Was the checkered tile floor in the climactic kitchen battle of SLIME CITY a planned element?
Its presence lends a ‘chess game between good and evil’ idea to the whole scene. It was planned by Scott Coulter and Tom Lauten, the special effects artists – because it allowed us to hide the slit we had to cut in the elevated floor so they could operate the rod puppet crawling brain! Your next film project was 1991′s NEW YORK VAMPIRES, aka UNDYING LOVE. It seems like vampires experienced a renaissance in the 80s, particularly with the rise of HIV concerns. Was UNDYING LOVE inspired by or in reaction to this vampire revival? The market for low budget horror films overseas and on domestic video dried up in 1990 – Slime City came out just in time, and in a parallel universe it came out one year earlier and I’m a successful filmmaker. I wanted to make a film even cheaper than Slime City, and vampires at that time required very few special effects. I wanted to do a deconstructionist film like Martin. It’s possible AIDS played a role in this, but if it did it was on a subconscious level. T
