When William Lustig, the director of 1980’s Maniac, says he’s seen a horror film that offended him, you have be at least a little bit curious. The NC-17 Murder-Set-Pieces is that film and director Nick Palumbo says Lustig read him the riot act after viewing it. Palumbo said Bill essentially told him horror films are supposed to play by the rules and this movie broke those rules.

Is this a backhanded compliment of Palumbo’s new film, praise from a like-minded artist or an example of a generation gap between two horror directors? Really Scary recently had the opportunity to speak with the Virginia-born, Kentucky-bred 34-year old director as he prepares for his third film, Frigid, a horror/survivalist film, which will be shot in Romania later this year.

Nick and pal

Nick Palumbo: I had Bill call me at my home and read me the riot act! He told me off, said the movie should never be released, that it was offensive. We went at it for about an hour, with me pointing out that my movie was just like Maniac, a unflinching look at a serial killer and that I thought Bill was getting a little conservative in his old age. But actually, his comment…I take as a compliment.

RS: Tell us a little about your background.

NP: Okay. I was born in Virginia where I spent my younger years as my parents split up when I was 9 and I stayed with my mother. I moved to Kentucky when I was 13 and stayed there with my grandmother until 1987 when I moved out to Las Vegas to live with my dad. I got my GED and then went to film school for two years at Columbia College in Los Angeles. I worked on some low-budget productions here and there but wasn’t doing what I wanted to do so I went back to Las Vegas and made my first film, Nutbag in 2000.

RS: Have you always been a horror fan?

NP: Always! I love it! When I was 10 years old, I went to a midnight screening of Texas Chainsaw Massacre at my uncle’s drive-in theater and that was it! Do you remember the kid in Tobe Hooper’s The Funhouse? That was me! Universal monster movie posters on my walls, reading The Woods Are Dark by Richard Laymon and Offseason by Jack Ketchum and having my family wonder what was “wrong” with me. Also, when I was still in Alexandria, my dad was a painter and he did jobs at funeral homes, mortuaries, hospitals, places like that and I was with him once – I guess I was about 6 – and I saw an autopsy. That should explain a lot about me. And when I was living with my grandmother in Kentucky, it was in this really small town with only one stoplight and it was SO quiet at night and DARK. You could see the fireflies light everything up and hear every single insect or animal in the woods! And the smell of the woods…this was the period I really was writing a lot. I was still only a teenager but I believe the atmosphere fueled a lot of the dark ideas I had. And you know, everyone was so nice sometimes it seemed almost TOO perfect so I would naturally begin to write about people and what if the "nice old lady” down the street really wasn't so nice…. So, in the end, I love to tell scary, realistic and gruesome horror stories but obviously my type of filmmaking isn't for everyone and that's perfectly okay with me. I make the kind of movies I would pay to see.

RS: Tell us about your latest “controversial” film, Murder-Set-Pieces and all the trouble you’ve had in getting it made and released.

NP: Oh my God! You have no idea! Well, first, Murder-Set-Pieces was my look into the mind of a serial killer. I did tons of research, interviewed guys on death row, rode with a Las Vegas homicide detective. Actually, when I rode with him, I had this experience – he got a call on a double homicide and suicide and I was with him. We were first on the scene and…well, those bodies had been there like three days before someone made the call and it was horrible. The guy had stabbed his girlfriend and baby daughter and shot himself. There was blood everywhere…and the smell. I threw up. And the homicide cop said to me that this was what it was really like. So when people complain about how “brutal” or “gory” or “offensive” my movie is, they should have been at that crime scene. That’s real life.

So anyway, we started shooting in October of 2003 and with getting arrested three times and all the other interruptions caused by the Attorney General’s office and people calling the police because of the screams they would hear coming from the house we were using to film, we didn’t finish until January 2004. I also had problems with cast and crew members who supposedly had read the script and knew what they were getting themselves into but would freak out anyway so I would have to fire people. And then, no one would process the film! Three labs, two in Los Angeles and one in New York, thought it was a snuff film and refused to do the work! Finally, Ascent Media in Burbank finished the film. And I was getting hate mail and people were saying I belonged in jail and then I started getting death threats! I’m still getting that stuff – I just bring it to the police’s attention. About 12 theatres in Los Angeles refused to screen the film…it’s been a nightmare!

And now, Cerina Vincent, who plays The Beautiful Girl, wants her name taken off the film! Her agent actually cussed me out after the screening and won’t take my calls. She was told what the movie was about – a serial killer who murders women and children – but she only read the part of the script her character was in. Actually, when I first talked to her agent and told him about the movie, he asked me “What are you trying to make? A serious horror movie like Cabin Fever? I tried so hard not to laugh and told him that Murder-Set-Pieces was WAY beyond Cabin Fever. His reply, and I still can not believe he said this, was “If you can come close to the horror that IS Cabin Fever, you would really be doing something.” Oh my God.

Nick and Tony Todd

NP: I had met them all previously at conventions, as a fan, but I also told them I was a director and gave them copies of Nutbag and said I would love to direct them in a future film. They watched the movie and when I contacted them about “MSP”, they all agreed to come on-board.

RS: Who is The Photographer?

NP: The Photographer, played by Sven Garrett who is the nicest guy in the world, by the way, but has that Teutonic demeanor which can be very scary, The Photographer is a glamour fashion photographer with a girlfriend, Charlotte (Valerie Baber) whose little sister Jade is suspicious of him. He’s also a sociopathic serial killer who feels it is his job to rid the world of “what’s wrong with it”, namely hookers and strippers and eventually females in general. He has these nightmares of destruction and death, including 35 mm footage my DP took of 9/11, which represent to The Photographer how America is crumbling and how he feels it is his “mission” to try and save the country by killing all these people he see as the cause of the decay of American civilization.

He also is very proud of his Nazi past – his grandfather being one of Hitler’s close aides and his mother being awarded the silver “Ehrenkruez Der Deutschen Mutter” (Award Cross for German Mothers) which was an award the Nazis gave to women who had large families, in his mother’s case, 6 or 7 children. But, he is also tormented by dreams of his mother when he was a child and seeing her dead body at the bottom of a ravine by some train tracks with a bound-up doll left on the body. He keeps this doll with him as an adult but is very conflicted about his mother because in one scene, he takes the Award Cross and holds it in front of one victim’s face and yells in German at her: “What is the difference between you and my mother? Nothing! Nothing!”

There is a lot more to The Photographer’s psyche but I wanted to leave some things ambiguous for the viewer to make up their minds about – not be too literal about why he does what he does.

Nick and Jade Risser on location

NP: Before I shot Murder-Set-Pieces, I shot a promotional trailer in New York City for a film I plan to make called Sinister and Jade and her mom, who are from Pennsylvania, showed up for the audition and she was just so amazing! So, I used her in the trailer and then, when I was casting “Murder”, I knew she would have to play the little sister, the strong character who takes on The Photographer. There were times when she did get scared but I was able to talk to her and remind her this wasn’t real and Sven wasn’t really going to hurt her and she would understand.

RS: How about the other children in the film, especially the one child who is so upset in her scene? How did you handle that?

NP: The toddler in the crib, in the scene with Sven, is actually the daughter of my DP, Brendan Flynt, and she was freaked out by Sven. I think it took about 5 takes to get that scene and then, when she’s running down the hall to her dead mother, that was actually her real mother, who IS German, and that took about 11 takes to shoot as Tanja, her mom, couldn’t signal to her or anything as she was playing dead. Those were rough scenes to do. Heartwrenching.

RS: What do you say to all the people who are so horrified at your graphic depictions of violence towards children?

NP: Read the paper. Watch the news. Everyday, thousands of children disappear, often because whoever was supposed to be keeping an eye on them turned away for a second. I see it all the time – kids alone on the streets, walking home from school, alone in the malls. Really young kids! And I hope that this movie might be a wake-up call for some people – that there ARE monsters out there like The Photographer and you cannot watch your children too much! Also, I tried to think of what would be the worst thing that could happen to most people and it would hands down be the murder of their child. No question.

RS: How about some of the little details in the film, particularly some at The Photographer’s house? And whose house was that?

NP: We shot everything on location – no sets were constructed. That house belonged to this big-time gambler who had just bought it, brand new and he rented it to us for $50,000 and said we could do whatever we needed with it. So the Toe Tag guys fixed up the basement to look like it does in the film – a torture chamber…it took almost $50,000 to clean that all up at the end of the shoot…and we had some photographers we knew who shot a lot of the glamour prints hanging in the house. Joe Zito was my Art Director and he did the interior of the house – made it very spartan. And the jack o’lantern The Photographer has on his front step when Jade comes to investigate was done by Toe Tag as well – it’s a carving of Jack the Ripper. Also, the blow-up Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” which is in The Photographer’s kitchen – that’s sort of my trademark now. I plan to have that image in all of my films. And Toe Tag also did that great skull Jack-in-the-box or Sven-in-the-box, as that’s his image – I got to keep that.

Also, as a bit of a cheat, during the trick-or-treating scenes, where all the leaves are blowing around in the wind, I had those leaves “imported” from Tennessee to give the scene a more autumnal look as Las Vegas just doesn’t have that. And the scene with Jade and Ed Neal, which took forever to film as he is SO funny – it really WAS that windy that night! No SFX for that scene and it was perfect as we had originally scheduled that scene to be shot the night before but did another instead and that worked out as there was no wind the night before. That wind really made that scene work!

RS: Why, with all the total nudity of the women, is there no full frontal nudity of Sven? Seems like the old double standard at work.

NP: Oh no, not at all! We shot a lot of scenes where Sven is shown totally naked but in the editing process, they were cut. It wasn’t like he or any of us had a problem with full frontal – hell, he was walking around the set most days totally naked. You just get used to all the nudity, male and female, and don’t see it anymore. Perhaps some of those scenes will make it onto the DVD “Deleted Scenes”.

RS: When is the DVD due out and what extras will be on it?

NP: The DVD should be out by the beginning of October and it will be the uncut version of the movie. I also plan to have t-shirts available at RottenCotton around that same time, with the “MSP” poster art and one for FrightFlix too.

RS: What’s up next for you?

NP: My next project will be a horror/survivalist movie entitled Frigid, which will begin shooting at the end of October in Romania. It’s going to be an even bigger budgeted film as Tony DiDio, who produced both the original Toolbox Murders and the Tobe Hooper remake, saw Murder-Set-Pieces and gave me a call and said he wanted to produce my next picture. All I can say about the film right now is that the cast will be full of unknowns except for one character where I hope to cast a famous elderly actress, the shooting schedule is six weeks probably in the Carpathians, Toe Tags will be doing the SFX again and the main characters will all be women.

RS: Is there any last thing you would like to tell our readers about yourself or Murder-Set-Pieces?

NP: I just want to say that I have always been fascinated by serial killers and what makes them what they are so I made a movie based on all the research I’ve done over the years. I didn’t make it to be labeled a “misogynist” or “sick” and all the stories about the film and what we went through to get it made are TRUE, not PR. I’m not an “opportunist” out to make a quick buck. I just wanted to make as real a film as I could about a reality in our society and if that upsets some people, well, that’s going to happen and I just deal with it.

Check out Nick’s official website: http://www.frightflix.com