Indie Horror Month 2022 Interview: Kiah Roache-Turner Talks the Importance of Practical Effects, His Love for Button Porn and More for WYRMWOOD: APOCALYPSE

It’s been a little over seven years since Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead was unleashed onto the world, and now co-writer/director Kiah Roache-Turner is back with a follow-up, Wyrmwood: Apocalypse, that expands on all the zombie-fueled (quite literally in this case) madness from the first movie, and delivers up even more carnage and chaos in the sequel as well. For Apocalypse, Roache-Turner reteamed with three of the co-stars from Road of the Dead—Bianca Bradey, Luke McKenzie and Jay Gallagher—and explores the post-apocalyptic world where zombies still pose a huge threat to humanity, but also can be helpful all the same.

But does the usefulness of the zombies come with a hefty price tag attached? There’s only one way to find out—check out Wyrmwood: Apocalypse for yourself once it arrives on digital platforms this Thursday, April 14th, courtesy of XYZ Films.

Recently, Daily Dead had the opportunity to speak with Roache-Turner about the sequel, and he discussed how this follow-up feature came about after he was unable to get a Wyrmwood TV series going over the last few years. Kiah also discussed how much he enjoyed reteaming with several of the stars from the first film, his love for practical effects, how his films satisfy his own love for “button porn” in movies, and what he’d love to do if he gets to come back and make Wyrmwood 3 (two words: zombie flamethrower).

Great to speak with you today, Kiah. I went back and re-watched the first movie last night because I wanted to go right into the new one, and I'm really glad I did because they pair up so well. But when I was rewatching it, I was completely blown away all over again by what you were able to do with the first movie. And this sequel is really fantastic as well. I had a lot of fun and honestly, it takes a lot for me to care about zombie movies, but you guys really give me something to invest in and you do something different, which I always appreciate. The action is fantastic, and the effects are mind-bogglingly amazing. So first and foremost, congrats on creating two really badass movies.

Kiah Roache-Turner: Thanks, Heather. I really appreciate that. I actually haven't seen them back to back. I haven't seen the first one in years now, so I'm glad that they fit together because they are quite different. They're in the same world, but they look different, they feel different. The first one we shot over a three-and-a-half-year period, so the first one feels more like 12 or 13 short films strung together because we kept changing over the years. Whereas this one has a visual, a narrative, and thematic consistency, but probably isn't as funny as the first one. It doesn't have that same thing where it changes every 10 minutes. The style is consistent. It's just the difference between making a film over a three-and-a-half-year period and making a film over a six-week period.

The thing that this one has that the first one doesn't have is a clear narrative structure and goals. It doesn't really let up, you just follow a single person through a journey with a bunch of other characters. And the first one felt a lot more slapdash, which I think is something that people like about it. If the first Wyrmwood one is like the first Mad Max, this is like the Mad Max sequel [Road Warrior], where it's your classic hero's journey and then the whole third act is like the truck chase in Road Warrior where it's just balls to the wall action all the way at the end.

I know that you've had another film in between this, but was there something about the timing where you were like, “This is our moment to go back to this world that we've created and re-explore it in this new way”? Was there something in particular about where the stars just happen to align and you're like, “Yes, now is the time to make the Wyrmwood sequel?”

Kiah Roache-Turner: You know, we actually wasted a lot of time trying to get the TV series up. We wrote a pilot and a really awesome pitch bible. It was super thick, filled with storyboards, images, and a really specific treatment. It's probably one of the best things I've ever done that nobody will see. It's a pitch bible that is just fantastic. Everybody that we talked to went, “The Walking Dead already takes up that space,” and we couldn't find anybody who would give us a budget that was reasonable enough to even commit to making it. We just went, “Well, let's just make a film then. We know we can get a budget together to make a film that's decent enough, so we compressed the pilot and the basic ideas for the first arc of the first series in the TV show into a 96-minute timeline, and let's go make the sequel instead of a TV series.”

It wasn't really a question of timing, though. We made Nekrotronic and tried to make a TV series in between, and we just went and made a film instead because it's easier. Blake Northfield, our co-producer, came on board and said, "I have a really clear idea of how to progress this to production. Let's just do it and let's do it however you guys want to do it. I'm going to creatively get out of the way. I'm going to get you the money to make sure that you can make a professional production, and I'm going to let you guys make the film that you want to make," which is exactly what you want to hear as a filmmaker. So, we were off and running. We made the film pretty quickly in the middle of a pandemic and it was crazy. It was weird, too, because of the pandemic; in this, there’s a virus that's lethal to some people, it's not so lethal to others, you have to wear masks, and it's global. Basically, that is the sentence that describes the Wyrmwood world, as we were making a film about a global pandemic in a global pandemic. The irony was quite thick.

I was going to ask if that heightened your experiences when you were working on this movie, just the parallels that you guys were riding between the story that you've created and the rules of this world versus the things that we were dealing with in real life. That had to be surreal.

Kiah Roache-Turner: It was really surreal and that wasn't lost on us during production. But at the end of the day, filmmaking is so hard and you get such intense tunnel vision that all it does is make it harder. You just deal with the nurse in the morning and you deal with all this added risk. If somebody gets sick, we are stuffed. If I get sick, we're double stuffed. You’ve got to wear masks in these tiny sets and you're just sweating your head off, you're trying to breathe through this mask. My glasses are fogging up. It just makes everything harder. But we got through it, and we were one of the few films in this country that were able to be shot during the pandemic. We all isolated really beautifully and nobody got even a cold or the flu during the entire production. It was a pretty amazing experience just to say, "We did this and we did it really well."

For this sequel, you have some returning players from the first movie, in terms of Bianca and Jay, and then Luke coming in as a different character as well. I was wondering if there was a contingency if they couldn't do it? I know from talking to you when the first movie came out that they were all so committed to that first project, but what would've happened if they had been off doing something else or couldn’t have come back for other reasons? How on earth would you have managed?

Kiah Roache-Turner: It's funny. Getting the old cast back together was like the first half of the Dirty Dozen, where you've got to go and find the members and convince them to return. It was really fun like that. We had to go out and contact them. Bianca had started a new life in Finland, believe it or not. She'd actually given up acting for a while. She loves acting, but she found something else that she loved. We asked her if she would think about doing this again, and she said yes pretty quickly. I think it was such a special experience for us all and such a huge life event.

Forget about the fact that it's a movie. This was three and a half years of our lives, where we really believed in each other and had a passion for a thing, and we made it. Very few people go out and make and finish a film on their own, finance it themselves with their friends, and then release it, and it does reasonably well globally. It's a great story and it was a great period for us just as human beings. So not only did Bianca commit, she flew herself from Finland to make this film and then flew herself back at the end of it.

Luke was living in L.A. He'd started a new career as a writer. And he was like, "I don't really act anymore. I'm a writer now". But I told him that I had always wanted to see him in this kind of leading role. It weirdly reinvigorated this dream that he had, as he'd moved away from that part of his life. But he was like, “You know, I think I want to see myself in that kind of role, too.” So, he flew out from L.A. to make this film. Now he's back there, writing again. And with Jay, I just called and he said, "When do you need me?" He was super stoked. He was excited to put the leather armor back on and do it all over again. He had to take a break from his family, which was tricky, but they all came back and it was great. It was like a dream come true. It all worked like clockwork, and everybody slid into their characters like a second skin within five minutes of arriving. It was beautiful to watch and experience.

One of the things that I love about these movies is there's this sense of dystopian innovation that comes through with the gadgetry and these little traps and things like that. Can you talk about working with your team to create that kind of stuff? I'm somebody who geeks out on all the little details in movies, and there are so many fun little things to really geek out about in both of these films. 

Kiah Roache-Turner: I have a real obsession with lists, buttons, and those kinds of things. I love to see a rhythm in a film. I think that speaks to my OCD, but my favorite part of the film is where we scientifically follow Rhys’ morning routine. He wakes up. He does his exercises. He takes his pill. He loads his shotgun. He jumps out of the caravan. He kills two or three zombies. He has to heat his barbecue up using the meat vein from a zombie to power his barbecue. He has his food. He has to turn his generator on. He has to change the battery, and when I say battery, I mean he has to change out the zombie. Then he needs to go out, catch another zombie, bring it back in, attach it to the generator, and then he needs to load up his car.

And how does he get out of an enclosure that's surrounded by hundreds of zombies? He's got a meat catapult that he fires; that's a standard thing that he does. He's got an electrified gate that shuts itself on its way out so the zombies can't get into his enclosure, and he's out and he's off to work. That's my favorite section because it shows the banality of what he has to do in a completely unbeknown world. It's the most interesting thing you've ever seen, but that's the most boring part of his day. It's like watching a dragon slayer prep to go out and hunt a dragon. My favorite bits are those bits in movies where they show the lists of things that need to be done. One thing leads to another and this button does that. I love that, it's one of my favorite things about cinema.

So, I love when you can set up all of these different contraptions and bits and pieces in the bunker and then they use those contraptions and bits and pieces in action to defeat the antagonists. I'm just a big gadget nerd like that. I heard somebody once refer to it as “button porn.” There are always these action movies where people are pushing buttons, and this does that and I just love that stuff. It's a real geeky thing that I love.

I'm somebody who is very much into the world of special effects, and I think that the effects you had in the first movie were fantastic, but everything we see in the sequel felt amplified, where you have that big fun monster on top of everything else. Can you talk a little bit about working with Mariel [McClorey]? I noticed that she was somebody who was actually on the first movie, and it seems like she progressed into a higher position for this project, which is pretty cool. 

Kiah Roache-Turner: I've known Mariel for over 10 years; she's worked on every single thing that we've ever done. She started off as a makeup artist in Wyrmwood and has slowly, through the industry, become a really good head of makeup. We decided for this one we'd make her the head of makeup, too. She was great. She worked in conjunction with M.E.G., Make-up Effects Group, who also did the demon in Demon Runner and the demon in Nekrotronic. I'm a big fan of practical effects. I like to use digital like you would use a substance on a prosthetic. I would never want to just do something completely digitally. Digital should be there to augment the practical that's already in the frame.

This was something that I really learned in Nekrotronic because I had less control over the process, and I was told that you can lean on digital a lot more. I learned that I'm right, digital should be a backup. Digital is just a brush or a tool that you use to augment the practical effects that we're getting with the actors and with the makeup and the special effects. That's where you get those really amazing effects. One of the things that I love about this film is we use a hell of a lot of digital, but it's not super obvious. Some of the head explosions and blood splatter and stuff you can see, but a lot of it is pretty invisible, where we are just using digital to augment what's already there.

So much of what you see here is practical. All the guns shooting, those big blasts of oxygen—we bought 20 fire extinguishers and attached them to the weapons. It's the cheapest effect you'll ever see. It looks fantastic because it's really practical, frozen oxygen that smashes into the actors and the stunt people. As long as you're using it effectively and carefully, it's not going to hurt anybody. It's a really dynamic visual effect that looks like they get punched by a magical wall of whatever it is. We used that over and over again, and it's a really cool practical effect.

That's why I love makeup effects artists. I didn't get into this game to go, "That tennis ball over there is really scary, so act like it's coming towards you." Why don't we actually have something coming towards them? I don't want to have a digital cyborg zombie. I want to get a dude in a suit and make it look amazing and then augment him a little bit digitally to make him scarier. That way, when you've got an eight-foot zombie marching toward you, you can see the fear on the actor's face is real. It's like, "Oh my God, that thing's going to grab me." I think it looks better, I think the performances are better, and it reacts better with the lighting of the sets. More importantly, it's more fun. That's why practical is something that I'll always push for in my films.

I know we're getting close on time, but I did want to ask one last question. Because you mentioned how you took elements from this TV series to create this script, I'm curious, now that this one's coming out, do you hope that perhaps you'll be able to take other ideas that you had for this series and maybe do another film set in this universe, or is this your wrap on Wyrmwood? I know I’d love to see more myself.

Kiah Roache-Turner: For this film, it's the pilot and a couple of elements from the first half of the TV series. Wyrmwood 3 would be the second half of the TV series. We've got a pretty specific arc that we were moving towards, and we've already started structuring out how we do that. Are we 100 percent already knowing what we do for Wyrmwood 3? If Wyrmwood 2 does even halfway decent business, I'll start writing that next month. Hold me back, Heather, hold me back [laughs]. We've got awesome ideas. I was talking to somebody the other day about the fact that we weren't able to get the zombie flamethrower in there. We had this idea where somebody chops off a zombie's arms and legs, wears it like a backpack, and basically attaches a nozzle to its mouth that's attached to a flame thrower and goes to town. I love the idea of a zombie flamethrower. I also want to see a zombie drone, which is a drone powered by a zombie. I think these ideas are so cool, so I hope we get to do it.

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[Photo Credit: Above photos courtesy of Thom Davies.]