MADMAN: We Dared to Say His Name Above a Whisper: Paul Ehlers Brings the Madman to Scared Stiff

Exclusive Interview by Geno McGahee

“I think a return to something a little more suspenseful, something to keep us more on edge, and then have the payoff rather than starting by dropping pails of blood from the first frame is the way to go.”– Paul Ehlers, the Madman

When you think of an unstoppable killer in the woods of the horror world, one name probably comes to mind: Jason Voorhees, and rightfully so.  He has been marketed well, maintains popularity to this day, and is being reborn again in a remake.  Others may think of Cropsy from the 1981 horror classic “THE BURNING,” a man wielding hedge clippers and attacking campers.  Some of you die hard horror fans may even be thinking about the Monster in the 1984 film “THE PREY,” but there was one other killer…a man…a Madman to be precise that carried and axe and presented an unstoppable force.  The 1982 film “MADMAN” is a quality horror film, featuring a memorable killer.  It is one of my favorite horror movies and had it had the right ambition behind it and the correct bankroll, we may be talking about MADMAN VIII right now, but we are not.  There is only one, but I’m happy to report that it won’t be that way for too much longer.

Paul Ehlers played the role of MADMAN, the insane farmer that killed his family and is now rewriting history, preparing for a remake of the film and a second shot at horror greatness on a large scale.  Along with his son Jonathan, he is bringing back the Madman, and this, if it’s done correctly and by all indications, it will be, could potentially turn this horror world back around to where it was and where it should be.  This second chance for MADMAN may bring another horror franchise to the fans and should.  Jason, Freddy, and Michael Myers have run their course and have, arguably, become stale.  Madman will be a fresh face and will bring in the youth that love horror and want to see the new kid on the block and the people of my generation that are nostalgic and want the axe wielding killer to return.

I recently sat down with Ehlers to discuss the 1982 classic as well as the return of horror, the industry, the direction of Hollywood and his successfully and possibly surprising career outside of horror.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Scared Stiff brings you Madman Marz himself, Paul Ehlers…

GM: In 1982, MADMAN was released.  How did you land the role of Madman and what acting experience did you have prior to this film?

OK, I had been doing a lot of voiceover work and acting pretty much throughout film school.  I went to the school of visual arts, and I guess that I showed some natural aptitude at acting.  So rather than bring people in from the outside, they went cheap and they decided to use me for just about every movie that they made.  I was like Lon Chaney, SR., man.  There were like a million different things that I would wear…costumes and faces and beards and hair, and I wound up doing that and I also was very fortunate to do some voiceover work for some of the students and their animations, and I had fun with that.

My friends and I, when we were kids, and I’m sure a lot of people have done this…I know Steven Spielberg did and some of these other guys…we did things in super 8.  The funny thing is that my good friend, Larry…when he was growing up, he was making really low budget, no budget, horror films, and I was doing espionage movies and I remember we would actually go to some place like New York’s Kennedy Airport and film spy scenes and we’d actually go with these plastic replica guns with us.

We’d have them under our coats and have shoot outs in the bathrooms and I cannot even imagine today what that would be like.  That would be so crazy, but you know it’s funny, because in visual arts, of course, I love acting and I also love very much directing and it so happens that when I got out of college, my background from childhood was primarily as an artist, drawing, and it just so happens that I fell into more commercial art jobs then I did any film work.  That kind of took hold and it was about 1979 and I was doing various commercial jobs…illustration jobs, and a friend of mine…actually a friend of his was making a low budget film, independent film. It was the guy’s first movie and as with many young filmmakers I think that they wanted to do something exploitive…an exploitation movie, so they could bring in the money that they needed to do their very “serious” film.  So, MADMAN became the exploitation movie.

I know that they were working on it for a bit and trying out a bunch of different people for the part of “Madman.”  They tried some very tall guys and so forth and what happened was that I was in there, talking to them, and they wanted me to do the poster for the film and I did a variation of it, but the one you see now commercially.  The one with the silhouette that everyone knows is basically taken from a photograph that they illustrated over.  So, no, I did not do that poster, but the one that I was going to do…I was describing to Gary Sales, the Producer, and Joe Giannone, the Director, how I was going to illustrate this character.  I was kind of like moving and snarling and doing these weird hand movements.  They looked at each other and said: “What are you doing for the next two months?”  So I landed the role as Madman Marz, and it was, for me, very exciting because I grew up on horror movies.  Every Saturday, we had matinees, and we’re talking about the fifties now.  I got to see all that great fifties stuff when I was a little kid…the Wayne Castle movies and THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON.  All the best stuff…RODAN.  You should really see them when you are a kid.  Then you have this overwhelming impression that lasts you the rest of your life.

We came up from that with all my friends reading famous monster magazines, Castle of Frankenstein, and Creepy and Eerie, and all that stuff, and we just got off on all this horror stuff.  To me, it was just very cool for me to have grown up with this love of the genre and then being asked to be in a film and to actually be wearing make up and stuff…so, it was really great for me.  I really enjoyed doing it a lot.  It was memorable.  It was an experience that I never forgot and hope to relive shortly.

GM: There was a supposed rewrite of the script when it was discovered that a similar film “THE BURNING” was being produced.  Is there any validity in that?

That is true.  I think that everybody scrambled.  The Cropsy maniac is kind of a legend in New York camps became the theme for really both films, and I think that the way it came down, as I understand it, Gary and Joey were interviewing actresses to be in MADMAN and an actress came over and said: “Your script is something very similar to something that I read for a while ago.”  And it was THE BURNING and everybody panicked.  So THE BURNING remained THE BURNING and Joey regrouped and went back and put together MADMAN and fortunately, because it turned out to be their own special little story and I know that they had to really get it done quickly.  A lot of things were in place like the money and stuff like that, so something had to be done very quickly.

GM: There were three movies released around the same time and they all kind of had the same feel. You had MADMAN, THE BURNING, and FRIDAY THE 13^TH.  Why do you think that FRIDAY THE 13^TH made it so far, while the other two, which were just as good or better, didn’t really take off with the public?

I think the sexuality of Betsy Palmer…only kidding…and I know Betsy from conventions and she is just a fabulous person.  She’s a great woman.  You know, I’m not sure.  You know, I thought about that.  I thought why we, at one point, faded into relative obscurity, and FRIDAY THE 13^TH caught on so well.  It’s a mystery to me.  I think that our production values are not so greatly different.  I don’t think that that varies that much.  Both monsters are a lot of fun. It could be more went into the promotional stuff for FRIDAY THE 13^TH.  Maybe better word of mouth at that point?  I don’t know.  You would almost have to speak to some people back at the time and see what inspired them to go see them.

GM: When you look at the development of Jason Voorhees from little kid to weapon wielding monster, do you feel that the creators sort of borrowed some ideas from MADMAN?

I think so. I think that what started to happen is that so many of these monsters start overlapping with each other and I think that you can’t avoid that after a while.  You take what works.  You’re going to take what’s successful and if it’s different weapons…if it’s machetes or axes…whatever may work along those lines.  I think in time, with Jason becoming this killing machine…this unstoppable thing, which he became was really a great feature of him, and I don’t think that there is a way you cannot borrow from other people of the genre, unless you are…I’m not even sure.  It’s almost like you need an alien creature to bring in originality to that kind of slasher character.  What changes is the motive of death you have in films.  I think that is something that changes.  It becomes more horrific in many ways.   In many ways, it becomes more repulsive, leaving less to the imagination of the viewer, which at times, can be a very strong thing to rely on.  I don’t know about you, but I know how freaky my mind can get when I hear something or when I imagine something.  So there’s a lot to be said for what is going on even off camera…what we are not showing the audience.

I think that too much of “in your face” becomes just that and I think that we become use to it and we become callus.  We no longer get shocked or effected by it as well as we should.  If anything, I think a return to something a little more suspenseful, something to keep us more on edge, and then have the payoff rather than starting by dropping pails of blood from the first frame is the way to go.

GM: I think that that is why THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT was successful because it left it all up to your imagination.

Absolutely.  The great thing is that they were the first to kind of do it that way.  I think that it gave it that uniqueness and quality, but it’s a tough way to handle things.  You have to know how to manipulate the audience.  You have to have a sense of pacing and timing with what you are seeing on the screen.  Your acting is important in cases like that.  Music, which I think is so vital in every film.  It’s interesting where horror is, in fact, going.  It’s becoming something so visceral.  It’s like the games that people play.  You can almost reach out and touch the gore.  If that is the only that is a measure of success, then I don’t know if that’s the best achievement.  It seems like that is the easy thing to do and if people are expecting to see that, then it’s just one person outdoing another person with how much of that is shown.  You know, scare them with something basic.  Scare them with something primal.  If we can go back to real primal fear like why are we really afraid of the dark?  What is out there?  What’s creaking or breathing or whose eyes are those?  Leave a little of that to the imagination and then wham, when you pay it off, then scare the living shit out of them.  That’s what I would strive to do myself.

GM: In MADMAN, we had the unique death scenes, the memorable killer, and the tremendous pace of the film.  How do you feel about the finished product and how do you compare it to the movies of that time that are similar like THE BURNING, THE PREY, and FRIDAY THE 13^TH?

Well, what I liked a lot about the Marz character was that he would come in kind of this unstoppable freight train kind of a way.  He’d do his damage and be gone until next time.  In many ways I enjoyed what Joey did with you not seeing him all of the time. I thought that there was something working well with that.  It was certainly enough intimation of where he was.  You know, a lot of what happened and I mentioned to many before, a lot of the times you just see Marz’s hand come around the tree and what had happened at the time, was that we had different prosthetics sent to us at various times during filming.  I think that after two weeks, he only had a right hand.  So, we worked around this hand a lot.  We used that.  They pay off in the sense that you’re dealing with a maniac and you’re dealing with a “when is this thing going to hit.”  I think expecting that kind of terror…trying to be creative in how you bring the character into contact with the players in this film and again, part of it is how unique these murders are and how the kills are, you know.  And, of course, the acting varies so much in every film.

The thing that I always thought worked very well with MADMAN was I thought that our production values were high.  The camera work was really good.  The photography was good, the lighting was excellent.  It had that creepy, eerie feel to it.  Shooting only at night was a bit grueling but we did that, but I think that that separated MADMAN from the others at that time.  It had that creepy, at night shooting and the “something is out there in the dark” kind of thing.

GM: I thought that MADMAN was shot very well with the less is more mentality, much like SNOWBEAST.  When you don’t’ show your hand and when you see Madman just sitting up there in the trees, which is one of the most famous scenes, it sets the tone a lot better than a killer going crazy over and over again.

The cool thing about that is that every single person who was young at the time, as I would have been when I was most impressionable.  I would give anything to see MADMAN with new eyes from the perspective of an eight year old kid for the first time.  So I can truly, truly judge how scary it was compared to things that I saw when I was eight years old.  It is so hard as adults.  We become so used to so many different varieties of horror on the screen, we become very hard at what we look at.  I’ve become very hard at what I look at.  It’s like show me something that I haven’t seen and if you’re going to show me something, it’d better be good.

It takes a lot today for something to scare me in film.  Back then, life was simpler and I could still do it.  I loved that feeling of terror that I would have watching stuff.  So, a lot of you have spoken to me and had a chance to see MADMAN when you were very young and that seen that has creeped everybody out was that scene with Madman silhouetted in the trees.  It’s great stuff and I’m going to try not to disappoint the fans with all of that if we get around to the remake.

GM: Were you ever approached to play another horror villain considering that you played Madman Marz?

No, not really.  I kind of did the film and then scurried back into the art field.  I was certainly there.  I was prepped and ready to go, but as it happened, I got more involved in illustration and then I got involved in knife designing after a while, and that kept me really busy.  I was really wrapped up in that.  I would have loved to have done something, of course.

GM: Was there ever any mention of a sequel to MADMAN?

There was at the time.  I know that Joey the director and Gary the producer had gotten together several years back and did write a sequel story…not a remake, but an actual sequel involving the Madman versus a motorcycle gang…or something along those lines…something in the mountains.  From my sense after reading it, it seemed more action than horror.  That did not come to pass.

GM: That might’ve been a good thing.

Well, it could have worked too.  There are a lot of places to put the old farmer, where he’ll do his best work.  Why not with Hell’s Angels?

GM: Now here’s a question that you may not even know the answer to, but I’m just curious.  Why did he go stark raving mad?  What was the reason behind that?

Well, the main thing is that he had a TV show that he would watch every week and the kids broke the rabbit ears on his TV and he sat down to watch his show and he opened his bottle of beer and he was so pissed off, he went stark raving mad.  None of that is true.  I have no idea.  Thank God I blacked out to why that happened.  My conscious is clear.  I do not remember that night that well when I did those terrible, terrible things to those people.  I could make up some bullshit about it, but I won’t.

GM: Well, I like the rabbit ears story.

Yeah, well when Dad can’t watch his show, he gets very furious.  Can you see Dad in there when he sees the broken rabbit ears?  (makes Madman roaring noises).  “Oh shit, Dad’s pissed off again.  Get the axe mom.”  You never know with him.

GM: Madman was hanged by the townies and then axed in the face and then the next morning he was missing.  I have always assumed he was alive and lived through that but there is the contention that he is actually a zombie. He may have died and came back.

That could be very true.  We were leaving that up to the viewer’s perception because when he was struck with the axe, he was struck deeply in the face and through the jaw, enough to fray the rope.  So the rope was weakening and at some point, in the night, God knows what happened.  He is gone the next day.  I’d like to think that he was more of a primal type of thing.

What I’m doing with the remake…what we’ve done…my son Jonathan and myself, who was born at the time when we were making the first film. I have told this story many times where my beeper was going off and it was like two in the morning and he was about to be born and I had to drive like an hour and a half to this hospital.  I went to get the costume off but I wasn’t able to get everything off but I couldn’t find the people…the costume people at the time.  Somebody went to the bathroom…I don’t know.  I’m covered in blood and driving like a madman to the hospital and I pull up to the hospital and I run in and I yell: “Where’s maturnity?”  And they go: “No sir, you want emergency!” So, it was this crazy, crazy thing that really did happen.  Lo and behold, after all of these years, I kind of keep track of how old my son is because this November, he’ll be 28 and that is how long ago we actually shot the film.

What I’m doing with the remake is that we have been working together on a screenplay for a bit and what I decided to do, and I know that people want to see sequels but, I wanted to do a remake in the sense that at the time, when I was involved in the film, I was hired to play Madman, and I did it the best that I could, but I was really a guy from a horror background.  I remember after we wrapped at night…well, we’d wrap at sunrise was the way that it worked, and I would think a lot about how scenes were done…how I would have tried to do them a little bit differently or perhaps making them more frightening.  That’s what I basically did after all of these years.  I kind of did that.  I wrote that up.  My son wrote the dialogue with me.  He’s written some really meaningful dialogue, even though it’s for a horror film and what I’m going to give everybody with this is the Madman as a horror guy that I would have put together.  This is kind of a different take on it, although I am following the storyline very closely.

GM: Outside of financial issues that you may face while trying to make this movie, are you concerned about licensing rights, or do you own the rights to MADMAN already?

The rights are owned right now by Gary Sales.  Joey Giannone and Gary owned them.  It flipped back and forth for a while.  I know that Anchor Bay had them for a time and it was on DVD and then I think that it was on VHS for a while, and then the rights finally moved over to Joey and Gary and then a couple of years back, Joey passed away very suddenly.  Gary currently has the rights to the MADMAN film and is involved in this too.  We have been working with Gary and sort of all together on the script and so forth.  How all of us are going to play into this down the road when this comes together, I’m not quite sure.

GM: There have been a lot of bad remakes lately…

Yes there have been.

GM: You had the remakes of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, BLACK CHRISTMAS, PROM NIGHT, and THE HITCHER.  They are examples of Hollywood watering down and destroying good films.  How is MADMAN going to be different…can it fight this Hollywood crap machine that has destroyed so many good films?

I am very aware of that.  I am also very aware of the fan base and I’m very aware of what people expect and want to see.  One of my goals, as I said, was to bring the story to the screen the way that I always hoped that I could do it, and to satisfy fans.  What I have done with this in a way was that I have given Marz a little more dimension then he had originally.  You see him do some action and things that are a little different then what you have known him to do in the past.  So we start to get more of a picture of just how sick this guy is.  Some of that is going to be poured out on the screen.  He’s a pretty dark character and when he gets summoned, you don’t want to do that.  What I have done with this is that I have made a very big deal out of saying the name “Madman Marz” and why people do not say it and especially why people in that town, that region do not say that name.

Now we have several new characters to kind of flush it out a bit.  We have a character who works for Max, who’s a local boy.  Sort of the strong, silent type. He brings to it a history about his own growing up in that area and what Madman Marz meant to them and why they never said the name.  So, there is a lot of that brought in.  Once he’s called, it’s like JAWS.  He does his work and he does it quickly and he does it pretty viciously and then it goes from there.

As I was saying earlier, I always liked the idea of him leaving his house, driving to that tavern and putting his axe on the bar and ordering a beer…that whole sequence.  I thought, gosh that’s some great stuff there.  So what I’ve done is expanded on the scene of him arriving at this tavern and the town’s reaction and what they do to him.  It’s going to be a lot more graphic.  It’s something that I look forward to doing.  There’s a lot more meat to that.  You can see just how brutal he is and just how brutal the town was to him after hearing the result of what he had done to his family, and we are returning to the camp concept.  I hope to be able to frighten.  I hope to be able to alter some of the scenes. I think that those of you that know the first film are going to be led up to a scene thinking you’re going to know how it’s going to play and we hope to surprise you there with what Marz actually does.  I feel good about it.  I’ve been thinking about it for a very long time.  I’m not resorting to the torture aspect that is so popular in so many movies.  I’m not doing that.  I’m not shoving an egg beater into somebody’s eye and strapping them down…not that kind of thing.  There will be some lovely things that will be memorable…pretty twisted actually, but not out and out torture.  Kind of just doing people in wonderful artistic ways.

GM: Hollywood has just killed the horror films.  It seems that everything is released watered down and PG-13.  Is there some concern on your part that they are going to come to you and say, “you know what.  We love it but we want to make it available for 13 year olds as well and we want to do this and that and this.”  What’s going to be your answer to them should they present a deal like this?

Well, we’re planning on shooting it two ways.  One is the standard way that I’m going to shoot the script and the other variation that I will be carrying with me will be several large white teddy bears, which I will be speaking with during production and we will be singing…doing little songs, talking about love and death. It is going to be a meaningful film for little kids to watch.  Actually, NO, I am not concerned about it.  I’m hoping that we can stay where we need to stay.  I’m not trying to do a film for a little kid to watch, but then again, think about it.  All of you that saw this when you were kids and were frightened were all under age.  Every guy that I have ever spoken to and I ask: “How old could you have been?”  The guys were like 6, 7, 8, 9 years old, when people were really really impressionable.  So, they are going to get in there anyway.  They’re going to see it.  They’re going to see it on DVD.  But what we’re striving for the best of what we can give an audience.  I hope that the rating thing really does not become an issue.  I really do.

GM: Do you have a time table set?  Any idea of when it’s going to go into production and when it will be released?

Right now that is the one unknown that we’ve got.  We have people that are very interested in this.  We have money situations that are going to be in place that is good and we have thoughts on actors.  We have a lot of discussion on that.  We have done a lot of planning. It is really a matter of getting a green light and then I will know a lot more but right now I cannot say.  I will be happy to tell you when I hear about this and I will get back to you and let you know.

GM: There was a documentary called “The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film.”  Now, why do you think that this genre of film went away?  There aren’t many horror slasher films that come out and the only recent one of note that I saw was HATCHET and that was just horrible.  It seemed more comedic than what it was advertised to be. Why do you think that the real slasher film has gone away?

It’s a good question.  I think that maybe we were more naïve in terms of what we could frighten people with back then.  Maybe the world itself has become so dark and complicated and frightening in itself that you almost need a more twisted type approach to affect an audience.  It’s very hard for audiences who have seen so much on the screen…so much of everything on the screen…so much CGI on the screen that for them to accept a good old fashion horror movie, it’s a tough call.  I think that you can entertain them.  If you can draw them into that film and get them into that movie, and that’s the thing, and get them a little frightened early on, which I’m hoping to do so they are intrigued enough to stay with the film and give the film a chance.  I’m not against humor in a film.

When you get to superhero stories…we see the difference between all the BATMAN films.  I love the original Tim Burton’s look…the dark, gothic look that he gave to BATMAN, but in time that series became so tongue and cheek in a way also that I couldn’t take it seriously and then something comes along like BATMAN BEGINS and these guys have great actors and they are taking this very seriously.  I think that that is why it works.

If you do a horror film.  If you do a slasher film and you try not to make it into an Abbott and Costello Meets The Slasher…not that there is anything wrong with that, but humor is fine, but to relieve some tension, but not for it to seem like it’s a group of guys from a comedy club looking for a shot.  I know in HATCHET that everyone’s heart was in the right place for that and they did have a great love for the genre and they wanted very much for that to happen on the screen.  The opinions were mixed about it, but I know that the original intention was to do their best with it and the reception may not have been the best with everyone.  It’s hard.  How many remakes can you even think of?  I can’t think of many things tougher than a remake.  What remakes do we have that actually work?  We have the original THE THING (1951), a fabulous film, and John Carpenter’s THE THING (1982) is fabulous, taking the same story, but using more of the book.  There are just not that many remakes that very rarely rise above the original, and that would be an interesting challenge.  That’s the tough part.

Don’t forget that all of you that were impressionable young people at the time would probably go and see the remake of this after everything that has come before.  It’s really an interesting stage to walk out on. It’s so drenched in blood to begin with.  I’m very curious to see if we can do scary and there are a few moments of humor in there, of course, and I think that there were some funny things the first time that weren’t meant to be funny.

You know what killed me?  Here we have this poor little girl running away from me and she jumps into a refrigerator and everybody says that it is a funny scene with her hiding in there.  And people say: “How did you people ever think of that?!”  I’m not sure how Joey and Gary did think of that, but then look at the new INDIANA JONES film.  He hides in a refrigerator, which is probably where he should have stayed, but hey, I cracked up.  I think I stood up and said: “Hey, what the hell are you guys doing?!”

There are those people that want to see the hot tub stuff and I’ll give this away and there will be a hot tub scene.  Anyway, you’ll see.

GM: You are probably coming back into the horror world at the right time.  We don’t have any good horror villains anymore.  Jason, Freddy, and  Myers have all sort of gone away and the Creeper seemed to have a shot but he blew it in JEEPERS CREEPERS 2, and so, realistically, if MADMAN hits the younger generation and my generation that grew up with it, it has a chance to be a series of movies.

Well, if we get a character that the people can get behind.  Certainly in the first film there was a lot of speculation about just what happened to him.  You never saw him really die.  He does get stabbed and Gaylen (Ross) says that line that nobody can ever figure out and then she stabs me.  She actually says: “Son of a bitch!”  And then stabs me.  That’s what she says, but yeah, I think that we are one of the few films of this type that didn’t have a sequel.  I always felt robbed.  If I were Freddy Krueger, I’d still be bopping around.  The funny thing is that, I continue to stay with doing Martial Arts and all the things that I do in my madness, and I have been drawing and designing all of these years and the funny story is that if I return in the film as the character…if I come back as Madman, what I’m hearing from everybody that 28 years later, all my best friends that are horror enthusiasts…we cannot think of another horror character that has come back to the same part and play pretty much the same action again.

People get made up and show up on variety shows, but to come back and play the role?  The big joke is that everybody says that I don’t need the make up now.  God love them all!  The reason that I can do this is if I had remained in acting from 1980 on, today I would be a very serious actor and I would look back on my original role and buy all of the copies and get rid of them and say: “What? I never did that movie!”  But I’m available, so I figure, why the hell not.  I figure that this could really be cool because I have had 28 years to think about this guy.  I know him by now.  I think that it’s going to be great fun.

GM: There are a lot of horrible horror films out there right now.  Have there been any recent horror films in the last five years or so where you have been impressed and thought that they did a great job for the genre?

Well, not truly horror, but I think that THE SIXTH SENSE was creepy in the sense of what I remember creepy to be.  In the last several years, there hasn’t been anything that has truly frightened me. If I go back more than that, I found EXORCIST III very scary.  I liked the third film.  There are some really creepy moments in that and I thought that Brad Dourif was brilliant in that.  I thought he was just great as a demonic character.  In recent years, films like THE SIXTH SENSE…I can’t say that there are any other films that are screaming out to me right now, but probably once we finish the interview, I’ll think of three of them.  Right now, they are not jumping out at me.

I got so fed up with so many that were bad and like many other human beings, I get taken in by the visual and walk around the Blockbuster and see a great cover and go “Ah-hah!”  I take it home, and you know in five minutes.  I will not say that a film is great if it has one or two good kill scenes, or one incredible CGI sequence.  It’s not enough to carry the movie.  Give me an entire story…an entire film that I can remember and it’s very hard to do that.  It’s amazingly hard to do that.  I keep coming back to what have people not seen?  I don’t think that there is much that they haven’t seen.  You have get them with something that goes back to something more primal, which I hope we can do, and it makes a difference if you have good actors and even if they are only good players, but if they can do a good job, that makes a difference too.

GM: With movies like DATE MOVIE and SUPERHERO MOVIE coming out on a regular basis…movies that are dumbed down completely and geared toward what I see as complete idiots, what does that say about Hollywood’s view of the audience?

I think that they are really dumbing them down and I think that they think everyone out there is an imbecile and everybody is just a bunch of beer drinking, dope smoking idiots.  They have dumbed it down, but here is the terrible part of it.  It comes down to the dollar.  They make the money and as long as people come to see these movies and pay to go see them, the box office is good on them, the DVD sales are good, they are going to keep on making them.  You don’t see many art horror films and if you can even see one and maybe if I won the lotto and had millions of dollars, I could do a really artistic nightmare of a movie, I would do one, but there is that commercial pressure and it’s tough.  So many things get changed by so many hands.  Everybody that the script passes by, they change it.  So very rarely do we see the original intention of the writer.  It is so watered down and yeah, I think that they think that the audience are a bunch of clowns and it’s insulting.  I find it insulting.

GM: I read an interview with Robert De Niro and he had said something to the effect that he can read ten screenplays, and nine of them are great, but the one that is horrible is the one that the men with deep pockets will finance.

I know.  It’s terrible!  And for actors, it must be rough because they have to eat.  So a lot of times, you may be stuck doing a show that is really going to be crap, but you have to do it.

GM: I think that a lot of people will be surprised to find out that you are such a fantastic artist.  I checked out your website and the knives you have designed and they are all great.  Can you talk about that?

I always did a lot of fantasy illustrations…barbarian type illustrations…Conanish stuff.  Even when I was a little kid, I would draw soldiers and barbarians and Hercules.  Somebody always had a sword or an axe or a weapon at their side.  When I got older, I got my things to be a little bit more elaborate.  I was a little bored with how I was drawing standard swords and I would curve it a certain way and back in 1982, I had ordered a custom knife…a fighting style knife from a gentleman by the name of Gil Hibbons, who was a very radical knife grinder.  He took a lot of chances at the time with trying to do stuff out of the ordinary and I had read about Gil in Martial Arts Magazines and I went to him when I ordered this knife, and the story is that I sent him a sketch of something that was a little more fantasy that I had done.   I called him and said: “What do you think,” and he replied: “Well, I already made it and sold it.”  So I said: “I think we need to talk.”

So, that started it and pretty much not being a knife manufacturer or a knife maker, I designed whatever came out of my imagination and I have told people that if I actually made knives, there are actually things that I would have never designed because you look at it as a maker and you say, “that’s impossible.”  Coming just from the design aspect, I would let my mind go wild and Gil at the time, was brave enough to take chances, because all the hooks and all the things that you put on these knives are made out of sharpened steel.  Don’t forget that they are being ground and buffed on very fast equipment and any hook that sticks out of this thing and they can grabbed and throw the blade right through the guy making it.

So, there is that grave danger in making the more elaborate knives and we had a very good run for almost 20 years with it.  We were doing many pieces that many have never seen the likes of before, which was very satisfying for me as a creative artist.  All the years that I had been doing standard illustration, cartooning and drawing, it was the knives that actually got me the recognition.  It is so funny that former slasher becomes knife designer.  Somewhere in there folks, you must know that I did design plush toys and I did some dolls and things like that for different companies.  Somebody did give me the assignment to design the world’s cutest bear.  There’s Madman trying to design the world’s cutest bear.  That’s more scary to me than any of the other stuff.

GM: It’s nice to see that Madman has a soft side. Out of all of your designs, what is the favorite one that you have done?

Well, I was fortunate that Sylvester Stallone back in his RAMBO days was a knife collector. He bought three of my designs which is really kind of neat.  I did something called the “Saint George’s Axe,” which is basically a battle axe and when I would design it, I said: “Wait, if you had a dragon in the middle, and the body is coming down, and you’re holding the tail section, why can’t the wings be blades?”  At the time that I did it in 1984, I said: “God, it’s so obvious.”  What happened now is that everything that I have ever designed, I see everywhere in the world.  I mean, you can’t help it.  They take it and they embellish and they expand on concepts that you may have had originally.  What was one time unique is now very commonplace.

You mention fantasy knives and people will say: “Yeah, I saw ten of those for one hundred dollars on some cable station.”  Well, that’s not the same ones, really.  Back when we made these knives, it was during the hay days.  It was during the 1990s.  These were all one of a kind, hand made pieces that took months and months and months to make.  They would sell to collectors for thousands of dollars.  The knives you can get today from the far east are relatively inexpensive.

I was approached not too long ago by a company called “Master Cutlery” and they are in New Jersey and they wanted some of my stuff.  They have put out my designs based on my original stuff at very affordable prices.

GM: Any words in closing?

I got to tell you that I am so appreciative of fans.  When we did the film, of course for me, as a horror enthusiast, it was a great thrill to have it open on Broadway when it did in the theater.  All my friends who grew up with horror that could come to that opening were there and there I was sitting there with this love of horror watching this character on the screen.  That was wonderful.

When it came out on VHS, that was kind of neat, and for a time it was in Blockbuster Video and that was always cool, and then it kind of faded into obscurity.  I was not aware until very recently, the last three years I guess, that there were people that really loved it and that it had this cult following and I’m so appreciative of all the guys and girls that have really liked this movie.   I think that’s what inspired me to really push this remake.  I felt that it needed it.  I felt that we needed to return there in either a sequel or a remake.  Return to this character and do him some justice and I thought that there was no better way than to present MADMAN written by Madman himself and his son, and brought to you by the producer of the original film and getting everybody together and trying to bring this out to you guys.  I just hope that it’s something that gives everybody a fright or a smile or both.