As the April afternoon bleeds into the early evening hours in Albuquerque, the sun dips below the horizon, the temperature retreats back to its winter ways, and the vampires come out to play.
On our way to the bloodsuckers, the relentless wind pushes our vehicle forward as much as the gas in the tank. We turn down a gravel road that slithers through a sea of sand, rock, and wild brush. Tires crunch against the earth as the hood urges us forward to the lights. On the outskirts of their glow, we stop and step out into the brisk night, goosebumps spreading across flesh as the brisk wind blasts sand into our hair and the scene before us comes into view.
Lights emanate from a weathered barn that looks like it would be right at home in a horror movie. But what lies within the barn takes the creepy cake. Culebras—humans with the ability to transform into reptilian vampires—stand against posts with their arms bound above gagged mouths. Jars dangle below their chins, gathering the venom that drips from their fangs. They are the creatures of the night, but they are hunted by the man in their midst, one who has an ominous agenda and a scorpion-like stinger. He is just one of many monsters featured on El Rey Network’s From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series, which is filming a key scene for its third episode of season 3 on this spine-shuddering evening.
We gather around the open barn door and peer inside for a closer look at the makeshift vampire prison. Crewmembers move in a hard-working harmony to prep the space for the scene, ready the camera, and keep the tied-up actors as comfortable as possible. Clad in a leather duster and cowboy hat, the actor playing the warden of this special slice of hell stands before a new visitor to his domain, former Texas Ranger Freddie Gonzalez (played by Jesse Garcia), who now keeps the peace (sometimes with a little help from his firepower) amongst the culebra clans and others who threaten to upset the balance between the living and the undead.
“He’s literally the peacekeeper between the culebra world, the supernatural world, and the humans,” says Garcia. “He’s definitely embraced it, and it’s fun for me because I get to be a little more loose with it and have more play with the character and a little more humor this year. It’s been a lot of fun.”
A character who enjoys his own brand of fearsome fun on the series, Professor Aiden Tanner, aka “Sex Machine” (played by Jake Busey) is also present in the barn this evening. The Joker to Garcia’s Batman, Tanner was turned into a culebra back at the Titty Twister, and he had been enjoying his new life as a bloodsucker until he was taken to this isolated place and strung up on a pole alongside other vipers. A former follower of Carlos (Wilmer Valderrama), Tanner is looking to continue exploring his own path in season 3… if he can survive this night’s encounter with the scorpion man and his old nemesis.
“Coming to season 3,” says Busey, “he realized that he was digging up one hole, he was doing research looking down one hole, one mine shaft, and he was going down that path, the Carlos path, and he got to the bottom and [realized], ‘Okay, this is the wrong hole, I need to get out of this hole and start digging another one and look somewhere else. Sex Machine, as we saw him the first season, is an archeology professor, so he goes back to school, back to archeology and teaching. One of my favorite parts in Raiders of the Lost Ark, is after we’ve seen all this action, we go back and see Harrison Ford in the classroom teaching, and it brings us back to something we can relate to, some normalcy. It’s a little like after you’ve gone on a wild roller coaster ride, there’s that one point where you’re just going flat and straight for a moment before the next wave of curves and turns and loops.”
Perhaps more than anyone else in From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series, Richie Gecko (Zane Holtz) has seen his fair share of tumultuous loops. Although he’s not in the scene currently filming before us in the nose-numbing chill of night, Zane and his character are a driving force in the eerie events of season 3, as he and his brother, Seth Gecko (D.J. Cotrona), serve as collectors of payments (often late ones) for the Lords—the royalty at the top of the culebra food chain… for now.
“We’ll see at the beginning of season 3 that they [the Gecko Brothers] have a new position in the universe, and they’re given a new task by the powers-that-be, and we’ll see how they respond to that,” explains Holtz. “There’s always the difference between Richie and Seth, where Seth is not really interested in this [culebra] stuff, but Richie finds it interesting and wants to exploit it as much as he can.”
While the Gecko Brothers were apart for a good portion of season 2, they’re back in business with matching suits right off the bat in season 3. But while Seth has been hesitant to be around bloodsuckers ever since seeing the carnage they were capable of in the Titty Twister, he is willing to stick around in Richie’s strange, supernatural world for the sake of his brother. His new lifestyle as a collector is a return to steady, albeit unsettling, work for Seth, but when you’re a Gecko, it’s only a matter of time before life throws you a curveball… with teeth.
“In season 3, he’s [Seth] very much come to terms with what this world is, and we see him starting to make it work for him,” says Caruso. “The old Seth Gecko’s back, he finds his rhythm, and just when he gets comfortable, it all explodes open in an entirely new way, and [he] is forced to deal with it in a lot of unexpected ways, and is not really happy about it.”
Someone who is happy about the creepy chaos of season 3 is director Alejandro Brugués, who returns to the series after helming the excellent season 2 episode, "Attack of the 50 Ft. Sex Machine,” which pitted Sex Machine against Gonzalez on his home turf. Positioned behind the camera in the confines of the barn, a smiling Brugués’ enthusiasm is apparent and infectious, even at the outset of another long night of shooting (and also after a prosthetic tail is thrown a little farther than expected and lands amongst the crew during a fight scene). The fact that Sex Machine and Gonzalez are once again a central focus in this episode is one big reason Brugués is excited to be back.
“I feel like I am doing a feature with these two,” says Brugués. “I’m continuing the story of the characters, the arc that they have from my episode [in season 2] to this [episode] even makes sense. There are even shots that I’m doing that I’m saying, “Okay, last episode we did this, so in this one we’ll do this,’ and things like that. It’s cool that I’m getting to do one with them [again].”
Not only is Brugués directing an episode with the current version of Sex Machine, he’s also getting the opportunity to work with Tom Savini, the legendary actor and makeup effects artist who played the iconic character in Robert Rodriguez’s original From Dusk Till Dawn movie. Stepping into the boots of a new character, Savini plays Burt, a retired demon hunter approached by the Geckos for help when all Hell literally breaks loose.
After the crew takes a break for hard-earned chow, we gather around Savini near the midnight hour to hear how he got involved with the show. “At South by Southwest two years ago, Robert and I got to talking and he said, ‘I want to use you in the TV series, and I want you to probably be an overlord.’ But I wasn’t hearing anything, so they put out a feeler for this character, and my agent saw it and recommended me and Robert threw me right in.”
“I just talked to him tonight,” Savini continues, “He said, ‘What do you want to do in this thing? I want you to kick ass.’ I said, ‘Why don’t you take advantage of what I’m good at—fencing, the bullwhip. So he’s calling the writers and putting a fencing scene in. And people associate me with the bullwhip because I was Sex Machine in the original movie. It’s funny, I have a line with Jake Busey tonight—who is the Sex Machine in this thing—I look at him and he’s all done up [in leather], and I say, ‘What are you made up for?’ or something like that. It’s the movie Sex Machine belittling the TV Sex Machine.”
That type of self-aware fun is prevalent in the early episodes of the third season, along with comedy, horror, and ass-kicking action, all four of which come to life amidst the blowing sands on set. By the time we return to the shelter of our ride sometime after midnight for the trip back to the city, we’ve witnessed an incredible creative team band together to battle the elements on a chilly desert set that’s reminiscent of Leatherface land. The result: one hell of an atmospheric scene that will help make this season the series’ most memorable one yet. We sit down in the dark as our vehicle pulls away, retreating from the lights while the vampires stay out to play until dawn.
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Titled "“Protect and Serve," the third episode of From Dusk Till Dawn Season 3 airs Tuesday, September 13th at 9:00pm ET on El Rey Network.
Raised on a steady diet of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books and Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Derek has been fascinated with fear since he first saw ForeverWare being used on an episode of Eerie, Indiana.
When he’s not writing about horror as the Senior News Reporter for Daily Dead, Derek can be found daydreaming about the Santa Carla Boardwalk from The Lost Boys or reading Stephen King and Brian Keene novels.
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