I had interviewed Tom Holland before, and he was saying how serendipitous it was to have the crew of Ghostbusters on Fright Night. What were your feelings on that initially, having this first time horror director with a smaller budget. Any reservations?
Steve Johnson: Oh not at all, Tom was really fun to work with. The thing about Boss Films was we did Ghostbusters, Fright Night, our rendition of Predator, but we were always having a blast, and those were truly the glory days, it was a magical time.
The concept for the vampires in Fright Night were so unique. What was the inspiration for the more gnarled, animal look?
Steve Johnson: That totally came from Tom and it was very unique. You never really saw a transformation since the original Nosferatu, so I was a little hesitant at first, because they aren’t werewolves. Is the transformation effect on the vampires going to work? But, as we all know it worked quite well.
Let’s talk about Night of the Demons for a moment because I always said to myself if I spoke to you or part of the FX crew, I would simply ask, where did the lipstick concept come from?
Steve Johnson: (Laughs) It was actually in the script, but Kevin Tenney made the effect really sing simply through camera work, and his wide shots on Linnea. It was kind of a James Woods ‘vagina chest’ from Videodrome that we had applied on her, but Kevin Tenney’s camera truly made the application memorable.
I wanted to talk about Innocent Blood for a moment, supremely underrated vampire film. But the one thing I loved about it was the glow of the vampire eye, which you had created. What were the steps taken to figure out that technique?
Steve Johnson: There’s a funny story about that. I went to read with John and I asked what the vampires teeth look like, and he said they don’t have fangs. I said, “They don’t have fangs? So, what do their eyes look like?”, and John replied with, “They are different colors, but I was just thinking color contacts.” I knew that would be boring, but this was the around the time that credit cards had holograms on them. So I cut mine up and I tore it out. I had to figure out how to laminate a hologram on a hard contact lens.
I got with the world’s leading holographic designers and we made it work. I told John give me a few months, if it doesn’t work we will use yellow or red lenses. A couple of months and fifty thousand dollars later, they worked! I had contact lenses I could wear in my own eyes that could project images. But the issue was the moisture in the actor’s eyes would deteriorate the hologram after two or three days, so I didn’t feel comfortable. I told John I didn’t feel confident, and HE BECAME ENRAGED!
I am driving off the lot, and the STOP sign lettering that I was stopped at glowed back at me. They are treated with a 3M material called ScotchLite which is made of thousands of tiny glass beads. We took the lenses and laminated ScotchLite on them, and the doctors put another casing underneath the lense, so it was very safe for the actor. But again, we had to work with a light source going directly at it.
What we did was use a thing called a beam splitter, put it on the camera, and whatever the lens saw glowed. I took it another step further, and thought to myself depending on the color of light we could use the beam splitter and the camera lens would turn it another color. If you remember the sex scene with Anne Parillaud, when she’s orgasming, her eyes constantly changed color. So the mistake of holograms turned out infinitely better and successful with the ScotchLite. Everyone and their mother told me to patent it, but I never used it again and it cost way too much money to do.