Recently, I had the sincere pleasure of speaking with Madman producer/co-writer Gary Sales and star Paul Ehlers who played THE Madman himself – Marz, a yeti-looking maniac swinging an axe at every jugular in sight, who I – at 7 years old – imagined trudging up the stairs in my house in the middle of the night. I had the same problem with Chewbacca. Hey, what can I say? Hairy giants were terrifying to me. Guillermo del Toro still makes me pee my pants a little. But I digress…

While a hairy giant he may be, Madman Marz was not the only one mixing things up and accumulating bodies in cinematic summer camp romps. In 1980, the first Friday the 13th hit theaters, giving us an iconic horror villain, 11 follow-up films (including last month’s remake), and a spin-off TV series. And with the latest Friday the 13th sitting pretty in theaters with a $64 million gross, it looks like the ol’ Madman cast and crew is reuniting to take a look at Madman past and Madman future! Madman is currently playing on FEARnet.com, so we decided to give a call to the boys behind the Marz. In the following conversation, Sales and Ehlers talk about the cult following, the remake, and, of course, that infamous hot tub scene. Seriously, what IS up with that?!

[NOTE: For those who have not yet seen Madman, this interview contains SPOILERS. Watch Madman on FEARnet and then, after the jump, read the interview with Sales and Ehlers.]

Madman (1982)Tell us how Madman came to be...
Gary: I, along with our late buddy and partner Joey Giannone Jr., who was the director of the film, who ended up screenwriting, he and I were in college together making movies in the late 70s and we wanted to get into the movie business. We were both liking horror and what we saw coming out of Halloween. It looked like there was a new era. We just took on the independent filmmaker route available in those days.

I had a memory of a campfire legend that scared the crap out of me; it was then the Cropsy legend. And we set out to make the Cropsy legend. Joey and I came up with the story and he started on the script, while I started the producing business to drag a crew together and the money to go out and make it. We went out and started to make the movie and that’s how we found our way to Paul…

Paul: I was kind of an innocent bystander. Back in ’79, I was working as an illustrator. I had a friend who told me about these fellas making a film, and I met with them one evening and we were talking horror and so forth. What they wanted me to do was the art for the poster. Having grown up loving horror films my whole life, I jumped at the chance. I could finally get my hands into the horror business with this poster. So I was discussing with Joey and Gary at the time about how this character Madman should look and I was showing how it would be illustrated, and I’m hunched over and growling and they looked at each other and they said, “Paul, what are you doing for the next 2 months.” I just thought, “Nooo! I can’t believe it.” It was a dream come true for me. I went to film school and I had done acting, but at that point in my career I was really involved more in art. I kind of got drawn into finally being a monster on camera.

The illustrations in the opening credits are yours too…
Paul: Yeah I did the roots, the hands that come together and form the border for the opening credits. What I had done for the original poster didn’t in fact wind up being the one-sheet. I drew the fairytale black silhouettes around the title.

Do you still pursue art today?
Paul: I do, I do. When I started out I used to do illustration jobs, cartooning jobs. I worked for Kenner toys for some time. I designed cute little plush dolls for a little bit.

Gary: Tell her the truth, you were an amazing designer of…

Paul: [Screaming.] Yeahhhh. Alright well that kind of happened. I had always been interested, and since I was a kid I would love to draw fantasy characters like trolls and giants and Lord of the Rings type things. These guys always carried elaborate weapons into battle and they were in all of my paintings. What I did once, someone suggested it, I started taking my drawings and making them life size. I sent it [one with a weapon in it] to an American company that made custom handmade knives. I sent him the drawing and I called him to ask what he thought, and he said, “Well, I already made one.” I worked as a freelance knife designer and they tell me now that we started a whole movement of unusual, out-of-this-world knife-styling that we’ve been doing now since 1982 or 1983. I know it sounds strange. I always joke with people, “Here I am – I play a slasher and what I do for a living is I design knives.” [Laughs.] It’s a little twisted. I try to keep it fun.

Gary, you wrote the songs for the film…
Gary: Yep. I was also working as a musician. I was really pursuing that a lot stronger than I have been of late. A satisfying part of the making of the movie was the opportunity to add some of my own music to it. These were the early days of the genre in its slasher incarnation, a sort of new era. Before that there was a different kind of movie being made. It also was the days where the marriage of rock songs and movies was just starting to take place. MTV was just being born in the U.S. and Miami Vice was still years away. I was on the edge of that and interested in trying to inject more rock music into movies. I got to inject my own songs. It helps when you’re the producer… [Laughs.]

The soundtrack, the amazing electronic soundtrack, which, in its day, was special, and even now is special, was done by Stephen Horelick, who is still out there working as a composer for TV and Film projects. Ironically he's responsible for the music for the kid's show Reading Rainbow and was nominated for an Emmy for it. He went from Madman to Reading Rainbow. [Laughs.] He’s a master electronic musicians with many credits. At the time, I was an aficionado of electronic music. I wanted to create a special track for Madman that no one else had, and I tracked Steven down and we got together, I gave him some themes and he took it and ran with the track. Paul and I think it needs to be released as its own entity at some point. Maybe that will happen.

Paul: I myself collect soundtracks. I have since I was ten; and many people say, “There’s great music in Madman.” We have a lot of materials we can bring out to the fans that they haven’t seen or heard before. It’s going to be fun.

Tell us a bit about the set. I understand there were some funny moments…
Paul: We had some really funny stuff go on. Gary what about that scene with the window?

Gary: I may not have been here had that been a larger or nastier piece of shrapnel. I was shooting a lot of production stills while filming, and there’s a scene where Betsy comes to the window with the shotgun in the third act, and she’s looking around. She’s done her High Noon walk, as we used to call it, across the courtyard there, looking around with the shotgun. She hears something in the house and walks up to the window to see what’s going on with the shotgun in front of her. Ellie pops up in the window, still not dead from having the axe buried in her chest, and Betsy of course pulls the trigger and blows Ellie away completely. I happened to be right over the camera trying to get a great shot of this moment, thinking, “I’m fully protected. My camera is in front of my face. Everything is great.” And of course it wasn't good. It was bad, but it was too early in my career for me to die.

Paul: The film would have been dedicated to Gary back then. Much too soon…

Gary: Yeah. One of the pieces of glass on the breakaway window came flying out and landed right above where my camera was resting, right between the eyes. Had it been sharper and nastier it might have gone right into my brain and I might have been a great little effect gag there. We would have kept that in the film by the way…

Paul: There’s one story I like to tell people… One night, late at night, which it always was, for a couple of days, we pretty much shot in the woods. And there were small towns out there. No one really harassed us or bothered us. But one night – two nights this happened – someone reported that somebody was creeping around in the woods, and it was not a crew member and it wasn’t me and people were concerned about it because they didn’t know what it was. I remember one of the actresses saw this person run under a light. Joey came up to me, and here I am in full regalia, I’m dressed as Marz, and I’ve got the axe. He said, “Do me a favor – we’re not shooting you right now, but could you go look in the woods and see if you could find this person?” What a moment this was. I’m dressed as this monster creeping through the woods, in reality, looking for this poor bastard. As it turns out, I didn’t find anybody but that would have been a fabulous moment. That would have been the crowning moment of my horror career.

Gary: Horror Cop.

Paul: Yeah, Horror Cop. There you go. Maniac Cop, move over! [Laughs.]

Could you talk about some of the improvising you had to do on set?
Gary: We started off in early fall and the leaves were falling off as we were shooting and we had to go deeper into the woods and bring them back to put them on stands and spray paint them green when they were around us to fill out scenes.

Paul: I don’t know if you remember this Gary but there was only one day that we stopped shooting. While we were out there, John Lennon was killed, and I think everyone just said, “Guys, lets get a little quite today.”

Gary: That was around the end of shooting. It was December 8th. I woke up and the first thing I heard on the radio was that he had been killed. The great thing was there was that great hot tub – we shot that scene in it that people kind of love or hate – and there were times when I would go sit in the hot tub at the start of the day or coming off the night. I really didn’t sleep because there was always something going on. So I would just be in the hot tub with a little walkie-talkie, setting up the first shot for the day. [Laughs.] It was just so I could get some kind of real rest. and then when they were close enough I would run out there to run the shot with Joey. It’s hard to find that kind of experience again. I’m looking forward to doing the remake now that I’ve got so much experience under my belt. and with so much more technology.

Anchor Bay released Madman on DVD in 1999. Any plans for an update?
Gary: A reissue of the DVD is in the works. People have been having trouble getting their hands on the DVD. So we’re going to reissue. I’m not sure who is putting it out but I’m shopping it around and will make a decision soon.

Paul: It’s going to make a lot of people happy.

Will the soundtrack be available as a separate entity with that release?
Gary: That’s an interesting question. I’m going to look into that, since we want to get it out there. I do know that we have other kinds of extras to put out as well. Paul has a tremendous amount of extras, like, everything from the set from the day we started shooting to great gifts he’s received from loyal fans, who have done amazing artworks. There will be new interviews with Paul and myself. Unfortunately, we’ll have to communicate with Joey via séance. That should be coming out by summer time.

How have you perceived Madman’s fan reception?
Gary: It’s 27-28 years old, and to still have dialogue with people is great. At the shows we run into 18-year-old kids and 40-year-old guys. I ran into a guy at Fear Fest in Dallas that was on leave from Iraq and wanted to get another copy of the DVD because he seemed to have lost his or loaned it to a friend—he wasn’t really specific—and I asked him what happened and he didn’t say, but I got the feeling that the guy drove off on a mission with it in the HUMV and never came back. There’s a big fan base out there and we want to get more in touch with them, so putting out the reissue that will be happening shortly, and the soundtrack is something I need to figure out how to make happen as well. Maybe it’s a separate entity but Paul and I have definitely been talking about it.

What about the perception of the character? In my own experience as a kid, I thought Madman Marz was a terrifying Yeti and thought, “Why is this Yeti wearing overalls?”
Gary: [Laughs.] I think the very nature of the legend, of calling his name, is that way. Be it human, not human, a spirit, whatever, here we have the very essence of fear. He takes on the different aspects of the woods. He’s pretty much one with the woods in a way. He creeps in the woods, he’s got long nails, he’s barefoot, his hair has gone white. He’s scarred from his previous encounters with the townspeople. He’s pretty much a very serious entity. When that is entity is called – which is why they say not to say his name above a whisper – you are well, screwed. We tried to bring that to the screen.

It’s interesting that you bring up a Yeti, because he did have that large lumbering thing with deliberate movement to him. It was all intentional. Be he human or not, it remains to be seen. The vision of him when he appears is horror. You know you’re in a lot of trouble and you know you’re not going to be getting on a bus and going home. The audience’s imagination will beat them up far worse than what you can show them.

Paul: Plus he gets cold! Yeah okay, he’s a dressed Yeti. Could you see him stopping into Sears?

Gary: Everybody’s got their own demons. So by not over-giving them the look on screen, each audience member is going to take it and translate it into what scares them the most and make it much more horrifying than if you labor too long on it. That’s one of the reasons why we kept Madman mostly in the shadows and reveal later.

[NOTE: The photo above has not yet been seen before by the public.]Madman RemakeThere’s been some pretty significant talk about a Madman remake…
Gary: There has been more than talk. We've been actively pursuing it. There's a great tale behind it. Paul is deep in it. He of course has been Madman to the fans all this time. Fans have been finding him and sending him tokens and gifts of their esteem all this time. The truth is he's also been discussing the movie [with] me and the son of Madman, as it were, who was born during the making of the movie…

Paul: Gary let me tell that... We were shooting, it was fall. I was in costume. We shot only at night, which gave it a very creepy feel. We'd have lunch at 12 midnight, which was cool. Anyway, I'm in the costume and Gary was kind enough to get me a beeper so I would know when my wife went into labor. Sure enough, I had the costume on, make-up on, blood covering me – and the beeper goes off at 1 or 2 in the morning. I panicked, since I had to drive about an hour and a half to the hospital. People are pulling latex off of me, and I'm going "No, no. I'll be back in a while." I get in the car and zip to the hospital, and I get there in costume and the nurses come running over yelling, "Sir, can I help you?" and I'm like, "Where's maternity?" They're like, "No, no, no, you want emergency." But it was of course maternity, and my son Jonathan was born November 15th, 1980, so that's kind of how I keep track of how old the film is. He was a little kid. Gary had a shirt made up that said, “Little Marz.”

As time went on, he went about his career, and a while back I discussed thoughts about Madman, since he's a screenwriter. We got together and wrote a reimagining of Gary's original storyline.

So how likely is the remake?
Gary: [The remake is] very likely. All the pieces are falling into place. It's going to be a question of mostly getting the casting worked out and dealing with the studio that has the interest for it. We'd like to create something that has the qualities that we had in the original – suspense and good dramatic story, used with the great things you can do with prosthetics, and things that are available now. There's no question we can shock the audience, but I want them interested and connected to the story and the characters as well.

Paul: We'd like to create something in that same vein and take advantage of all the new technologies that are there. Anybody can throw blood around. We don't want to do that. Gary and I want to really try to scare some folks. The first Madman killed 10 people or something. With this one, no more Mr. Nice Guy. The character has been fleshed out a bit more, not a lot more, but a bit more. We know a little more about this guy. The early part of the legend of Madman Marz and how he became what he is in the original film, we show that in a very short time. We flesh that out a bit more, about why that happened to him and why he's so pissed off. I think that's going to make a lot of sense. It's going to be an interesting, more intense approach to some of the things that were in the first one.

If you could pick your dream cast…
Gary: That's a difficult one to answer right now. I would love to get, like, a Scarlett Johansson, in her younger days, for Betsy. I would be thrilled. I have some ideas of who I'd love. I haven't discussed it with them yet, but I thought a number of times that it might be interesting for the role of Max to reach out to maybe Meatloaf or Bruce Campbell. We'd be looking for really interesting people, who wouldn't be expected for camp counselors. I'd want to find some known but unexpected people for this kind of role.

I can tell you that we’re going to use a lot of different techniques, since there are a lot of great new tools that are out there. The kills that are written for this are extremely unique and the things that go down are far different than anything most people have seen. The story finds its way in a very similar fashion to the way it is in the original, but there are some new [elements].

The My Bloody Valentine remake in 3D just did really well in theaters. Will we ever see a Madman remake in 3D?
Gary: That would be a studio thing when we finally set the deal. I’m happy to do it if the studio wants to take the time and expense to do. It adds complications to your shooting and can take you 30 percent more time to get things done. You get great results if you do it right. I just saw My Bloody Valentine when it opened, and it adds a nice dimension to things at times, and I think the fans get a kick out of it too. Mostly because 3D is still a novelty, since it hasn’t fully broken out in the mainstream, but I think we all know it’s going to find its way out there and become more popular as it goes on. There’s pretty heavy-duty players getting ready to release in 3D, so I think it’s going to draw the audience’s attention. But can they translate it down into the home video market? Can people still see it in 3D at home?