The Jitters: A John Fasano Interview
Editors Note: This interview originally appeared in Fangoria Magazine.
When director John Fasano unleashed heavy/metal horror mash-ups like Rock 'n Roll Nightmare and Black Roses, headbangers in the 80's rejoiced. These movies were all about the cheese 'n sleaze filled moments of demonic beasts thrashing about to the sounds of music associated with the devil.
Unfortunately for heavy metal fans, John decided to steer away from further metalsploitation and lay his stake into a different path altogether. His third film was yet another Canadian-lensed production, but the kicker this time around lay in the subject of Chinese hopping vampires! You heard that right folks, vampires that hop around like bunnies; a first for the director and even a first in American cinema.
The film was given the appropriate title of "The Jitters" and invariably there's plenty of jittering going on here, but not in the way the title suggests. Much of it is a colossal mess of tone and execution, clashing at times over the seriousness of the story, but also the silly antics of the hopping vampires. Perhaps American audiences weren't ready for this unusual hybrid for a horror film; certainly it boasted some fine creature effects from Steve Wang to help redeem it somewhat.
Putting all that aside though, the director revealed during the commentary track his issues over the sound quality and often lamented on the lack of funds for post production. It seems there are many possible scenarios for the handling of this movie and FANGORIA took some time out to chat with the director about the recent re-release from Retro Media / Bayview Entertainment.
FANGORIA: You shot The Jitters in Canada, so where did you end up choosing your primary locations this time around?
JOHN FASANO: We shot in Toronto and we didn't have the money to make anything, so we used what was there. You can see the CN Tower in the background, and it's so funny because the distributer was asking if we could say it was San Francisco. Of course you can say whatever you want and that was the joke watching TV in the 90's when all the episodic stuff was shot in Toronto. You could say it was Chicago or New York.
FANGORIA: Toronto can sub for either city because it's got that flavor to it.
JOHN FASANO: It's too clean though.
FANGORIA: I know.
JOHN FASANO: That used to be the joke, and that scene in the alley where we shot the end of the Jitters, we had to bring all that garbage into the alley and all those card board boxes. They don't let you keep all that garbage in the alley because they clean all that up. We had to make sure we directed it and shot it because the next day somebody would have came by and cleaned it all up.
FANGORIA: So what was the concept behind hopping vampires?
JOHN FASANO: There are a bunch of these movies, like twenty or thirty shot in Hong Kong called Jiangshi, which were the hopping vampires. They're supposed to be comedies, so if you see them they're supposed to have blood in them and they are very funny. A company called Gaga Communications had heard about Black Roses and said we will give you $750,000 to make the first English language hopping vampire movie. The first thing I said to them was we don't have enough money because there is so much wire work involved and the vampires need to pop up. So I had the foresight to visit with the coordinator in Toronto and work it out. He said oh yeah we can do that stuff.
FANGORIA: So what happened after that?
JOHN FASANO: Of course he couldn't do it for the money, but they still had this script written by Sonoko Kondo and Jeff McKay and it was a haunted house movie. It all took place in Maryland going into a haunted house that had vampires in it. I said we have to do West Side story, because I had just done Black Roses and it had a lot of people in it. It had a lot of characters and it cost $450,000. So I said for $750,000 you can take $200,000 out of it for post and we can do it as sort of an epic on a Canadian horror budget. We can have an opposing gang and a lot of extras in it, but it was the first mistake that I made.
FANGORIA: Why is that?
JOHN FASANO: My-ex wife and I rewrote the script and not into a Big Trouble in Little China way, but more of a West Side story you know where he's white and she's Chinese in the midst of this gang war between vampire and gang members.
FANGORIA: That does sound epic.
JOHN FASANO: Yes for sure, but what happened was and this is not a slam on Toronto, but because we are basically a non union movie with our cast, we just had too many people in the movie to get quality actors all the way down to the last few people. There are a lot of gang members that were just acceptable and a few even bad. They were really pushed in terms of casting to get as many Asian speaking parts as we needed. The Tony Yang Jr. character played by John Quincy Lee had a girlfriend in the movie which we wanted to cut out. We could have cut her character out at the beginning, but we wrote a dream team cast of everybody we wanted in it, so we couldn't show all those parts. Well we did anyway and that's one of the things I learned on set was not to do the haunted house necessarily, but if the script was more contained and there were fewer characters it would have been a little better because we would have spent more time on it.
FANGORIA: So you went ahead with it anyways?
JOHN FASANO: Well Sonoko came and she said she had this money, so we wrote the script and went up there and scouted locations in China town. We made a deal with all the Chinese restaurants on this one block where they would leave their lights on the night we were going to shoot Sal and Marilyn coming up the street. We paid them all in advance and the night we showed up they were all closed and had their lights off.
FANGORIA: Oh man!
JOHN FASANO: So we had to put lights in the street so we could see. I wanted to have a nice long tracking scene of them coming up the sidewalk and that fell flat.
FANGORIA: You must have been really frustrated at that point.
JOHN FASANO: I was, but here's the thing about The Jitters - when people watch it right, there's no post audio. What happened was when we got to the end of the shoot it turned out they didn't have $750,000, they only had $500,000. We had spent almost all of it to make the movie.
FANGORIA: Pretty much yeah.
JOHN FASANO: Black Roses had a great score that the guy composed to the movie and not just from the musical end of it, but it had a great incidental score composed for the movie that's not in the Jitters.
FANGORIA: It's really bland.
JOHN FASANO: It's just like a guy playing synthesizer live while he watches the movie once through. There's no sound effects and when I edited that movie everybody who got punched, I would take a great fight scene from the movie Commando and I cut our fight scenes so the punch was lined up to the sounds of the Commando fight scenes because Joel Silver had the best sound editing. So I give the sound guy our edited footage which is full of punches and chairs smashing whatever, and he didn't put in any sound effects. He had this button on his keyboard that went shhhhhh every time someone would punch somebody. It just kept making the same sound.
FANGORIA: Oh boy (Laughing hysterically).
JOHN FASANO: That's why you have to understand if the Jitters had been finished the way I wanted it, I might have stayed in New York and gone to Canada for two or three more movies. I was so disappointed on the post for the Jitters, I took a copy of Black Roses and I drove to L.A. and said that I'm not going to be making any more low budget movies out of New York anymore. It was the experience of making the Jitters that taught me to don't have more characters than you can cast those actors for in the city and don't take the producers word for it that you have enough money for post. There was no way around it, and I don't know if there was a way I could have made that guy redo the sound over and over again until I was happy because we didn't have the money to pay him.
FANGORIA: Doesn't this all just make you crazy?
JOHN FASANO: What we shot, it's like Paul Mitchnick who shot Black Roses he goes crazy because some of his best shots are in this movie with the worst sound behind it. I mean if you watch the Jitters with the sound off entirely, it looks like a pretty good movie, because you don't hear that terrible score. I was so disappointed at the final film, that it drove me out New York and it saved my life because I came to Hollywood and I have been here ever since.
FANGORIA: Well despite all the trials and tribulations on the Jitters, Steve Wang did an outstanding job on the creature effects. What are your thoughts about him?
JOHN FASANO: I'd seen an article on Steve Wang in Fangoria and he and his partner Matt Rose won some make-up contest and they were like eighteen year old kids. I said I want that guy because he understood what I wanted. Steve has a character design esthetic that's amazing and he was working for Stan Winston. He had just sculpted the Predator and he and Matt Rose worked as a team, they did the Predator and then did the Creature from the Monster Squad. They had to get tons of money for those suits and the studio paid like $200,000 for them. We were making our movie for half a million dollars, so I went to Steve and said I can give you X amount of money which I won't say in public. The amount was nothing really, but for the amount I gave him he made the Chan suit from the waist up, the Chan change-o-head that splits open when the other guy was underneath him. He did all this work and basically had to use $20,000 to $30,000 to make this suit and he did it because I told him I would give him head credit.
FANGORIA: So the effect turned out to be quite involving then?
JOHN FASANO: It involved making a fiber glass head that split open and that whole upper body suit. We had all this stuff planned for him, and we built this false floor. I don't know how he really understood how low our budget was after he just did the Predator, but he did a great job and he has been my friend ever since that.
FANGORIA: Who came up with the idea of the vampire creature at the end?
JOHN FASANO: Steve came up with that.
FANGORIA: Okay, so now the film is getting re-released from Bayview Entertainment. Did they approach you about it?
JOHN FASANO: They were asking me for years for the rights to it and I hadn't thought about it, and then Jeff McKay was involved with hooking me up with Code Red who did the re-release of Zombie Nightmare a year and a half ago. I met him over there while we were doing our commentary tracks for Zombie Nightmare and he was there. I asked him what had happened to the Jitters and he said he was trying to track it down. I said I have a really good idea, let's put it out on DVD and if there's somebody who actually owns those rights they're going to come out of the woodwork and say hey you aren't supposed to do that. So that would be the best way instead of doing all those legal searches through the internet, because the distributer now wasn't going to release it until they couldn't find anyone who had a claim on it, and they couldn't find anyone so we put it out.
FANGORIA: Are you optimistic about this DVD?
JOHN FASANO: I hope people buy it. I always assumed it would be the film that when I see it on VHS for sale on Ebay I would buy one when my copy wears out. Now Jitters is finally out on DVD and people can get to see the film that drove me out of the low budget film business.
Kenneth Gallant, HMS