The Big Picture

The film Destroy All Neighbors is a splatterfest made more enjoyable by its real and tangible visuals. The film’s small but mighty team including director Josh Forbes and stars Jonah Ray Rodrigues and Alex Winter make it a success. The team discusses the making of the film, working on a tight schedule, the insane script, and covering Winter in prosthetics to play Vlad.

Shudder is the world’s home for horror, whether it’s big budget productions or the kind of films that are scraped together by the skin of the creatives’ teeth, with small budgets and even smaller sets that still manage to produce world-class screams. The streamer’s latest offering, Destroy All Neighbors, is just that, a splatterfest made all the more enjoyable by the fact that everything on the screen is real and tangible, made even more disgusting and fascinating by the people both in front of and behind the camera.

The film has a small but mighty team behind it, including director Josh Forbes, as well as stars Jonah Ray Rodrigues and Alex Winter, who play protagonist and musician William and his unseemly, loud neighbor, Vlad. The three are key to making the film what it is, a Liquid Television-esque romp with lots of loud music and an accidental slasher, that thrives on its prog rock soundtrack and its stars’ willingness to go balls to the walls, even if that means acting against a severed head.

Collider was excited to sit down with all three to discuss the making of film, where they delved into working on a tight schedule, the film’s insane script, and covering Winter in mounds of prosthetics to play Vlad. They also talked about Rodrigues and Forbes bringing their musical experience to the film, its visual influences, and their personal takes on prog rock.

Destroy All Neighbors Struggling prog-rock musician William Brown finds himself in a living nightmare when he accidentally kills Vlad, the neighbor from hell. Release Date January 12, 2024 Director Josh Forbes Runtime 85 minutes Main Genre Comedy Writers Mike Benner , Jared Logan , Charles A. Pieper

Check out the full interview below, or in the player above, and stream Destroy All Neighbors on Shudder.

COLLIDER: This movie was nuts. I’ve been trying to describe it to other people and I’m like, “Just imagine the goopiest horror movie you can possibly come up with,” and that’s the best thing I can do to describe this. It’s hard to come up with questions about that, but to sort of start off with an easy one, do you guys have any prog rock that you actually like, or do you think it’s a dead genre?

JOSH FORBES: I like it.

ALEX WINTER: We all like it, don’t we?

JONAH RAY RODRIGUES: But do you listen to new prog-rock?

FORBES: Oh, yeah. I’m a big Coheed and Cambria fan. I hated them and then I did a music video for them and then my brain just switched and, like, I can’t get enough of them.

RODRIGUES: I guess Mars Volta. There’s prog that’s still happening.

FORBES: Yeah, but it’s definitely a very indulgent… It’s ridiculous. That’s kind of what I like about it. It’s so extreme. But definitely the ‘60s and ‘70s stuff where you have a 45-minute song that’s, like, a flute and whatever. [Laughs]

RODRIGUES: “What if we did all the notes in this song?” “Well, we did that in the last song. Let’s try it again in a different order.”

FORBES: Right. Exactly.

I will say, this did motivate me to finally go back and listen to the King Crimson vinyls that people bought me for Christmas that I just never put on.

WINTER: Can you leave those outside your door and I’ll swing by and grab them?

Forbes’ Music Video Experience Gave the Team an Advantage

[laughs] Josh, you said you’ve obviously got your start in directing music videos, and this is such a music-focused film. Did that experience carry over into making this, outside of generally what you learned as a director on those?

FORBES: Yeah, I think so. It’s funny because in an earlier version of the draft, we always wanted William’s character to have something he was trying to accomplish, some sort of goal, and it sort of morphed over the different drafts. At one point he was a cartoonist because I really love Better Off Dead, and we’re like, “Oh, maybe the cartoons will come to life.” But then when Jonah came on, one of our writers, Mike Benner, was just like, “Dude, he’s a musician. Let’s go for it.” And so, everything just sort of fell in line. I’m like, “Okay, cool. I know how to shoot a music video.” And so, it definitely helped.

It also helped, I feel like, when there’s the big music montage towards the end that definitely was just super in my wheelhouse. Then also, there are a couple other moments, too, like when they have their party in the apartment. We barely had any time for that. We were pushing so hard to make room, and I think we shot that whole sequence in, like, eight minutes or something. Like, we played the song twice, but it was because I’ve done that so many times, and Jonah has too, and so has– I mean, Alex is just sitting there as a head, but you know. We all kind of knew it. We knew it collectively in a way that I think a lot of other people, like the AD was like, “What do you mean? How are you gonna get… There’s, like, 20 shots on this list.” I’m like, “Dude, just play the music, roll the camera…”

RODRIGUES: “Everyone get out of the room except for the camera guy.” Josh and I, we had a couple of those moments on it where it’s like, we knew we needed shots, and we knew we needed some of these elements just from the stuff that we’ve done for music videos and stuff. And again, Alex is from that world, too. We’re all just these DIY kind of punks that were just making whatever we could with as little as possible. So, there were moments where, like Josh said, we’re just like, “We’re just gonna run the camera up and down the hallway, and hit Jonah in the head!” It’s the first day he’s like, “I don’t see where we could… We have to have a conversation.” And we’re just like, “Let us do it! It’ll take five minutes and then we’ll have it. There’s a bucket of stuff we can use.”

FORBES: Also, with music videos, obviously, the budgets keep going lower and lower, so you have to be more and more creative. I think that’s kind of where I hope that I shine, or that we all shine. I feel like the movie looks like we had 10 times the amount of money that we did. We were really able to stretch our budget, and I attribute that to my years of doing music videos.

RODRIGUES: We also shouldn’t have embezzled so much of that money for our own personal use. Looking back at the movie now, I think that was a mistake.

FORBES: And those horses were very fast in their practice, and they weren’t during the race. That happens sometimes.

Alex, you’re obviously buried under piles and piles of makeup. What was that experience like? You did Freaked in the ‘90s, which is in a very similar sort of vein, but this is full-body prosthetics. I imagine you Jim Henson’d him into a box where it’s just his head and then everything else is covered. What’s that experience like? Is that uncomfortable, or because you were moving at such a fast pace did it not bother you that much?

WINTER: No, I’ve done it so many times. By the time I did Freaked I’d done it a bunch before that, and I’ve done it a bunch since then. We just did Bill & Ted [Face the Music] with a bunch of prosthetics with Kevin Yagher. It was similar, you know, hours and hours in, hours and hours out. I really don’t mind it. When you’re working with the best artists in the business, they also make it more comfortable. Gabe Bartalos did all the designs and created this whole thing for Vlad, and Bill Corso, who I’ve been working with since Lost Boys, did the applications and the paint. Bill had a sort of an MO that he worked out with Gabe about how to create the pieces in a way that would make them very light, so we were shooting in the dead of summer and that’s really all I need. I just need pieces that are light and that breathe, and then I really don’t notice it. So, you don’t really notice it.

I think people who get freaked out with prosthetics, it’s the putting it on that freaks them out. Sitting in a chair for four hours and having things just glued and glued and glued to your skin, I don’t mind that. I find acting and prosthetics very liberating, so I don’t mind the push of getting in and out of it.

RODRIGUES: Also, you got to hang out with your friend of over 30 years the entire year.

WINTER: Yeah, I always like hanging out with Bill. I mean, we’d just done Bill & Ted 3 together not long before. But it was kind of all you guys, though, right? When you’re working on a film like this, I mean, all films are like stone soup — if you have $100 million you still stretch the hell out of it. So, it’s kind of a cliche to say on a lower budget you’re stretching because everyone’s stretching all the time. But this really was stone soup. Everybody involved was so passionate about telling this story and making something creative and inventive. From Josh’s vision all the way down to whatever department, everybody was just coming up with ideas and building stuff in the back and throwing stuff at the screen. In that way, being in prosthetics makes you part of that kind of process, which I really do like.

And you spend so much time in this movie just as a head. I mean, we see your other limbs…

WINTER: I tried to get rid of those. I kept fighting with everyone, but they insisted.

In terms of that, you don’t have the chance to have any sort of physicality because you’re just a head. How do you play a character when you don’t have the advantage of getting to move around and come up with those kinds of things?

WINTER: That was what was so fun about it. There’s a few things that we played. Like, Jonah is a lot taller than I am and his energy and mine are different in really good ways. So, we have those two scenes together before I’m sawed into pieces that kind of establish how we interrelate physically. Then, a lot of the rest of it is really facial expression and then just doing as much stuff with the head as possible in terms of just chucking it around like a basketball. I personally enjoyed that challenge. When I read the script, I think the fact that I get decapitated on page eight or whatever it is, and then I knew I’d be doing all my scenes with Jonah, I think that’s what made me want to do it. For the scenes that they have together, there’s kind of a weird double act, and the interrelationship of the physicality of Will and the complete immobility of Vlad.

I imagine that the voice you put on must have helped, too, because if I hadn’t known you were in this movie, I would not have guessed because that voice sounds nothing like you do right now.

WINTER: [laughs] Really?

Not at all!

RODRIGUES: That was always the funniest moment with Alex and all of his Vlad makeup in between shots or at lunch just talking like he talks now. That was always unsettling.

FORBES: We had such a great prep process. Like, it’s kind of crazy, especially for a movie as silly and goofy. Like Jonah always says, stupid things done smart, or something like that.

RODRIGUES: Stupid things taken seriously.

FORBES: Yeah, but Alex had a whole wall, like he had a spirit animal kind of for the way he moves. I know you had, not Kabuki theater, but…

WINTER: Oh, Butoh.

FORBES: Butoh theater, where it’s just the faces.

WINTER: They’re very expressive. They can do a lot with their face, so I was just studying stuff that would give me a lot to do with just a head.

FORBES: It’s awesome. In an earlier version, I always thought of Vlad as this, like, really hulking guy to the point where maybe it would even just be like a puppet head or something. But when Alex came in, he’s like, “Dude, you’re gonna wanna see my face.” I’m like, “Yeah.” And that was the right decision because he was just able to emote and express in a way that I haven’t really seen in any other movie.

Rodrigues Takes “Stupid Things Done Seriously” to the Max
Image via Shudder

Jonah, in any given scene in this movie, you’re the only normal person, between that insane puppet of Randee Heller and Alex and all of the other dead people that end up surrounding you. How do you keep William grounded? I know he’s going off the rails the farther you get into the movie, but as an actor, how do you keep yourself grounded within all the completely insane chaos of this movie?

RODRIGUES: My favorite kind of stuff is like what Josh was saying earlier, stupid things taken seriously. If you make it as real as possible, it makes that stuff pop and be funnier, so I tried to be as grounded as I can. It was fun. It’s not something I’m terribly not used to because it’s like being on Mystery Science Theater 3000. There’s like episodes and episodes of me having to interact with robots, where the puppeteers were there, but the guys doing the voices are kind of far away, and so I kind of got used to just looking at inanimate objects as actual people to interact with.

Sometimes it was a bit hard, where it’s like there’s a scene with Randee Heller, Eleanor’s skeleton, but I think it was, like, Alex doing the voice that day, and he’s in the other room and I’m trying to have this emotional scene. That was probably the hardest one, having an emotional scene and Alex just going, like, “Oh William!” I was like, “I’m trying to get tears going. Could you please…?”

You’ve also done quite a bit of horror recently between seasons of Mystery Science Theater 3000, because you’ve done this, you’ve done Suitable Flesh, you’ve done Satanic Hispanic. What attracts you to the weirdness of this genre?

RODRIGUES: I was so obsessed with all these types of movies growing up. The first horror movie I was in was Victor Crowley, and Adam Green was like, “I want you to be one of the first deaths in the cold open.” I was like, “That’s my dream!” Then it kind of became this thing where within the horror community everyone wanted to have me in their movie and get killed. So, Joe Begos put me in Christmas Bloody Christmas, and then I get killed. So, it’s nice that even though I end up in prison in this thing, I’m glad that I survived to the end. That’s a new thing.

But yeah, I’m a punk rock kid. I loved horror, but what I loved about punk rock was it was almost this kind of attainable thing that you can get into. You don’t have to have all this stuff. You can just go and start doing it. Then that’s when I started doing stand-up comedy, and it was the same thing. It’s like, “I want to do sketches. I want to make these things,” but I didn’t have those tools. I didn’t have the people that I knew. So I would go, and I just went up on stage and started doing comedy. And horror is this kind of thing where it’s like people are just making stuff, they wanna have fun making it and they want to do it, and everyone gets to be involved. It just feels like another step in that same process I’ve been doing since I was a kid.

Does playing a musician on film feel any different from being a musician in real life, because obviously you are a musician in real life, but I know you have to pre-record music and that kind of stuff. Is it at all different, or can you just kind of transfer that directly?

RODRIGUES: You know, that’s the thing, I can’t shred on guitar. [laughs] I was so worried the whole time.

There were times where our camera op would get on my fingers when I was playing the guitar. I was like, “Get off of my hands! People are gonna see this. It’s gonna not match.” That’s like the worst. I hate seeing that in movies. I was a drummer, that’s the instrument I’m good at. But I was so worried about making it look good and having it be fun. And it’s fun being able to play music in real life and then having to do that stuff. Even in Satanic Hispanics, they’re like, “Oh, we need a song for this part.” So I ended up writing a whole song for my segment in that movie. There’s a thing that Johnny Carson said after doing a magic trick and a Donald Duck voice, and it kind of goes like, “You’ll use everything you’ve ever learned.”

‘Destroy All Neighbors’ Has Some Unique Visual Influences
Image via Shudder

One last question for you, Josh, specifically. I know you mentioned Freaked and Liquid Television as visual influences for this movie, but was there anything else that went directly into how this movie looks? I don’t want to call it gorgeous because it is a gross movie, but it does feel really, really gorgeous in a way to me as somebody who watches a lot of goopy stuff.

FORBES: I think what Jonah is saying, as far as pulling from all your references and stuff, or all the things that you love. That was kind of it for me. I’m a big Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro fan. Amélie is one of my favorite movies, and I just wanted to use color in that way. One of the funny things about our DP, Will Stone, is that he doesn’t really watch horror movies, and I feel like that was just such a benefit because I was like, “Okay, dude, you’re making a David Fincher movie and we’re making a Sam Raimi movie, and we’ll see where we meet in the middle.” Because I hate when people try to overdo the schlockiness, or something. Obviously, it’s a ridiculous movie, but I wanted to have a serious approach to it so that all the insanity would be a counterpoint to it.

WINTER: That’s what I like about it. It’s not trying to be ‘80s or ‘90s. As the old old guy here, we made movies in that era like that because we liked them. The idea of making something that has practical effects is not to be retro, it’s to give you a very specific feeling that does come from punk rock and DIY, these things that Jonah and Josh are talking about. That’s evergreen. There should be more of those. It’s like the idea of seeing something where there’s real things happening on the screen, and prosthetics, and this sort of hyper-theatricality of it, but done in a grounded, serious way, those are just the kinds of things we like watching. So, it’s nice to be able to do that, and it was fun to work with folks who were taking it seriously.

RODRIGUES: It was cool to see the people respond to movies like Psycho Goreman, for one, where it’s like the good will that movie had, it made me excited for ours. It was like, “Oh, there are people out there that wanna see this stuff and want to take it seriously.”