“…Man has ruled this world a stumbling, demented, child-king long enough. And as his empire crumbles my precious black widow shall rise as his most fitting successor!”
-Vincent Price
The Black Widow
Why, what do you have there little girl?
Is that . . . Ohdearnooo!
Before they made horror movies or wrote comic books or hosted a Netflix show set in an abandoned slaughterhouse, Jen and Sylvia Soska spent an idyllic childhood playing in their North Vancouver backyard.
“The big goal was to find the biggest spider possible,” Sylvia explains. “One of my earliest memories was . . . holding up a spider and seeing adults run away from me.”
That experience, as well as some guidance from their mother after their first, terrifying viewing of Poltergeist, directed the twins to their vocation in fright.
“That’s a job?” Sylvia recalls thinking when her mother told her that you could get paid to scare people. “You can have this feeling forever and people will pay you for it?”
The sinister siblings are hard at work on their next job as they’re busily “fine tuning” the script for their next movie, a remake of David Cronenberg’s Rabid.
The trailer for Cronenberg’s 1977 vampire-ish movie includes the phrase: “Pray it doesn’t happen to you,” but religion is absent from the proceedings, Jen notes.
“We’re a bit different from Cronenberg . . . we’re female and we also are nice catholic girls which you wouldn’t guess from our films,” she says, prompting Sylvia to laugh. “We believe in an afterlife and so many of (Cronenberg’s) films are about the quest to expand the human condition – kind of this mad scientist ideal of, ‘Let’s experiment on ourselves to become gods ourselves and immortal in our own flesh.’”
The original movie is about an outbreak of bloodlust but it’s also about the state’s reaction to that bloodlust as the epidemic sweeps through Montreal.
“The most interesting thing about doing a horror movie like this is the social commentary that you can do,” Sylvia says, noting the way zombie film Dawn of the Dead dealt with consumerism.
“There’s a lot of social issue that we tackle in Rabid so it’s pretty heavy. It’s fun, too but we always trick people into learning something,” Jen says.
As much as they respect the original and its director (Sylvia calls him Mr. Cronenberg) their movie is intended as a reimagining, not a remake.
“There’s so many cheap, heartless, cash-grab remakes,” Sylvia acknowledges.
The reason, the twins say, is that many remakes (not John Carpenter’s The Thing, obviously) are “paint-by-number” productions made by filmmakers who weren’t fans of the original and wouldn’t buy a ticket to watch their own movie.
“If you’re making a movie for money it just doesn’t really hit the same chords that a movie that’s been made for passion,” Sylvia says.
American Mary, the Soskas’ exploration of the world of body modification examined transformation. It’s a theme that’s likely to come up in Rabid, Sylvia says.
“American Mary almost feels like the beginning of a thought process and Rabid is the continuation of that thought process on a much larger scale,” Sylvia says.
It’s a scale they also explored alongside writer Daniel Way in their graphic novel Kill-Crazy Nymphos Attack.
“It feels like outbreak and society crumbling has been chasing us for a while as a theme,” Sylvia says of the grindhouse comic.
The book features a revolting malcontent whose attempt to have sex with nearly every woman he sees inspires a bloody backlash. While it was written before approximately 50 women accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment, there do appear to be parallels.
“I’m glad that our book was delayed a little bit because now it feels like divine intervention. It’s more timeless now than ever,” Jen says. “I was warned to stay away from Harvey Weinstein. Every woman always whispers, ‘Don’t go near this guy.’ . . . For the first time it feels that maybe it’s staying in the spotlight long enough for people to actually get outraged and remember these stories.”
While the Soskas are perfectly comfortable to be spattered with crimson-coloured corn syrup or to elicit screams, they explain the need to do those things morally.
“We believe in, you know, life, death, god, punishment,” Jen says.
They were likely “too Canadian” to play Halloween pranks, she reflects.
Instead, their Halloween decorations were intended celebratory and macabre, sometimes invoking Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Their childhood home was a spooky farmhouse, Sylvia recalls.
“It’s the oldest house on the block,” she says. “Anybody who actually made it all the way to the front really deserves their piece of candy.”
Meanwhile, they’d often dress as X-Men, or Jessica Rabbit, piecing their costumes together in the days before Hot Topic made Halloween easy for comic book nerds.
But as you might expect, the day is synonymous with horror movies. Jen and Sylvia recommend Interview with the Vampire (“If you’re a vampire person.”) and Ginger Snaps (“If you’re a werewolf person.”)
They also list Canadian flicks The Battery and Pontypool, as well lesser known movies like Kill List and The Tunnel.
“I love doing double duty watching horror movies and handing out candy,” Jen says. “It’s just waiting for Halloween to happen.”
