Fantastic Fest Interview: Kylgor in the Grisly Abyss

Everybody picked up a hobby or new skill during the pandemic, and many people came out of the experience with something they’d never expect to create. In Mason Newton DeRushie’s case, that something was a barbarian epic of creatures and carnage, created in his own home with puppets.

Kylgor in the Grisly Abyss, which debuts at Fantastic Fest, wasn’t originally intended to be a puppeteered movie. Having previously created segments for several anthology horror films, he was just looking to make his feature directorial debut with a movie he could crowdfund. “And that was when COVID started coming around,” he recalled. “So, we can’t rely on actors coming in and out, so we were just like, ‘well, if we did it with puppets and with an underground set, we can do it all in our garage.’”

Newton DeRushie had used puppets in minor roles in earlier films. His background is actually in special effects, an interest he inherited from his father and uncle. He said, “They had a company called the Brothers Gore Effects, and I immediately fell into that because they needed help.”  His first adventure in filmmaking and first IMDB credit (“special effects assistant”) came when he was 12, and he ended up on the set of The Chester Kids. He recalled, “Somebody gets shot in the head, and they drag his body out and have to bury it, and I was there on the sidelines.”

Since then, he’s parlayed those early on-set experiences on movies like The Demolisher and Bite from underground powerhouse Black Fawn Films into a career in Canada’s indie horror scene, working on films such as What Keeps You Alive and 60 Seconds to Live.

For Kylgor, he wasn’t interested in Muppets-style cuteness that is so common even in adult puppet movies. “A lot of them go with the felt and the cloth, and even when they do violence they’ll have yarn coming out of them.” 

Instead, the Canadian filmmaker was highly influenced by the award-winning British comedy satire show, Spitting Image, with its grotesque caricatures and plentiful bodily fluids. “No one I’ve talked to really knows that show, but it’s a hidden gem, and that was a huge influence on how our puppets would look.” To get that slightly grotesque feel, the puppets’ heads were made of liquid latex, “and their bodies are carved out of coach foam, and then we did layers of liquid latex over the top of that.”

Of course, what’s a barbarian’s quest without an abyss filled with deadly monsters? “We knew we wanted to have a rat creature, we knew we wanted a kaiju-sized creature, but a lot of them were a bit of necessity where we looked at what we had for scraps and material and cobbled stuff together.”

This was a truly handmade production, made by Newton DeRushie and his friends and neighbors in his hometown of Belleville, Ontario. “It’s just people who were game to help us,” he said, “so there was a lot of back and forth, just figuring out how we would do it. We ended up with a key group of people that really knew how to work the puppets. … So there was a lot of jamming the camera in there with six people when we don’t really know what we’re doing.”

He actually shot the film in sequence, as the troupe was learning the skills, “and so the first three or four scenes were the training scenes, and once we got to the fourth, fifth, sixth scene, we knew what we were doing.”

Now he’s got the puppeteering bug and already has a script for a Kylgor sequel. But his plans don’t end there. Just as Kylgor was influenced by his love of Conan the Barbarian, “I sit around all the time and think about random movies, and what a puppet version of them would be like.”

Kylgor in the Grisly Abyss World Premiere Friday, Sept. 18, 11:30am Tuesday, Sept. 22, 8:45pm

Fantastic Fest runs Sept. 17-24 at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar. Badges and info at fantasticfest.com. Follow our coverage at austinchronicle.com/fantastic-fest.

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