Horror Hotel - "Tilt" Rehearsals

by Ricky Hess

Those of you who regularly read this blog know that the MonsterBusters have been working on a new anthology web series called Horror Hotel. This past weekend we held a dress rehearsal for "Tilt", our pilot episode for the series that follows an android and her abusive owner as they plot to kidnap a well-known computer programmer.

You may recognize the beautiful Marie Barker from Making the Cut; she’ll be playing the role of an android assistant. Being a huge sci-fi fan, I wanted her to follow Asimov’s three laws of robotics, and you’ll see throughout the episode that she does indeed do so.

I really wanted to emphasize her eyes- one of my favorite films is John Carpenter’s They Live, and I love how Meg Foster’s eyes appear almost artificial. The inhabitants of Arrakis from Dune and their spice-induced, impossibly blue eyes were another inspiration. I wanted the android in "Tilt" to have eyes that really set her apart from her human counterparts, and to accomplish this we're having Marie wear blue contacts. Since her eyes are naturally blue the contacts are really pushing her eyes toward that impossibly blue color I was looking for.

Towards the end of the episode she is damaged and goes into what I describe as ‘terminator-mode’; for these scenes we switch out the blue contacts with red contacts. What’s really cool about the red contacts is that the red diminishes closer to the pupil, and when her natural blue starts to show through it really gives her a creepy look... like maybe she’s changing into something even more dangerous.

We also have a few new actors that you haven’t seen before in one of our productions. Ronny Mathew will be our international spy computer programmer. I knew he was perfect for a MonsterBuster flick when he showed up in an old-school video game shirt. I liked it so much that I asked him to wear that shirt in the actual episode.

We’ve even got some Nazis as portrayed by Tanner Gould and our frequent creature actor, Nathan DeRussy. I was really impressed at how well the Nazi costumes turned out- at first, I was dancing around the idea because I wasn’t sure we could make it convincing but to my surprise they turned out quite perfect.

Of course we can’t forget the man of the hour, Johnny Harvill, who plays the role of Merle, the android's abusive cowboy owner. He’s so convincing as the character that I’m still a little creeped out by him. In reality Johnny’s a real nice guy with stories that I swear could be future Horror Hotel episodes.

Shooting officially starts this weekend- with Nazis, a robot chick, a cowboy, and a spy, how could this not be an awesome first episode?