It’s one of the most beloved cult classics of the eighties, and now, over 40 years after its debut, BASKET CASE has been given a stunning 4K makeover. To celebrate its release, we spoke to writer/director FRANK HENENLOTTER to reminisce about making the movie…
STARBURST: How you feel about the film standing the test of time, especially with Arrow releasing the 4K UHD version.
Frank Henenlotter: I’m so overwhelmed by it that I don’t think about it. I never expected this film to ever really be seen. All I wanted to do is to make a feature film. But, beyond that, I had no plans. I knew that I’d at least finish it no matter how terrible it turned out. In those days, you could find a distributor because the market was so strong for horror and exploitation films; there were so many distributors who dealt with crap. So no matter what crap you made, you’d find one. You wouldn’t make money on it, but you’d find a distributor. I thought, if all goes well, it would play 42nd street for a week and then disappear and I’d be happy.
And here we are over forty years later…
I’m honestly flabbergasted. I’m very grateful, obviously and now it’s been on every format. I’m happy but I don’t watch the film, but when I have think ‘if I could just go back and fix this or fix that and make this better’. I think I realised that it’s better if I don’t change anything, because then whatever it is that made the film work, why tamper with it?
Absolutely. It’s the little flaws that are that are endearing as well. How does it feel to be in the Museum of Modern Art?
Well, when I first got the email from Ron Magliozzi, the curator of MoMA, my only question to him was, “Before we go any further, have you seen it?” He assured me he’d seen it twice already, once with the film and once with my commentary. So, alright, you’re know what you’re getting into, we can proceed! I didn’t want the process to go forward and then them saying, “Holy crap, have you watched this?” It worked out well. They were highly supportive, sweet and everything, and I was very happy with them and I still am. I feel a sense of pride to to see the MoMA logo at the start. I’ll tell you how great it is, a friend of mine was at a screening, not one of mine, at Alamo Drafthouse and there were a couple of people around and this one guy was talking about all of his accomplishments. I had never heard of his movies and all this stuff. He said, “You’ve got to do something better than exploitation”. So I said, “Okay, but let’s put it like this. How many films do you have in MoMA?” [Laughs] Anyway, that was the end of that conversation.
What was the hardest part of the production?
Making it not having money. We literally had no money. I think the whole thing was shot at $35,000. Two months would go by where I didn’t see the footage we shot because we couldn’t pay to get it out of the lab. It was just a mess. I wasn’t happy. I felt I had written like maybe three versions of it as I knew we were approaching the poverty level of making. We raised no money whatsoever until we were shooting stuff, and we had something to show. But in the beginning, we started with $8,000 that I had in the bank at the time and shot with that I borrowed money from my grandmother. We shot with that. It was rough and each time I realised how we could I couldn’t do the ending I wanted, I couldn’t do this way I wanted, I couldn’t do this, this, and this.. There was a point where I was really depressed about it, and I didn’t even want to finish the film. I thought it was a disaster. I’ve got to wait till I can do it right. And the more I thought about that, I’m thinking, “Well, if you walk away from this one now, you’ll walk away from every other one you do. You can’t – you’ve got to finish it”. So I did, and it turned out to be remarkably different than what I had planned, but it probably worked better than what I had planned.
People love it and they love Belial.
I actually have Belial in the corner of my living room. He’s been there sitting there since we made the film. It’s the animation Belial because it had an inner core of, I guess, hard Styrofoam. It’s modelled after Kevin’s face. The ugly puppet Belial was made of latex rubber and it disintegrated very quickly. It’s got a shelf life, and all of a sudden one day, you can’t put the glove on. You can’t touch it. It’s brittle. It shrinks. It’s just dead. The one that I have in the living room, because it has a core, it kept its shape, it hasn’t shrunk. If you touch it even gently, though, it’ll crack, and every so often, I lift the black sheet that’s covering it, and I’d see something else is starting to desegregate on it. Or I’d look and there’s a finger on the floor. I leave it over there, and no one ever asks what’s under the sheet. I don’t want to hide it, but then if I lift it up, people are like, “Oh my god!” and want to have a selfie with it.
BASKET CASE is available on 4K UHD from Arrow Video and available to stream on the Arrow service. You can read more of our interview with Frank in the new issue of STARBURST MAGAZINE, on sale here.