Hi, I’m John R. Hand and unless someone tells me different this is the official blog for my film Frankensteins Bloody Nightmare. Now I’m of the philosophy that if you’re going to go make something you should go and do it so I guess this blog is a little late – the film has already been completed, it’s already been licensed by Unearthed Films for US DVD release sometime in 2007 and it’s playing at New York’s Pioneer Theater for a week of shows in October. But I guess it’s never too late to try, so here I am.
You can find out more about FBN and what it’s all about at my main website but if I had to describe the film myself I would just say that it’s simply an odd little movie. It’s genre is ultimately oddness, though I guess I will play along with people and pretend that it’s a horror film. I like the term “fantastic film” because that really encompasses what I was going for, something that looks not of this time or this world really. FBN was shot primarily in Super 8 Kodachrome, at first because I was getting into Jean Rollin and Jess Franco and I wanted to make a kind of vintage-looking film in the chromatic spectrum of things (as opposed to going with plus-x and tri-x and risking infringment onto Mr. Lynch’s territory) but halfway through filming I decided that I just wanted it to look different, like just a ride through this strange broken emotional world of this one character, though I don’t believe most viewers would characterize it as that kind of cliche of a one-man film which I myself dislike as well. I think the trailers on my website give one a good idea of where I’m coming from more than any of this other crap I’m writing because I believe this film is ultimately a very strange visual experience.
Yes, Hand really is my real surname and yes, I really did intend to spell Frankensteins Bloody Nightmare without that apostrophe, not for any really pretentious reason other than the fact that the words just look prettier without that stupid character getting in between all those other nice letters. Is there anything so wrong with that? For a long time I spelled it correctly and then when I was making the FBN poster design the words just didn’t look very pretty with that stupid apostrophe. Now the title FBN is an “homage” of sort’s to Paul Naschy’s Frankentein’s Bloody Terror and if you see the photoshopped version of the FBT logo on the new FBT DVD they definitely make the apostrophe work by kind of distorting the title but with FBN I wanted a kind of weird, RED-colored Euro font and it didn’t good with the apostrophe so I didn’t use it, and then I found out that no matter what font I used I found the whole title just looked cleaner as “Frankensteins Bloody Nightmare.” but it’s really just a personal and an academic thing; it’s like how many exclamation points are there in a Russ Meyer film title or how many S’s in Sweet Sweetback’s Badassss Song? Most people misspell these things without knowing it, and I’m not enough of a pretentious asshole yet to really ask anyone to start using my spelling of the title so pretty much every document related to this film, everything that’s been printed about it, and the Pioneer website all list it the old way, which is fine by me. So there’s one in the title of the blog but just try to ignore it, for me, okay? Pretty please?