“Dean Cain is the baddest motherfucker I’ve ever worked with.” - Sylvia
I met the Twisted Twins, Jen and Sylvia Soska, two years ago in Austin when American Maryplayed at Fantastic Fest. I was moved by the story of a medical student (Katharine Isabelle) who found a home in the body modification community, and used it to avenge the wrongs done unto her by other doctors. As soon as I got home from Austin, I watched their first film, Dead Hooker in a TruNK.
So I was excited for the Soskas when they hooked up with WWE Studios to direct See No Evil 2, the slasher movie vehicle for WWE Superstar Kane (Glenn Jacobs) as the killer Jacob Goodnight. As a guest of WWE at SummerSlam 2013, I shared the VIP booth with the Soskas and learned what huge wrestling fans they were, and Kane in particular. That was a controversial SummerSlam too with an upsetting defeat for Kane, but he has persevered.
Things continue to go well for the Soskas. They’ve directed the action movie Vendetta for WWE and are attached to a Painkiller Jane movie. They also directed a short in The ABCs of Death 2, which is now available on VOD. I won’t spoil which letter of the alphabet they got, but their short features an actress (Tristan Risk) getting revenge on a gang of sexist male filmmakers.
See No Evil 2 has its premiere at Screamfest on Wednesday, October 15. If you’re not in L.A. to see the film with the Soskas in person, it is on VOD October 17 and DVD and Blu ray on Oct. 21. I spoke with the Soskas about their passion for WWE, feminist perspective on horror and their upcoming films.
SuicideGirls: American Mary was a very female centric story, and not that every film has to be, but are there some female centric elements to See No Evil 2?
Sylvia Soska: It’s so funny because that was one of the reasons that WWE Studios and Lionsgate hired us, because they wanted to grab that audience and have a more female centric story. It’s so funny to say it, but See No Evil 2 is a total girl power feminist modern woman movie.
Jen Soska: Absolutely, when you have Danielle Harris, Katharine Isabelle and Chelan Simmons all together. Chelan was in Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil, It, Final Destination 3. Katie’s been in every one of our movies.
SS: Ginger Snaps, she’s on Hannibalright now.
JS: And Danielle was just born being a horror icon.
SS: Danielle has a pedigree. Honest to God, in real life, she’s an Amazon too. If I ever got chased by a psycho, I would call Danielle Harris and be like, “Okay, she can fucking handle this.”
SG: What kind of characters do they get to play?
SS: Well, I can’t say which one of those three is going to be the final girl, although Jen and I do have a soft spot in our heart for final girls.
JS: All three of them are written as final girls.
SS: Katharine, it’s so funny because I love her so much. Every time Jen and I work with her, I want to do something she hasn’t done before. American Mary we did a lot of different things, but in See No Evil 2, she’s so fucking funny. And it’s so nice to have a hot girl be the funny one, because you never see that in movies. She’s like pee yourself in the theater laughing funny.
JS: Also something you see in all of our films is characters start out like you, me, could be anybody and then something awful happens. In this case, a serial killer wakes up, and they go through a massive transformation by the end of the film. Or die.
SS: It starts like a John Hughes movie and you’re so in love with all of the characters, and then something happens and you’re like, “Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck.”
JS: It’s really so much a 1980s slasher, like the soundtrack, shots, the tone, the characters. The one thing that’s a major difference is you’ll find our lead three females are the most dominant characters in the entire film. You watch the guys take on almost a female role throughout the thing because you’re like, “Usually a girl does that” or “Usually a guy’s the one who’s going after the bad one.”
SS: Us putting gender stereotypes on their heads. How unlike us.
JS: And the women are definitely the sexual aggressors in this too. Kevvy Mental who’s done our music on everything is back on See No Evil 2.
SS: At the end of See No Evil he does the end credits and he got Danny Lohner from Nine Inch Nails and there’s a lot of unreleased Nine Inch Nails in that track. It just drop kicks you in the dick. When we were finished See No Evil, I watched it four times in a day. They’re like, “You have to leave the office.” I can watch this for fucking ever. Mary’s a bit of a downer, but See No Evil you’re like, “Fuck yeah!” It’s a “Fuck yeah” movie.
JS: Exactly. See No Evil 2 is a “Fuck yeah” movie and I truly think the only people that aren’t going to like it are the people that come in with a fucking chip on their shoulder not wanting to like it.
SG: American Mary was so big with the body modification community. Is there any element of that you could put in See No Evil 2?
SS :Well, there is a lot of medical horror in there and I think that was one of the reasons that we rose to the top of the list of the directors that they were looking at. It was really fun to be in a morgue. Jen and I have such a fascination with dead bodies. Then we started looking at the tools and the things that are actually in morgues, and we’re like, “Oh, this is fantastic. How do we kill people with this stuff?”
JS: Jacob Goodnight also performs body modifications but at a much more amateur level than Mary Mason.
SS: Yeah, it’s much more hack n’ slash.
JS: He’s just feeling it out.
SS: It’s like Ricky Bates’s Excisionwhere AnnaLynne McCord, “I’m just going to stab people.”
JS: Or Martin, Laurence Harvey in Human Centipede II.
SS: He does staple gun surgery.
JS: Yeah, he’s just figuring it out.
SG: Jacob Goodnight might do involuntary body modifications.
JS: He does do involuntary, not really voluntary. He’s almost got an innocent boy sensibility to him.
SS: Well, you think about it, in the first movie he has this horrible mother that’s tortured him his whole life and completely controlled him, and then she does. So in the second movie, it’s like this guy is trying to figure out this world and he’s gone through shit and he’s just trying to figure out who he is but he’s haunted by his past, so it’s just a really cool transformation. I always like knowing why. I love seeing people get stabbed. I like to know why they’re stabbing people.
JS: There’s definitely Norman Bates undertones to his character, and then there’s also the whole religious repression as well, because sexuality and alcoholism and partying is something that might be a hot button issue with Jacob.
SS: Because his mother fucking damaged him.
JS: She did. Whose parents haven’t damaged them.
SS: Not ours.
JS: Not ours. Ours showed us horror movies and this is the result.
SS: And we turned out perfect! The end.
JS: Turned out fine.
SG: I know you’re huge WWE fans and you’re not alone. Are there a lot of women at ringside with you?
JS: Absolutely.
SS: Yeah, it’s cool. It’s just like horror movies. Everybody just assumes the fan base, the majority is male. It’s like no, a lot of chicks really get into it and really like it. Especially with the role of Stephanie McMahon now in WWE. She’s taken on the role of Vince. She goes out there and she’s like, “You’re fired!” She’s like the Beyonce of the WWE.
JS: The Marine 4 shot in Vancouver right after and we got to meet Summer Rae, Danielle [Moinet]. She’s amazing and she’s such a WWE fan too. Obviously, because she’s a Diva. It was her dream in life to be a WWE diva and she does it so well. We hit it off. I love her. I’d actually love to work with her.
SS: Yeah, I was so pissed off that The Marine 4 cast her. I was like, “I wanted a Diva. That was my Diva.”
JS: Give us a Diva. Hell, give us the Bellas.
SS: I’ll take the Bellas but Danielle is on my hit list. I want her. I want to work with all the Danielles.
SG: What was the attraction of WWE? How early did you discover it?
JS: Back when Lionsgate Studios first formed in Vancouver which is where we’re from was the same year we became WWE fans. We used to go by Lionsgate and say, “One day we’re going to work there.” That summer I was channel surfing and I saw The Undertaker. He wasn’t wrestling, he was just standing in the ring with the mic addressing the crowd. I didn’t even know I was watching wrestling. I was like, who is this God? I love this. It was the same year that they introduced Glenn so when he was there, he was building up the story to introduce Kane. That was just it for us. We were big Attitude era fans. Then we started making movies and we fell back, and then we started watching WWE again. It’s only gotten better.
SS: It’s just such a show. It sucks you in. You can have not watched it for weeks, months or even years and you turn it on, and it’s like you never missed an episode. You’re at the edge of your seat and you’re yelling at it. It’s just so fun and all over the place and despite all the showmanship, it teaches you a lot of really good things like how to stand up for yourselves. As little nerdy kids that got picked on all the time, that meant a lot to us.
SG: How would people pick on you as a kid?
SS: Well, we liked comic books and horror movies and wrestling when it wasn’t cool.
JS: And video games. Everything that people like about us now, we were beaten up for.
SS: It was just like they’re trying to make this stereotype of what you’re supposed to be. You know when you’re a little kid, you’re like oh, I want everybody to like me. So we kind of went in the closet about out things.
JS: We were nerds, we were straight A students and that’s not popular in school.
SS: It was just too bad but I remember in high school we found a bunch of other girls that also liked wrestling. We had a little wrestling group. At lunch, because we couldn’t go in the cafeteria because we would get beat up, we went and ate by our lockers and we talked about, “Oh, did you see what happened last night? Oh my God, Sean Michaels is so sexy. I’m going to marry him one day.”
JS: He is not.
SS: He is sexy though.
JS: He’s not sexy like The Undertaker is.
SS: He’s just a boy toy.
SG: When did you become comfortable being yourselves and showing your true personas?
JS: It happened in high school as well. You try so hard to make people like you and accept you, and then at one point you just go, “Fuck it. People are either going to like me or not like me no matter how hard you try, so it’s best to just be yourself.” And that goes to anyone at any time. People who don’t like you will never just be good to you or be friends with you. People will find some reason to hate you even if you do nothing wrong.
SS: And life’s too short. There’s no guarantee that there’s a do over or anything after this. You might as well live the life you want while your’e here.
JS: Yeah, be who you are.
SG: How did I know which ABCs of Death 2 short was your from the very first frame?
SS: Are we that predictable? I think you know our style and I think that’s a nice thing.
SG: I don’t mean it as predictable.
SS: You didn’t predict that the vagina was actually going to be a tentacle monster?
SG: No, that part surprised me.
SS: Yay!
JS: You know, that’s a really high compliment because a filmmaker like Tarantino, you can’t say what kind of films he makes, you say, “Oh, he makes Tarantino films.”
SS: Or Rodriguez.
JS: If someone says, “It’s a Soska sisters film,” that’s a huge compliment. “I can tell that that’s the Soskas.”
SS: Even Ricky Bates, he did Excision and Suburban Gothic which couldn’t be more different from each other but you still watch it and you’re like, “Fuck, it’s that guy.”
SG: I also thought, “Hmm, who might do a short about the exploitation of women?”
JS: I felt there’s such a magnifying glass on us too because there aren’t that many women that participate in any horror anthologies. I wanted to do a commentary about the objectification of women in horror, because so often you see a female character and you see her breasts. You never get her name, you never know anything about her but she’s just there as a sexually satisfying object.
SS: But the thing is, Yumi came there to get her fuck on. That’s the thing. The funny thing is, if she just had a vagina and no tentacle piece, she would have been horribly ganged on by those guys. But then as soon as she turns the tables, God bless Conor Sweeney. I don’t know too many guys that will come out to help, to get ass raped on a desk for hours. It’s just kind of fun to see and it’s so nice because I thought they would censor everything. The tentacle going into the asshole, I’m surprised that’s still in there.
JS: I thought they’d cut out the semen and blood coming out but that’s awesome.
SS: I think it happens so fast, people don’t know what’s happening. They’re like, “I don’t know, I’m offended?”
JS: That’s going to be a GIF for sure.
SG: I think about this a lot too because I want to celebrate women’s beauty, and then I worry that I’m part of the problem if I enjoy the physical.
SS: You’re such a wonderful human being. No, you’re not [the problem]. It’s the intention.
JS: Syl’s so right about the intention. I don’t mind being called sweetie, honey or baby if it’s done in a caring way. If somebody’s talking down to me like, “Aw, sweetie,” I do not tolerate that shit but if some older gentleman says, “Well, how are you sweetie?” That’s nice. It’s all about the intention of it.
SS: Although I do lose my shit if anybody calls me a princess. I think every woman who refers to herself as a princess should be sent to a fucking island to become an Amazon because she doesn’t know what the fuck is going on.
SG: So I’m not that familiar with Painkiller Jane. I remember there was a live-action TV show. Was that successful, or is this your chance to do it right?
JS: I would say the reason it was unsuccessful is they didn’t involve the creator Jimmy Palmiotti or Joe Queseda enough in the creative process. They kind of pushed them out of it. One of the reasons people love comic books so much is because what’s on the pages is working. Many of them have been going on for 40, 50, 60 years because of the strength of the characters and the strength of the content that exists. For whatever reason, when somebody adapts a video game or a comic book, they think, “Oh, let’s update it. Let’s make a movieverse or different for a new audience.” That’s totally disrespectful to the original audience. So our Painkiller Jane is going to be 100% true to the comics and true to the pages.
SS: We met Jimmy and his wife Amanda Conner who is just one of the greatest comic books artists on the planet and we got along really well. He asked us if we’d like to read his script for Painkiller Jane. We’re like yeah, Jen and I both read it and soon as we were done, we’re like, such fucking unemployed directors. We’re like, “So, um, if you ever make this, uh, I would really like to pitch for it.” And then eventually we got attached. We’re like yes! Fuck yes.
SG: What is Vendetta about?
SS: Vendetta is our first action film.
JS: With WWE Studios and Lionsgate. Apparently we didn’t mess up See No Evil 2 badly so they brought us back.
SS: Jen and I love action movies. We grew up on [Robert] Rodriguez so it was always a mix of horror and action. So we’re so excited to do it. Starring Dean Cain. By the way, if you told me two weeks before preproduction that I was going to say Dean Cain is the baddest motherfucker I’ve ever worked with, I would’ve probably laughed in your face and said, “Oh, that’s sweet.” The guy is such a professional. He had coordinated fights every day and he was just amazing. Phenomenal talent and he’s scary in this. He is really dark and very scary. Then we also got Paul “The Big Show” Wight. It’s so funny, I don’t understand why he hasn’t played this guy before because he does sinister and he does powerful and he does all this subtle nuances with his eyes. He’s such a beautiful professional actor that we were just blown away. It’s these two guys just going at it through the whole thing. Then we got to reunite with one of our See No Evil stars, Michael Eklund, again. Michael, every time you work with him it’s a different experience. He’s a chameleon.
JS: It was so important for us to recreate what people knew Dean Cain as and The Big Show as. Just like with Glenn Jacobs and Kane, Jacob Goodnight had to be his complete own individual being.
SS: Paul “Big Show” Wight was so refined as an actor. Watching him like that, people aren’t used to seeing him like that, I was like [to WWE], “You’re talent is so talented, you could put them in anything.”
SG: They never get enough credit that half of their job is public speaking.
JS: Absolutely, to be able to have one take to do everything and they have to do it in front of a crowd that’s screaming for their blood. They can take something this big and on camera turn it down small to be more applicable for film which is brilliant.
SS: And plus, when they’re not working, they’re like the real fucking Avengers. They go visit the troops and they go visit sick kids in the hospital.
SG: Are both Dean and The Big Show villains in Vendetta?
JS: I can’t say.
SS: I can’t say. You know, there’s no real good guys and bad guys. It’s just a bunch of shades of gray.
JS: It’s a lot like I Saw the Devil actually because there’s no real good guy and there’s no real bad guy. You know the more they fight against each other, the less you can differentiate the good guy from the bad guy.
SG: What did you get to do in Vendetta that you’ve always wanted to see in an action movie?
JS: Kill a lot of people.
SS: I think we killed at least 47 people.
JS: And Vendetta is very much like Boy American Mary. We take a guy and we ruin his life and then we build him up from nothing.
SS: It’s beautiful. I like to watch people suffer.
SG: Do you see American Mary as a tragedy?
SS: Yeah, I do. It’s a very Shakespearean, but in a way you can look at it as sad, but there was really nowhere else for her to go. She was free at the end.
SG: A part of me hoped that she was so good at suturing she was going to sew herself back up and make it. But it’s tragic because I wanted her to make it and be okay, but it wasn’t in the cards for her.
SS: I want to do more of that story, but we’ll see how the world works out if we can do it or not.
SG: A follow up to American Mary?
SS: Yeah, we were always going to do American Mary and American Black where it’s the same timeline but you follow Dr. Black and all the doctors. The last one’s American Doll and you follow Beatrice and Ruby.
