was a good name to give it, based on my name. But what I want to do is the antithesis of slasher films. I think we’ve seen a lot of variations on the slasher movie, over the past 20 years especially. I want to make movies that are more story-driven, character-driven – something with a real monster in it as opposed to just psychos running around. We’re really channelling some movies from the early 70s.

Which ones?

The main one was Rosemary’s Baby. That was the movie that we universally thought – my partners and the director – we might want to do. It’s this slow burn, and then all hell breaks loose.

How do you feel about the current state of horror movies? You mentioned that slasher films had been kind of run into the ground. Now the big things seems to be “torture porn.” Do you feel like genuine horror has been drained out of the genre?

A good-quality torture porn movie was Hostel. Very unnerving but very well done. If [director] Eli [Roth] set out to make people uncomfortable, he did an amazing job. So there are good ones and bad ones. There are all these gory movies focused on dismemberment, or whatever the thing is. I just want to get involved with movies that are ominous, haunting and psychologically scary.

Listen to Slash talk about Fan Expo, April Wine and pruning actor Seymour Cassel’s pot plants in the full video interview on nowtoronto.com.

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