SEVERAL YEARS AGO, Stephen King famously crowned fellow writer and filmmaker Clive Barker “the future of horror.”
To fans of the macabre, it was the equivalent of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval and being anointed by Oprah all rolled into one gruesome goody basket.
What, then, would King think of Vincenzo Natali, whose latest film, Splice, discerningly delivers the kind of gooseflesh that’s rare for a genre preoccupied with serial slashers and dyspeptic torture porn like the Saw series?
Without needing to consult any crystal balls, tarot cards or chicken bones, it’s easy to predict that King would find some new way to knight Natali. Splice, which stars Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody as madly in love mad scientists meddling in the deep end of the gene pool, is simply that good. A pat on the back from King would certainly do wonders for Natali’s ego (not to mention his career).
But if there’s anyone whose opinion gives the Toronto filmmaker the heebie-jeebies, it’s the Baron of Blood himself, David Cronenberg.
“I’m afraid for Cronenberg to see Splice. I’m scared to find out what he might think of it,” says Natali.
“I grew up on his movies — Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly. Anyone who sets out to make a smart horror movie has a lot to live up to.”
Natali comes by his strong affinity for Cronenberg naturally. The 41- year-old was born in Detroit but grew up in Toronto, not far from the elder filmmaker’s familiar haunts. And he cut his teeth at North York’s Canadian Film Centre (CFC), the mecca of film education founded by Norman Jewison and where Cronenberg is on the board of directors.
Surprisingly, Natali says working on a moderately budgeted feature film like Splice echoes his days as a student filmmaker. “Making student short films isn’t much different than a big feature — they’re both surprisingly difficult,” says Natali.
“It always feels like I’m going to die. I’m sure even Spielberg and Scorsese suffer at times to get their movies made, though.”
Located on the Windfields Estate on Bayview Avenue, the CFC provided Natali’s “lucky break.”
“I wouldn’t have the career I have without that amazing institution,” he says. “Well, I have to confess, I spent the most terrifying night of my life in one of the CFC cottages. Don’t ask what I was doing there. It was like living through a B-grade horror film.
If anyone asks whether Windfields is haunted, the answer is yes!” A haunted film school? Sounds like the perfect inspiration for a future king of horror.
As Natali talks, he’s occasionally distracted. He’s on the phone en route to the airport. He’s flying somewhere — Boston maybe? Chicago? He can’t keep track — for a series of advanced screenings ahead of Splice’s June release. “The last few months have been insane,” he says. “After an incredibly long and difficult pregnancy, I’m excited to show off my baby to the world.”
You can forgive Natali his frequent childbirth references. After all, Splice is a Frankenstein tale about the spawning of a new organism that combines human DNA with, well, something else. The result is Dren (that’s “nerd” spelled backwards), a mostly human mutation with a bald head, wide anime eyes, reptilian legs and a Bjork-like sex appeal. “Dren is certainly a fascinating creature, very childlike but also very womanly,” he says. “She’s also definitely a monster.”
Natali came up with the idea for Splice 15 years ago after seeing photos of the Vacanti mouse, an experimental lab mouse that grew a humanlike ear on its back. “It was such a shocking image, it instantly galvanized my desire to write a story that in some way drew from that,” says Natali.
While he worked on other projects, he kept coming back to Splice. At first, he was drawn merely to the Grand Guignol aspect of the story. Then, he started exploring the moral and ethical ramifications of genetic manipulation.
“The film started out as straight horror and science fiction, and now real science has almost eclipsed everything in the movie,” says Natali. “By the time we were filming, experimenting with actual humananimal hybrids became legal in the U.K.”
Like Dren, Splice’s cinematic DNA can be traced to several sources. There are bits of Steven Spielberg’s early fascination with dysfunctional families and supernatural settings, a strand or two of David Lynch’s obsession with the bizarre and Stanley Kubrick’s detached unblinking gaze.
There’s even a nod to James Whales’s classic Bride of Frankenstein with Boris Karloff — Polley’s and Brody’s characters, Elsa and Clive, are named after Bride stars Elsa Lanchester and Colin Clive.
But it’s the melding of hard science, body horror and romance in Cronenberg’s The Fly that is Splice’s most obvious ancestor. The result is both fantastic and fantastique, which is the imposing of science fiction and horror elements into an otherwise realistic environment.
In fact, the story only came together through the relationship between Polley and Brody’s scientists as well as their quasi-parental relationship with Dren. “It’s inherently a creature film spliced onto a relationship story with that relationship story at the centre,” says Natali.
“It was important that we see Elsa discover her latent mothering instincts, and that, as the creature becomes a difficult child, she becomes a poor mother, which mirrors her own childhood in many ways, and then we see how the creature becomes attached to Clive and vice versa.”
Splice also owes a debt to Cronenberg in the way it fuses horror and sex, something that would likely give the elder filmmaker fits of giggles.
“It’s an emotionally driven horror film,” says Natali. “If you took out the emotional and sexual component of the story, it’s not something that I would be very interested in at all.”
It’s also not something Hollywood is usually very interested in. Natali admits that he never could have gotten Splice made in La-La Land. “It’s a miracle that it got made, but it has an inherent life force and willed itself into existence,” he says.
Ironically, Splice is now being distributed by a big Hollywood studio, Warner Bros., who jumped on board after über-producer Joel Silver (The Matrix, Sherlock Holmes) saw the movie at the Sundance Film Festival in January. “It was next to impossible to get people to loosen their purse strings to make this movie,” says Natali, who rustled up funding through a Canadian-French coproduction deal and shot the film on the cheap in Hamilton and Toronto.
“So it’s amazing to see it get a large theatrical release.”
Natali moved to Los Angeles following the success of his first feature, the ferociously inventive cult classic Cube. But as Natali talks about growing up in downtown Toronto, it’s easy to tell he hasn’t been swallowed up by the Hollywood lifestyle.
“Just because I live in L.A. doesn’t mean I live the L.A. life,” he says with a chuckle. “No one’s rolling out any red carpets for me.” At least not yet. Expect that to change once Splice hits theatres.
