In Freaks of Nature, vampires and zombies are just a regular part of life. It’s when an alien invasion hits that things get really weird…
Welcome to Freaks of Nature’s Dillford, Ohio. It’s just like any other quiet little town in suburban America. High school kids like Nicholas Braun’s Dag Parker live high school lives. After all, it has been some time since the zombie apocalypse was dealt with and so long after the vampires revealed themselves that it’s all just part of society. Mostly, Dag is just focused on his girlfriend, Vanessa Hudgens’ Lorelei, and things are pretty much par for the course. That is, until the alien invasion happens…
Once upon a time, Freaks of Nature was a Black List project by screenwriter Oren Uziel (who would go on to script 22 Jump Street). Titled Kitchen Sink for it’s mash-up of genre fare, the retitled feature — directed by Robbie Pickering — hits theaters this Friday, October 30 in select theaters.
Freaks of Nature: Nicolas Braun as Dag Parker
“It’s sort of like ‘The Breakfast Club’ if they were monsters,” star Josh Fadem told ComingSoon.net when we visited the set last year. “It’s sort of like a John Hughes and Jon Landis comedy with a production feel of ’80s Spielberg horror. The stuff he produced, like ‘Gremlins,’ ‘Back to the Future,’ ‘Goonies’ or ‘Explorers.’”
Set up on a soundstage in Manhattan Beach, California was a suburban Dillford home, packed with zombies and vampires. Normally, the zombies are kept in check in Dillford, confined to their own part of town with shock colors and issued government rationed brains. Presumably the alien invasion is part of the reason they’re now crashing a vampire house party, but the cast was keeping quiet about the way the specific events unfold. What happens in the scene is that three unlikely characters are forced together and, as it turns out, they’ve got some personal history.
“The three characters all have a history together,” continued Fadem, who plays a kid named Ned Mosely, “but they haven’t spoken in the same way that you might not talk to someone that you knew in middle school during high school. They wind up together in this sort of apocalyptic situation. They’re stuck having to deal with that as well as their high school back story.”
“We were best buddies all through childhood,” Braun explained. “Then, somewhere around 7th grade, I went for the cool crowd and left him in the dust. So we have to kind of band together to save the town.”
Freaks of Nature: Mackenzie Davis as Petra Lane
Then there’s Petra Lane, a girl that, way back in the sixth grade, Dag lied about making out with.
“The movie is not told chronologically, so you don’t see it immediately,” explained Mackenzie Davis, who also likened Petra to Beetlejuice’s Lydia Deetz, “but she sort of started in the town of Dillford as an outcast in high school.”
Of course, both Petra and Ned have a twist to their characters.
“When you’re in high school, everything feels apocalyptic,” offered producer Matthew Tolmach of Freaks of Nature’s underlying metaphor. “It feels like the emotions are just going to bury you. You got dumped or you can’t sit at the table you want to sit at or you can’t go this party. It’s all just crushing.”
The weight of those emotions are magnified to monstrous proportions in Freaks of Nature, which sets Petra as a vampire and Ned as a zombie.
“The metaphor is really getting seduced by an older guy, losing your virginity and then, a second later, being cast aside,” Davis explained of Petra’s undead side. “The vampire stuff really feels incidental. It’s about a teenage girl trying to find herself in her skin and survive high school. We live in a very crazy world where high school is populated by supernatural beings, [but] she’s a dark character to begin with.”
Freaks of Nature: Josh Fadem as Ned Mosely
For Fadem’s Ned, the metaphor is that of a kid who has turned to drugs.
“He starts out and he’s not a zombie,” Fadem explained. “He’s having a hard teen life. High school is rough. He doesn’t have any friends. He’s a really smart student. He’s like the smartest kid in school, but the teachers don’t really care. He’s kind of the oddball in his family. As he perceives, they don’t really get him. It’s kind of the metaphor of rough high school teen life. He thinks ‘This is going to be forever,’ so he checks out and becomes a zombie. He convinces a zombie to bite him.”
To help drive home the drug metaphor, there’s unique aspect to the way Freaks of Nature handles zombies.
“Whenever he eats brains, he gets super-stoned and high,” added Fadem. “There are many points in the movie where he’s eaten brains and he’s totally out of it. They’ve got to find a way to get him more lucid.”
The three teen characters navigate a world packed with familiar faces from all over the comedy world. Among those featured in supporting roles are Denis Leary, Joan Cusack, Bob Odenkirk, Keegan-Michael Key, Patton Oswalt and Rachael Harris.
Freaks of Nature: Denis Leary as Rick Wilson
“We kind of have all these weird comedy levels,” says Pickering. “The New York stand-up scene and the UCB scene. The Groundlings. All these stratas of people who are kind of comedy legends.”
Bob Odenkirk and Joan Cusack play Nicolas Braun’s hippie parents and Tolmach admitted that part of the reason Braun won the leading role was because he reminded him of the Say Anything star.
“John Cusack is the perfect everyman,” said Tolmach. “He’s cool without being self conscious. He was funny, but self deprecating. He was good. He was a good guy. That’s what I think this script sort of demanded… You needed the human — the normal kid — to kind of be the glue.”
“He’s an awesome comedian in that all of his improvisation is very self deprecating,” added Pickering. “It goes beyond the usual kind of 20s teen guy go-tos which are all aggressively misogynistic. He has a very different take on this that’s just a whole lot more clever.”
Despite the massive scale of the film’s backdrop, Freaks of Nature was shot in just 36 days for $20 million and is being released with an R rating. It remains to be seen whether or not Sony Pictures’ “special engagement” release will help the film find an audience over the Halloween weekend.
“We went for it,” says Pickering. “It’s hard R. People blowing up. People getting chainsawed in half. Great blood gags. The comedy really works well with the gore.”
“It’s not tongue in cheek,” added Tolmach. “It’s not meta. It’s real zombies and real vampires. But it’s also ‘The Breakfast Club.’ It’s these three kids who are stuck together and have to sort of figure out how to live with each other.”
Click here to watch the Freaks of Nature Red Band trailer.
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