“Treevenge,” Hobo with a Shotgun, V/H/S/2, and Vice TV’s hit “Dark Side of the Ring” director Jason Eisener is back with the horror/sci-fi movie Kids vs. Aliens.
In Kids vs. Aliens, all Gary wants is to make awesome home movies with his best buds. All his older sister Samantha wants is to hang with the cool kids. When their parents head out of town on Halloween weekend, an all-time rager of a teen house party turns to terror when aliens attack, forcing the siblings to band together to survive the night.
Eisener co-wrote the film with John Davies (Hobo with a Shotgun). Ahead of the film’s release, Bloody Disgusting spoke with Eisener about the various influences that shaped his movie, from childhood fears to He-Man and the “Masters of the Universe.”
The central setting is the siblings’ family home near a lake, which significantly influences the plot and feels like a spiritual profession from Eisener’s uber-creepy 2013 short “One Last Dive.”
When asked about how much of himself he put into the story, including his short, Eisener explained, “We had written a whole feature film based on that short film. I sold it to a studio in 2014 or something. I wanted to be able to do all those things that I had been dreaming about, even though this is a such a low-budget movie. I was lucky to get a day where we could do some underwater diving. So, I got to exercise a couple of those things that I wanted to do in that feature film version of [“One Last Dive”].”
The filmmaker also incorporated ideas from another surprising feature film he’d wanted to make.
Eisener explains, “A few years ago, I had pitched on the Masters of the Universe movie and had several meetings about it and was doing pretty good at it. I re-immersed myself in that world. I have all the toys and everything. I had it all out on my table, circling it every day and thinking about that world. Then when I didn’t get the gig, I was so crushed that I entered this realm. Masters of Universe and She-Ra were the first things my sister and I loved growing up. I was like, ‘You know what? Screw making the Masters of Universe thing. I’m going to make my own version of that or take inspiration from how big that universe is, and then make my own.’ What’s in this movie, I feel, is just the start of something that could be much bigger if people allowed me to because I have the universe of it; it’s so much bigger than what’s just in this film. I want to expand it more.
“I don’t know if you remember, there was the most grotesque toy set for He-Man, this thing called the Slime Pit. It had a dinosaur skull that you put slime in, then you put an action figure in it, and the slime would all go over the action figure. Most action figures, like Ninja Turtles, had a slime side as well, too. I said, ‘Oh, I’ve got to have my slime playset in this movie.‘”
You can bet that the “Darkside of the Ring” director also found a way to include his love of wrestling. Eisener explained how wrestling and childhood memories influenced the baddies in Kids vs. Aliens.
“I probably learned a little bit of that from wrestling,” he said of the teen bullies, “where you have to have a good heel. The audience wants to watch the heroes kick the shit out of that and see them get what they deserve. Also, when I was a kid, teenagers were the most terrifying thing ever for my friends and me. Older teenagers. I remember when we were kids, we were filming movies in the woods or playing stick war; I remember one time some teenagers came out and started throwing beer bottles at us and chased us through the woods, just throwing beer bottles.”
Above all, Eisener found inspiration from local folklore.
“In Nova Scotia, where I’m from, in 1967, a UFO crashed into a harbor. It’s called Shag Harbour; it’s at the southern point of Nova Scotia. This is real; something actually crashed there, and a bunch of fishermen saw it. They raced their boats out. They thought it was a plane that went down, so they were going to try and find survivors. When they got there, there was no one, and there was no wreckage of anything, but there was a glow coming from below. Then days after that, the American military had their ships parked over it, and they blocked off the public from being able to see what they were doing out there,” Eisener recalls.
He continues, “Well, there’d been rumors, and there’s been documentaries about it and stuff. I had a family member who was in the Navy. When I was around the age of the kids in the movie, he was telling me all the things that he heard from fellow people in the Navy, saying that they had divers go down. They saw beings inside the UFO and that another ship actually came up from underwater and connected with it for a couple of days. Then they both took off together. To me, that was like, ‘This is happening in my backyard?’ It’s so freaky. It was so scary.
“I was haunted by that as a kid and really freaked out by it. Then obviously, when Fire in the Sky came out, it said, ‘Based on the true story.’ I was like, okay, I’ve got to get ready. I went to the library and got every book I could find on alien abductions and UFOs, and I kept a baseball bat under my bed.“
Kids vs. Aliens will release in Theaters, On Demand and Digital on January 20, 2023, from RLJE Films and Shudder.