Interview: Bill Moseley
House of 1000 Corpses star Bill Moseley talks with Ryan about his past, present and future projects.
Living-Dead.com: Could you tell us about some of the projects that you have been involved with?
Bill Moseley: Some of the projects I've been involved with? I've been involved with a plethora of projects in my show biz career, ranging from acting in films like Clint Eastwood's "Pink Cadillac," playing Johnnie in the Savini remake of "Night of the Living Dead," Choptop in "Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2," Luke, a henchman with rotten teeth and bowler derby in Disney's "White Fang" to putting out three Cornbugs CDs with Guns N Roses guitar wizard Buckethead, to writing articles for magazines like the Hollywood Reporter, Interview, Psychology Today and the late, great Omni Magazine. I'm currently working on a screenplay that I'd like to produce and act in.
Living-Dead.com: The Tom Savini Night of the Living Dead remake is one of my all time favorite horror movies, what was it like to be involved in such a wonderful production?
Bill Moseley: I loved working with Tom Savini on his color remake of "Night of the Living Dead." I'd worked with Tom five years earlier ('86) when he was Special Effects Makeup Master on "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2," and so I was excited when he sent me the script to NOLD and told me to pick any part. Of course I picked the parts that worked the longest, made the most money- that was my criterion. When I ran my first couple of choices past Tom, he clarified: pick any part, just make sure it's Johnnie! Well, Johnnie has one of the greatest scenes in horror history in the cemetery, but the part only worked a week, so I sucked it up and studied my Boris Karloff movies so I could say "Theah coming to get you, Bahbra." I loved working with Tom, great director. He was helpful to me, had a great disposition. I'm trying to get him to direct a movie called "Forest Prime Evil" that I'm co-producing. Hell, if it's a SAG production, I might even act in it!
Living-Dead.com: As an actor that has a place in a couple of the horror genres best known pictures, are you yourself a horror movie fan?
Bill Moseley: I'm absolutely first and foremost a horror movie fan. Otherwise, I wouldn't have hung around the genre so long. I love horror movies! My top five faves are the original Night of the Living Dead, Carnival of Souls, Tod Browning's Dracula, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Evil Dead 2. When I was a kid in Barrington, Illinois, I used to practice making frightened faces in the mirror, and I'd risk life and limb sneaking into the TV room long after I'd been put to bed to watch Shock Theatre, the local horror show that featured movies like Black Scorpion, Creature from Blood Beach, Valley of the Gwangi, Last Man on Earth, Beginning of the End. I loved 'em all, and I consider it my solemn duty to turn my two daughters on to the horror films they can handle. My older kid is 14, so she can hold her horror with the best of 'em, but the baby's only 3, so I'm weaning her off Disney and onto Godzilla, Minya, Mothra and Ghidrah.
Living-Dead.com: I have visited your website, choptopsbbq.com, what is up with that? The site is crazy!
Bill Moseley: Thanks for asking about choptopsbbq.com. I started it in 1999 with then webmaster Mark Gash. When Mark died (of natural causes) a year later, Tobe Hooper's son, William, took up the bbq spatula, and he's really served up some fantastic victuals for the eyes, heart and mind ever since. So it's a mixture of the old and the new, but it's all Choptop. I wanted to make the site Choptop would make- not do some dreary actor site or try to sell everybody Choptop mugs and caps (well, we do sell mugs via cafepress.com). There is a bit of bloody commerce on the site- you can buy Cornbugs CDs, an autographed picture or two, and coming soon, the official Choptop's Bar-B-Que t-shirt from Rottencotton.com- but for the most part it's fun, fun, fun with a dementia only Choptop and his friends could truly appreciate. Check out Choptop's Crazy Piano when you visit the bbq, and pretty soon William assures me that our Raaaaydeo Station will be up and streaming.
Living-Dead.com: If you could have been in any famous horror movie, what would it have been, what role would you have played, and why?
Bill Moseley: A part I'd love to play in any famous horror movie? Hmmmm. Dwight Frye's part in the original Dracula. Not to outdo him- I don't think anyone could touch that portrayal- just to get into his skin and have as much fun playing off Bela Lugosi as Dwight appeared to be having. Dwight was totally into the part, probably ate real bugs and spiders; hell, maybe he was a Method actor- actually, I think Dracula predates the Actors Studio. Maybe Dwight slept in a coffin to stay in character; maybe he flitted around town at midnight in a black cape or shoes with flapping soles, eating out of garbage cans. Yeah, Dwight Frye, can't beat him.
Living-Dead.com: What is your favorite horror movie? Director? Why?
Bill Moseley: My favorite horror movie is still Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I saw it in 1975 on a sunny autumn afternoon at the Paramount Theater in Boston's Combat Zone on a double bill with Enter the Dragon. I can't remember whom I saw it with, but once the screen went dark, and there was that opening series of flashbulb shots of a glazed and rotted corpse accompanied by that strange violin creaking sound effect, I knew this was serious. That movie sucked the air out of all of us who only moments before had been whooping as Bruce Lee kicked his way through an army of karate kids. From the opening of TCM to Leatherface's closing chainsaw pirouettes, I never came up for air; Tobe Hooper wouldn't let me! That movie scared the bejeezus out of me, made me paranoid of country folk- what were they cooking back there in the dirty little outbuilding behind that mom & pop gas station on a lonely stretch of road a hundred miles from the freeway?! The chainsaw family deeply disturbed me, so much so that I figured, being a Yale graduate, that the best way to exorcise my terror would be to see the film over and over until it became dog-earred and predictable. So I watched it another 10 times or so, but that only drove the spike deeper into my soul. Finally, I wrote and produced a five-minute video spoof (also available for viewing and for sale at choptopsbbq.com) called "The Texas Chainsaw Manicure," set in a beauty parlor on New York's Staten Island. That helped- I had a cameo as the Hitchhiker-but it didn't cure me. I was in Hollywood a few months later on a magazine assignment; I had the Manicure tucked under my arm to amuse my show biz buddies. One friend happened at the time to be working down the hall from Tobe Hooper at somesuch studio and asked me if I'd like him to walk in the Manicure to the Godfather of Gore. I said sure; he did; Tobe saw the Manicure and loved it; and two years later, on the basis of my twenty-second cameo, Tobe offered me the part of Platehead, name later changed to Choptop. Once I became a part of the Chainsaw family, I got a lot more comfortable with the original. I could appreciate where they were coming from!
Living-Dead.com: What is your opinion of today's horror movies, and the direction that modern horror seems to be going in? What modern horror movies are your favorites? Least Favorites?
Bill Moseley: I don't really have much of an opinion of today's horror movies. I'm sorry that there has emerged a kind of tepid corporate horror formula that produces films like Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend, etc. I think it's a rip-off to populate your movies with TV stars, then have the killer just another TV dweeb with a mask and a psychology problem. But they're Big Box Office, and it sure proves that those horror formulas never get old. I just starred in Rob Zombie's "House of 1000 Corpses" with Karen Black, Sid Haig, Michael J. Pollard and Tommy Towles, and we kicked some serious horror ass. So serious, in fact, that Universal Pictures dropped the movie, and we've been in a kind of distribution limbo ever since. Universal loved Rob's script, apparently gave him the fastest green light in studio history. We shot most of the movie on the Universal backlot with the trams passing by every three minutes with curious fans taking pictures (our House was the old Chicken Ranch from Best Little Whorehouse in Texas). There were always several Universal execs on the set whenever we rolled cameras. Universal was so excited with the rough cut of the movie, they gave Rob a couple of million bucks to shoot more stuff! But then they got cold feet for some reason- maybe they had mistakenly thought that Rob Zombie was making another Scream or some kind of half-assed horror pic where people could watch it and buy the action toy down at Burger King. Instead, Rob was going for a grisly, gruesome, gory and violent movie that had a lot more to do with the films of the 70's than Scream and Urban Legend. Washington was breathing down Hollywood's neck not to sell R-rated films to kids under 17; there was Columbine to consider; there was a presidential election going on with both sides falling all over each other to prove each was more squeaky clean and moral than the other guy. I guess Monica Lewinsky helped kill House of 1000 Corpses at Universal- if she hadn't spilled the beans about her affair, morality in the White House might not have been an issue, and we would be another jewel in the horror necklace of the Monster Studio (Universal was built on Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, Wolfman and Creature from the Black Lagoon, Rob Zombie's favorite). Instead, we've been in limbo for nearly a year. But not only is Rob a great writer and director, he's a marketing genius, and I have every bit of faith that he'll find a great distributor for House, and eventually everyone can see for themselves that savage horror is back and here to stay!!!
Living-Dead.com: If someone was wanting to become an actor/actress, like yourself, in horror movies, what advice would you give them?
Bill Moseley: Horror movie advice? First of all, watch a hundred horror films- watch films by George Romero, Tobe Hooper, Tod Browning, Dario Argento, see if you like horror films. Do they grab your guts? Does your head swim with adrenalin? Do you scream out loud when the killer jumps out of the closet and runs a razor across that dumb girl's throat? Then, act in school plays, go to acting school if you can find a good one, a supportive one, and you can afford it. Make videos at home if you've got a camera or know someone who does, show 'em on TV to friends and family, critique yourself: Are you real? Are you convincing? If not, try, try try again. and when you think you're ready for the Big Time, come on out here to Hollywood or New York City and look in the trades for student films, non-union stuff if you're not in SAG and DO EVERYTHING YOU CAN TO WORK. Learn how to conserve your energy when it's four a.m. and you're out in some swamp in East Jesus and you're sick and cold and hungry and they're just now getting to that Big Emotional Scene you've prepared for for two weeks. And when the director yells ACTION, you gotta bring it no matter what. 'Cause the camera never lies. If you believe it, the audience will believe it. and the audience wants our best, and deserves our best, because no one wants to be treated by a half-assed doctor or have their burning house put out by a clumsy, self-conscious fireman. Being an actor is a tough, lonely, thankless life for most of us, so you better love it or it'll eat your lunch!
Living-Dead.com: What has been your favorite project to work on, and why?
Bill Moseley: My favorite project is always my last (or current) paying job. I just did a movie called Essence of Echoes, so that's it.
Living-Dead.com: Do you have any projects currently in the works? If so, what are they?
Bill Moseley: Currently, as I mentioned before, I'm writing a screenplay. I've been invited to appear at the Fangoria Magazine convention in Brooklyn, NY, January 5&6, to Chiller Theatre in New Jersey April 19,20,21 (chillertheater.com) and maybe a show in Baltimore in May. Rob Zombie asked if I'm available to shoot some more stuff for House of 1000 corpses at the end of January, and I said yes, sir! I think it's going to be some even more horrible stuff than is already in the movie, so that should be really fun. Other than that, I'm looking for work, raising my two daughters, taking care of three cats, three birds and three fat goldfish, recycling and trying to pay my bills like any other working stiff.
