David Howard Thornton may be responsible for bringing one of the most instantly iconic horror villains of the past decade (Terrifier’s Art the Clown) to life, but his biggest bucket list goal as an actor has been to entertain the whole family.
“One of the dreams that I’ve always had was to be a Disney villain. I was a huge Disney brat growing up; the first stuffed animal I ever had as a kid was Winnie the Pooh, the first movie I ever saw in a movie theater was The Fox And The Hound, and the first leading role I ever had in a show was playing Mickey in a production of Mickey’s Christmas Carol.
“I was just obsessed with all things Disney; I went to the parks all the time and I was so obsessed with the music that I’d buy the soundtracks to memorise the songs before I’d even saw the films. In fact, the very first character voice I ever learned how to do was in the first grade; a girl I had a crush on gave me a note asking if I’d be her boyfriend, and I let out a sound that was a note-perfect impression of Goofy!
“So to play another iconic Disney character is a full circle moment for me in so many ways.”
Naturally, getting to play the Mouse House’s most famous character in a movie is a lifelong dream come true, although there’s a big catch. With Steamboat Willie, the first ever Mickey Mouse animation, now in the public domain, enterprising horror director Steven LaMorte has decided to capitalise on the lack of copyright by reimagining the sailing mouse as a cold-blooded killer in Screamboat.
Mickey Mouse isn’t in the public domain yet, just this early incarnation, which restricted both the writer/director and Thornton to only utilising characteristics established in the eight-minute long short from 1928 for their splatter comedy.
“Although, a lot has changed since filming”, Thornton continued, “as more Mickey shorts have become public domain, so thankfully, he can now actually talk in the sequels! When we were originally planning this, the only version of Mickey we had was one where he didn’t talk, he just made sounds, and we had to retain his black-and-white look with gloves and a hat on.”
During filming, the team tried to find as many ingeniously violent ways of paying homage to sequences from the short as possible, but scrapped many of them as it felt like they didn’t serve any storytelling purpose.
“There was a whole bit we filmed where I did the xylophone bit, where Willie plays Turkey In the Straw on a group of farm animals – only we did it where I was playing it on the rib cage of one of my victims! It was a funny idea, but we could never get it to look how we wanted onscreen, so we scrapped it instead of putting in something that didn’t live up to its potential.”
The movie takes place on a late-night Staten Island ferry, where the passengers and deckhands are all picked off one-by-one by murderous mouse Willie. It’s a simple enough premise, but one crucial aspect which complicated filming was that Willie is, well, the size of a mouse, meaning that kill scenes were largely filmed without Thornton on set.
This meant that his takes were the final pieces of the puzzle, with the shoot reverse engineered to give him gory kills to react to on a Los Angeles soundstage weeks later.
“I was only on the ferry set with the cast and crew for one day, just to get my bearings on the locations the characters was going to be in. We did some test footage, and a couple of shots of forced perspective work when it came to decapitations, but otherwise, I was adding all my scenes in later.
“I was on a soundstage where the kill scenes were projected behind me, and we’d do two takes, one with green screen and one with digital projection, which was a challenge. If they’ve already filmed the kill scenes, you must stick tightly to what they’ve got; you can’t play around and improvise comedic moments like I would in other projects.
“However, in moments where they needed to let the camera linger on me, I could have fun improvising reactions. There’s a sequence where I have to react to a d**k getting chopped off, and there was nothing in the script – the team thought my wordless response was hysterical.
“I knew that scene would be an immediate classic; it’s the one everybody’s going to be talking and laughing about. I just know an audience will be reacting very well to that one!”
After Terrifier 3 director Damien Leone finally succeeded in freaking out his star - “blood doesn’t get me squeamish, and he finally worked out during that shoot that only puke does that to me!” - he was back to being in his element here, where every ridiculously violent kill is designed to generate a bigger laugh than the last. However, the team do pay further homage to Disney with their victims, many of whom are styled after more of the studio’s most famous characters, including a group of party girls directly named after princesses.
This is part of why Thornton hopes that the studio's top brass sees the movie, which he views as a sincere, albeit hyper-violent, love letter to their back catalogue.
“I hope this doesn’t jeapordise my chances of playing a Disney villain, but I am aware that it might. I do want the people at Disney to see this, because they’ll see that this was made with love – everybody involved with this film loves their movies, we all grew up watching them, and are still hardcore Disney fans ourselves to this day.
“After all, the best parodies are when you’re parodying the things that you love, and I think that’s where the truth of the joke comes from; you can see that affection in the movie. Plus, I need to know what Bob Iger thinks of this...”
And even if Disney do see Screamboat and hate it, bad luck for them – a sequel is already in development, with the end credits teasing that Willie will return with another old friend in tow.
“Throughout filming, we were always entertaining the idea of a part two, which could maybe bring more famous faces into it, but it naturally depends on how successful it is. I can’t pretend that it wasn’t in the back of our minds the entire time though, building this wonderful new world of Willie...”
Screamboat is released exclusively in Vue Cinemas on Wednesday, 2nd April.
