Welcome to Thanks, I Love It, our series highlighting something onscreen we’re obsessed with this week.
Have you heard about our lord and savior PG: Psycho Goreman?
If you’ve visited horror movie Twitter lately, you’ve probably encountered one or more of the film’s digital disciples. These enthusiastic souls laud the gruesome but lovable sci-fi adventure from writer-director Steven Kostanski as “a masterpiece,” “an instant cult classic,” even “hands down the best movie I have ever fucking seen.” Yeah, this story of a sadistic alien warrior, who is indeed called “Psycho Goreman” (“PG” for short), being held captive by a feisty little girl named Mimi and her timid older brother Lucas, really is that good.
“I’m just trying to find that spark and put it back into my movies.”
“It’s mostly inspired by my experiences as a kid,” Kostanski tells Mashable over the phone.
“I grew up in the video store, constantly going to rent movies with my family every weekend. There were a lot of scenarios where I would rent movies that were not suitable for kids, and so ‘PG’ is a bit of me working through some of those traumas.”
Kostanski, who confirmed the title is a direct reference to the MPA’s “parental guidance” rating, designed his film to combine “all the sci-fi adventure stuff that a kid would want” with the skull-crushing, eyeball-bursting violence a splatter fan would love. It was the viewing experience the filmmaker had himself growing up, when his mother mistook the “very much R-rated” 1996 movie Guyver: Dark Hero for being “like Power Rangers.”
<img alt="Family
Family <3
Image: rlje films
“Having crazy sci-fi stuff through the perspective of kid characters just makes it infinitely more interesting to me,” Kostanski says. “It’s fun to reflect on those experiences and on those times, because I don’t feel like movies really excite me in the way I used to get excited back then. So I’m just trying to find that spark and put it back into my movies.”
“You’re really in the trenches with everybody just fighting to get this thing made, and I think that intense passion shows up on screen.”
But recreating that childhood memory was a challenging task. For starters, he had to balance the humor and horror of children being faced with an extraterrestrial overlord who threatens to literally “bathe in their blood.”
Stars Nita-Josee Hanna, who plays Mimi; Owen Myre, who plays Luke; and Scout Flint, who plays Alastair, a neighborhood kid-turned-tentacled brain monster-thing (don’t ask), were fearless, Kostanski says. But finding the right attitude for the character of PG — one that would neither overly endear nor alienate audiences — was essential.
“What the character became is definitely a result of just shooting the movie,” Kostanski remarks of his creation, who has since achieved “icon” status among some genre fans. (Seriously, PG is now an action figure.)
“There’s this evolution of PG from being a more straightforward villain to this kind of just passive aggressive dude by the end of the movie, where he’s irritated with everything and a little more casual [that’s really fun to watch] and a lot of that came out of the situation.”
Independently funded, PG: Psycho Goreman was paid for by friends of Kostanski, who, as he recalls it, “told me to just go nuts.” Kostanski had no shortage of ideas when it came to recreating the memorable feel of a creature feature — and as a special effects master with credits on Umbrella Academy, The Boys, It, Suicide Squad, Crimson Peak, and more, he had the skills to pull them off.
Oh buddies, this ends so badly for you.
Image: rlje films
But practical effects on a limited budget meant a lot of work for Kostanski and his tiny team.
“When you have the obstacles of low-budget filmmaking, your team bonds in ways that I think don’t really happen on bigger projects,” Konstanski says. For Matthew Ninaber, who played PG, Kostanski says that involved “sweating and suffering” under a latex costume for as many as 12 hours at a time. (The alien killer’s voice was provided by actor Steven Vlahos.)
“I clearly am not learning from my mistakes.
“You’re really in the trenches with everybody just fighting to get this thing made, and I think that intense passion shows up on screen.”
Kostanski’s ambitious project was guided by a quest for awesomeness. In the writer-director’s favorite scene, a fight between PG and members of The Planetary Alliance, PG promises a “warrior’s death” to his foe Darkscream, played by Alex Chung.
The moment — which involves PG unhinging his jaw for an attack that somehow combines the merman from Cabin in the Woods with the anatomy of a praying mantis — needed to be a slam dunk. So, when the team didn’t like the way the scene came out the first time, they completely redid it, with a sort of hand puppet design Kostanski whipped up at the eleventh hour.
The spectacularly screwed members of the Planetary Alliance who do not yet know how screwed they are
Image: RLJE Films
“That’s a bit of a problem I have,” Kostanski says. “I’ll write it thinking, ‘Oh, this’ll be easy!’ I’m not joking when I say that, when I wrote this script, I thought this would be a small movie compared to what I was used to doing. I thought I was writing a more contained story, and then I still ended up in the shop shooting inserts late at night, cursing myself for writing something this complicated with this many effects.”
“There will be something PG-related coming up; I can pretty much guarantee that. It’s just figuring out what exactly that should be.”
When asked if he remembered saying something similar in a 2017 behind-the-scenes interview for supernatural horror movie The Void, which Kostanski co-wrote and co-directed with Jeremy Gillespie, he laughs.
“I clearly am not learning from my mistakes. But I think to even try to make a movie like this, you have to be a little dumb and assume that everything is going to go perfectly and that nothing will be a challenge.”
With fan art coming in daily and word of mouth picking up, Kostanski is confident his star character will return in future projects.
“There will be something PG-related coming up; I can pretty much guarantee that. It’s just figuring out what exactly that should be.”
Until then, he’s happy knowing PG: Psycho Goreman is finding its fans, and making its mark on scary cinematic history.
“My hope now,” Kostanski says, “is that anytime people see ‘PG’ on anything, it’ll make them think of Psycho Goreman.”
PG: Psycho Goreman is now available to rent or purchase on Amazon Prime Video, iTunes, Google Play, and YouTube.