Hey, there fellow horror geeks and horrorphiles, Prometheus here with some more of the macabre! “PLAGUERS,” Brad Syke's sci-fi horror cult classic starring Steve Railsback, recently celebrated its tenth anniversary! To commemorate the milestone, the film has been reissued on DVD, and for the first time ever on Blu-ray! The Tenth Anniversary Edition boasts a ton of extra features and is available now!
I had the opportunity to chat with writer and director Brad Sykes, along with his wife Josephina Sykes, who produced the film! You can check out the trailer, plus our awesome conversation below!
BS: BRAD SYKES
JS: JOSPEPHINA SYKES
AICN: PROMETHEUS
BS: Hi, is this Josh?
AICN: Yup!
BS: Hi this is Brad Sykes from PLAGUERS.
AICN: Hey Brad! How are you doing?
BS: Good, how are you?
AICN: Good!
JS: Hi Joshua, how are you? This is Josephina.
AICN: Hi Josephina, how you doing?
JS: Good!
AICN: Thank you guys for the time! I wanted to talk to you about “PLAGUERS,” which recently had its tenth anniversary!
BS: Yes, it did!
AICN: And it's been reissued on Blu-ray and DVD?
BS: Yes! The Blu-ray is something we have not had before. That was actually one of the reasons we wanted to do this! The previous release was just on DVD. So, we thought that would be cool and we did some extras for the Blu-ray, that kind of thing.
AICN: So, it’s the first time in Blu-ray format?
BS: In the United States, yeah. It was released in Germany on Blu-ray but um… yeah, we don’t really talk about that.
BS + JS + AICN: (All laughing)
BS: They released it over there as “Space of the Living Dead.” That was the title that they gave the movie in Germany. It was retitled, it was dubbed in German and it’s just a whole other animal.
JS: We have a copy of it for fun, but you know, they just kind of made the movie into whatever they wanted to do with it. But here we contributed to the special features and things like that so that’s fun for us.
AICN: I wanted to ask, for those who haven’t seen the film, or might be just hearing about it; what can you tell us without spoiling it too much?
BS: Well, what I would say about it briefly is that it’s a sci-fi horror movie that is essentially a “zombies in space” movie, which had never been done before, and we wanted to be the first to do that so that was our concept going in. I’m not going to talk too much about the plot but it does take place entirely in outer space which is something we wanted to do because I’m a big fan of ‘80s sci-fi horror movies, “Alien” and “The Thing,” “Life Force,” and movies like that. We wanted to make a movie in that style and we really hadn’t seen one done in a long time. Just off-hand the last one I remember seeing something like that before “PLAGUERS” was “Event Horizon,” back in’96 or ’97.
We wanted to bring back that sort of old school style in terms of giving you a real sci-fi horror movie and giving you a lot of practical effects and creatures and transformations and gore effects, and all this stuff was done on set with prosthetics and creature suits and makeup. We really wanted to deliver an old school sci-fi horror movie that way. So, that’s really the idea behind the film and that’s the audience that it’s for.
JS: Because of the cool retro vibe and the whole sci-fi thing, I personally think, and maybe I’m wrong and the viewers can decide for themselves, but the movie isn’t dated. So, that’s cool and also (new viewers) can discover it for the first time like it was just shot yesterday!
BS: Yeah, I like that it takes place in the future, according to the movie. The future in cinematic terms, in a sense that this was the future world that we were presented within say 1985 or ’86. This is what the future looked like according to filmmakers back then, whether it was low budget or bigger budget movies and our movie takes place in that future if that makes any sense. It’s like a cinematic future.
AICN: Now Brad, you have 28 writing credits on IMDb, all of them seem to be horror. Are you a big horror fan? You must be.
BS: No, I hate horror movies.
BS+AICN: (Laughing)
BS: No, I’m kidding. Yeah, I definitely consider myself a fan. When I first started getting into film making and taking it seriously, I was shooting shorts that were horror-oriented. Then I went to film school and started getting into other types of films. When I moved to LA, I wasn’t necessarily thinking I was going to direct a horror movie, but it turned out that a lot of the jobs I got through the connections I had, were on horror films. So, I ended up working on a lot of movies in the genre and meeting a lot of people who were genre-oriented, directors, effects people, and actors and so on.
So, when I had the opportunity to pitch something to get my first feature off the ground, of course, it ended up being a producer who was doing a lot of small horror films. Then I sort of just went back on my instincts and the films that I loved growing up. The thing with horror is you can always do different takes on you, find a different approach to it. So, that’s what I’ve tried to do with my career instead of only slashers or only zombie films. But yeah, most of my credits are definitely in the horror realm.
AICN: If you could pick any genre to work in, what would it be?
BS: Off the top of my head; two of my favorite genres out there are action and noir. I would love to do like a modern noir, really. That’s one of my favorite sub-genres. Movies like “Red Rock West,” or “U-Turn,” that type of thing. I love those. I’ve written scripts in that genre that I’ve tried to get off the ground and have not been able to get produced. I’m a huge neo-noir and old school noir fan. That’s something I really like.
AICN: It’s kind of a neglected genre lately.
BS: It’s not like the boom we had in the ‘90s. Probably part of my interest in it is, there was some really great stuff coming out when I was in film school when I first went to Boston University. I would go to the movies and you had films like “True Romance,” “U-Turn,” and “Lost Highway.” It was one great movie after another. It was huge and a lot of them were shot in the desert, which I’m very into. I guess I got into it at the right time, so I’d love to contribute to that.
AICN: Now Josephina, you’re originally from Bucharest, Romania?
JS: Exactly, and I went to school in Bucharest and in France.
AICN: How was that?
JS: They were both very wonderful experiences, frankly. It was great and I got to meet a lot of people who really into film making like I was. It was one of the best experiences of my life.
AICN: Brad, you wrote “PLAGUERS,” and Josephina was a producer?
BS: She was the only producer!
BS + JS + AICN: (All laughing.)
AICN: So, how did you guys meet?
JS: We met in ’99 when I was doing an internship in my second year of film school. I didn’t have a lot of experience on movie sets, so they took me along. The movie was called “Phantom Town.”
BS: It was a Full Moon movie, if you're familiar with Full Moon Entertainment. They had a pretty decent complex, like three soundstages, a full western town and anything else you needed they could build it! We met on that movie. It was a lot of fun!
JS: We started talking about movies during breaks and you know we kept going until we became annoying and people were shushing us.
BS+ JS + AICN: (All laughing.)
BS: There wasn’t a lot of work getting done, lets put it that way.
AICN: So, what’s next for you guys? What can we keep an eye out for?
BS: Well, the movie that we’re working on right now, that we’re in post-production on is called “High-Fear” which is an anthology horror movie that is the third part of a trilogy that we started back in 2013 with “Hi-8.” We did a sequel a few years later called “Hi-Death.” We’re kind of guiding that through post-production.
JS: Should be sometime midway next year.
AICN: Awesome! I’ll be keeping an eye out for that! I appreciate you two taking the time!
BS: I’m glad we were able to do this!
AICN: It was my pleasure. I enjoyed “PLAGUERS” when it came out and I enjoyed “Hi-8,” so it was more than cool to talk to you guys!
JS: Thanks a lot for everything!
AICN: No problem!
BS: Thanks so much!
If you've never seen "PLAGUERS," now is the perfect time to check it out! If you like sci-fi horror, I recommend giving it a watch! The practical effects alone are awesome!
That's it for now, folks, but you know the drill! Comment below and until next time, keep on geekin' on, my friends!
Joshua "Prometheus" Scafidi
