Few filmmakers’ work exude the same amount of joy as the work of Steven Kostanski. His work on the whole – with films such as Manborg, The Void (as a co-director), Leprechaun Returns, Psycho Goreman, and Frankie Freako – show the playfulness of filmmaking that is very rare in the world of movie making these days. He dove headfirst into his first sword and sorcery film Deathstalker, starring Daniel Bernhardt, with all of his tools and tricks of the trade, using practical monster and creature effects, puppetry, and gore, and it rekindles the earthiness of the Roger Corman-produced original Deathstalker series from the 1980s. It’s rare enough to get a “fun” sword and sorcery film these days as it is, but to get one that could be considered a cannon sequel to a franchise that has lain dormant for decades is a really special treat.
I had a good time with Deathstalker. It’s a dream come true for something I never knew I needed. Who in the world would have thought that we would’ve gotten another Deathstalker movie in 2025?
I mean, that was definitely my logic when I was going after the property. Nobody asked for this, and I think that was why it needed to happen. It was the same logic when I did Leprechaun Returns. What a weird life turn for my career today. I saw it as just a fun challenge to rejuvenate this thing. It had been forgotten for the most part as a franchise. I don’t think anyone was thinking, Oh, we’ve got the next big thing here! Let’s reboot this!
Of all the people on earth to make it, I think you’re the absolute perfect person to do it. For me to say “the perfect choice” … It’s not like I would even have a list for something like this. The fact that you made it, it makes perfect sense.
The instinctual gut reaction that I had of making this movie … the thing that motivated me the most was that it would be a crazy sandbox to play around in. It’s not just a fantasy movie, but a budget, ’80s fantasy movie that’s in the Corman ’80s fantasy movie style. There’s a lot of latitude to play around in. I wanted to indulge in what I wanted to see from that type of movie. I got to draw on the genre tropes, like maybe a Lord of the Rings or a Game of Thrones. There was a freedom there that excited me a lot. I think that’s something that’s fun about this subgenre. You look at Deathstalker 2, and it’s just clearly Jim Wynorski going to town making a Jim Wynorski movie. I love it for that. I love that you can see his personality. That really appealed to me, that I could kind of go anywhere and do anything with this. I would get to indulge all of the fantasy tropes that I wanted to lean into and visualize in crazy ways.
That’s something that is very clear about the Deathstalker series: They’re pretty playful movies. The second one is almost a spoof. You’re a very playful filmmaker as well. The Void is probably your least playful movie, but I can see the joy of filmmaking coming through your movies.
Well, thank you. That is intentional, for sure. I want the passion of filmmaking to shine through. I think there’s no shortage – especially nowadays – of really talented genre filmmakers that can make grim, dark, miserable movies that are perfectly executed from start to finish, and I just don’t think I’m that kind of guy. I want to make stuff where you can see that we’re playing around and trying to figure stuff out, but for me the magic of filmmaking comes from the unexpected moments. Unpredictable things, and whether you can see it or not – perfect or imperfect – a little rough around the edges … I think that’s where real magic of movies lies. There’s a texture to making movies in 35mm over digital, and there’s a texture to making movies down and dirty in the mud, and it makes you feel like a kid. In the mud, mashing action figures together. I feel like my past three movies, especially, Psycho Goreman, Frankie Freako, and Deathstalker, I think they work as a kind of trilogy. It’s Steve Kostanski’s fun time trilogy.
I 100% agree with that. Tell me a little about your fantasy / sword and sorcery discoveries when you were younger. Maybe you weren’t even aware of Deathstalker when you were younger, I don’t know. What movies or cartoons, books, or videogames might’ve been your touchstones when you were younger. Maybe they directly or indirectly inspired you all these years later to do Deathstalker the way you did it.
Some videogames were a big influence. I played a lot of PC games. Two influences were 100% Heretic and Hexen. I was playing the N64 game of Hexen while I was writing the script for this. It was a very frustrating game, so I think some of that frustration maybe worked its way into moments of the script. I was also very big into Magic cards as a kid as well. Maybe that worked its way into this as well. I wasn’t that into fantasy movies, specifically, growing up. The closest thing might’ve been the Masters of the Universe movie. I loved it and still love it to this day. Yeah, like Deathstalker and those movies were a little bit of a legend to me. I had a friend of mine of who had an older brother that would watch all the R-rated movies with him. He would come to school the next day and explain the movie to me. One of those times he gave me a Deathstalker review in typical kid fashion, and this was maybe like grade 6 at the time. He would embellish the details and make it crazier than it was. I remember he described a scene where there was a monster man having sex with a lady, and then Deathstalker shows up and he beheads the monster man and then he has sex with the lady. It’s kind of an approximation of the opening scene of the first movie. The way he described it, which was sort of a kid version of it with lavish but vague descriptions. I remember when he described it, it sounded really intense and too adult for me. I wasn’t ready to watch that movie, and then a few years go by, when I was in my teens I really dived into the video store and I finally tackled all the Deathstalker movies. I liked part 2 the best because it was the most fun. When I saw them, I realized they weren’t quite as crazy as my friend made them out to be. But sometimes the legend behind the movie is bigger than the movie. It’s not that I don’t have a fondness for all of them. To this day, I revisit them frequently. We put them on at the shop in the background, while we’re working.
The thing about the Corman-produced sword and sorcery movies is that they’re very grungy and earthy. They were super appealing to me, personally, growing up and probably even more now, likely because I love the Conan movies and the pulpy aesthetics of that whole genre. The Corman movies are much grungier than the slicker Hollywood style film. You did a really good job of tapping into that. That’s tough to emulate today. Nobody gets it.
On our budget level, it’s not that tough. It’s a super low budget movie. The whole time I was making it, I was like, we’re in full-on Corman territory right now. We were out in a quarry in Ontario; everyone was cold. At one point we didn’t have port-o-potties, and there was another production shooting in the same quarry, and so our producer was like, “Oh, just go use their port-o-potties.” The other production found out about it, and they put a security guard there so we couldn’t use their port-o-potties. This is like … there was some real low budget shit going on in this movie. It was a very authentic Corman vibe going on. We were down in the mud. Held together by duct tape and a prayer. So, yeah. In the end, it formed the aesthetic you’re talking about, and I’m very happy with the way it looks. It was a pretty tough go. I have to give a shout out to my cinematographer Andrew Appelle. We talked about the look of the movie. I didn’t want the film to look like we were shooting in Northern Canada, which is exactly what we were doing. I wanted this to feel like a real movie, and give it a distinct vibe and its own flavor. I wanted people to be engaged but not preoccupied with “Oh, we’re in Canada, cool, that’s boring.” In every scene, we were pumping in atmosphere. We had smoke and haze all the time. The producers did not like that because it costs money, but we had to have it. We were watching stuff like Excalibur, and it looks awesome. We tried to understand what is it that makes it look awesome? It’s very dirty, and like you said, very earthy. But then, also, there’s smoke everywhere. Torches constantly. Everybody’s got a torch, or there’s a torch in the background. In our movie, in as many scenes as possible, there’s fire somewhere. It feels like fantasy. We fell on a bold color pallet. Before we even started shooting, we started with looks for each location. We had these pre-set color looks on the monitor to see how it would look in post. It really helped to form how we shot everything. It helped get the crew on board too. I remember Daniel Bernhardt, who played Deathstalker, he came over to watch playback, and we were toggling between the raw, ungraded footage, to this bold color, and this red that we made this quarry look like a hellscape. It was gold and red, and he just loved it, it looked crazy. It didn’t look like anything he’d ever worked on before. Yeah, being bold with our choices, and knowing that it’s a fantasy movie, it needed to be bold with these types of things. We weren’t grounded by any sense of reality, so why be preoccupied with that? It really helped with the look of the movie.
Mention your decision not to sexualize your Deathstalker. Those movies are known for going overboard and pretty hard into sex. You could’ve easily gone that way.
I would argue that this is my horniest movie yet. A lot of that comes from Nekromemnon, the villain. There’s a sequence where he screams, “Cum!” over and over again. He’s being approached by the final boss monster. I just chose not to lean into doing nudity. I know people can do that well, but I also don’t want to act like I’m turning my nose up at nudity. I don’t care. Other filmmakers can do it. For me, I have all these resources at my disposal to do cool monsters, cool action … my imagination doesn’t work in a way where I’m thinking, How do I get some tits on this screen? That doesn’t interest me as a filmmaker. It was a conversation that we had early on. The producers were like, “Deathstalker has nudity, so you need to figure out how to get some nudity in there.” Then the conversation turned to, “Well, if you’re going to have a girl take off her top, you should have a guy show his dick too.” It was such a lame conversation. Why am I wasting my time on this? I can be making monsters. Nudity would have been at odds with the tone I was setting and at odds with me as a filmmaker, so I opted to sidestep it completely. I was a little worried that I might get crucified for this. Thankfully, people who’ve seen it haven’t mentioned it and like what I’m bringing to the table, which is the other half of the Boris Vallejo poster. The first four posters have no problem delivering on the scantily clad lady, but they seem allergic to delivering the big troll monster. My goal was to deliver on that half, and you get to have that.
It’s such a treat to watch your film and get to soak in all the details of the creatures you create. How were you able to integrate as many of your designs as possible into this movie?
I approached this narrative with the logic of, almost like Ninja Scroll or Shogun Assassin. Making a budget fantasy movie, I definitely can’t have hundreds of guys fighting each other. What can I do? I make monsters for a living, and I know I can’t deliver an insane amount of monsters. So, then I leaned into this idea of maybe it’s just a boss monster fight every five minutes. One after another until we get to the climax. Once I settled into that narratively, it all came together pretty easily conceptually. I wrote it fairly chronologically too, starting with the two-headed troll. I wanted to start big and crazy. How do I orchestrate the rest of the narrative? Every set piece has a new set of rules. Every monster has to be visually distinct from the previous one and has its own set of rules that need to be navigated. That’s how my brain works. I kind of use Mortal Kombat logic. Where every character has its own special moves but also has its own weaknesses. Deathstalker has to learn how to exploit those weaknesses. That was the most fun part of this, was making up all these crazy monster fights. Then, I had to think about how I was going to make all these things. How is this going to work? I’m lucky to have such a great team of prosthetics artists. This has been in the works now for a few years and so many people in the Toronto effects industry were ready to jump on this project as soon as it went. My main prosthetics artist on this is a big Conan the Barbarian fan, and he’s got a replica sword from the film that he paid tons of money for, and I was able to speak a shorthand with him, which was great. It helped that I was sculpting a lot of this stuff while I was writing. As I’m physically making the thing, I’m starting to think through, is this going to be a suit, and if it’s a suit, how does it move? What can it do? What is its weapon? As I’m thinking it through, I’m putting it down on paper and I’m figuring it out. The Cyclops mummy guy can see through stuff and see souls. How do I visualize that? I need to make a puppet head where the eye can push out as a way of showing his soul-vision, or whatever. Everything happening at the same time helps it all take form. I’m writing the scene and sculpting the monster at the same time. But then, also, I’m malleable in that even as we’re getting into pre-production and production, I’m not the kind of guy who needs to stick to the script. It doesn’t have to be exactly like the script. I know what’s intuitively important to keep the narrative intact. But, on the day, or even while we’re building the creature, the wardrobe might create restrictions. We couldn’t put the sword back in Daniel’s sword scabbard. He couldn’t even pull it out. It only works with a shorter sword. That was something we had to figure out. He couldn’t draw it out properly. If you watch it again, you’ll see there’s a moment where he’ll reach for the sword, and it’ll cut to the other angle where it’s already out. That’s just the nature of filmmaking. That’s the world I operate in, entirely. You’re problem solving. You don’t have the resources of a bigger movie where you can just throw money at it until it goes away. The Dreaddite can’t see out of his helmet, so you’ve got to cut the eyeholes bigger. The shoulder pads would fall off, so you’d get red zip ties and zip tie the shoulder pads to the arms. It’s a constant game of what’s going to break, what’s going to trip us up? I’m in that mode of thinking from day one of writing the script. Right up until the movie is delivered and is ready to play on the screen. It’s constant problem solving.
Talk about working with Matthew Ninaber who plays several of the creatures in the movie. You’ve worked with him before, obviously, on Psycho Goreman and In a Violent Nature. I interviewed him about his film A Knight’s War and brought up the fact that he tends to put on these outfits and sometimes has near-to-zero visibility. That’s kind of his thing. He’s amazing.
I would also add that he’s a very creative guy. He’s a filmmaker himself. He can think of these things in the right terms. Department heads sometimes are very involved in their own part of the project that they don’t think about the big picture. He thinks big picture all of the time. He knows what we’re looking at, and he knows what we want out of him. With his performances. He’s able to apply that to whatever clunky awkward suit that I’ve built for him. For example, the two-headed troll. We did a fitting, and he immediately found a bunch of problems with it. But instead of whining about it, he went out and got a bunch of PVC pipe and built a whole support system in the under structure of the suit by himself. He’s innovative like that. He’s very hands-on. He’s actively solving problems himself. When he shows up, he’s got a solution already, so that’s why I love him. He’s super collaborative, very easy and fun to work with, and very committed. Every interview I’ve done with Daniel, he talks about his fight with the troll or with Thundrax, and Matthew could only see through a tiny hole in the troll. He was able to push through it with real fight choreography. Watching it back, I’m amazed he was able to get through that without getting injured because he couldn’t see or hear or do much of anything in those suits. He’s super committed. Instead of being crippled by that, he’s always finding solutions. Solving problems that I didn’t even know were a problem.
Daniel Bernhardt leans a little more into the John Terlesky take on Deathstalker rather than Rick Hill. He’s a melding of all the Deathstalkers.
I mean, really what I wanted out of him, I wanted was not to do a fake American accent. I wanted him to be himself as much as possible. The more I talked to him, the more I saw his personality. He’s really charming and kind hearted, and I feel like that should be the heart and the undercurrent of his Deathstalker. Even when he’s being tough or a wiseass, I wanted to feel like there’s a nice guy buried in there somewhere. We worked on that a lot. I did want him to be a little more John Terlesky, but I wanted him to do his own thing. I still think it fits into the Deathstalker catalogue. It makes some digressions, and has its own personality, but all of those movies have their own personalities. That’s what I wanted from him. Just be you as much as possible. Even with his accent. It sounded like a 90s action movie, having his Swiss accent come through. It was super charming to hear that. He was just leaning into himself, and not forcing a character.
You did a great job casting him.
It was a big swing, just instinctual. I didn’t have a thing where I explained why I wanted Daniel Bernhardt to producers. I just said, “What about this guy?” It felt right at the time. The more I talked to him, the more right it felt. I trusted my instinct. It would be cool to have this guy headline this movie. He’s not the obvious choice, but now that the movie is out there, there would be no other choice. It’s exactly what I wanted for this character. I can’t imagine anyone else.
Do you see this as Deathstalker 1 or Deathstalker 5? I want to consider it just cannon, just part of the series.
I’ve been saying Deathstalker 5 from the very beginning. I understand that the money people are saying, “It’s a reboot, it’s a reimagining.” We’ve been leaning into reimagining with all the marketing, and whatever, that’s fine. But, realistically, this is an older, wearier, more tired Deathstalker. A couple of decades have passed since his earlier adventures, Deathstalker 1-4. He’s grown a little harder, things have gotten a little darker. The universe from that franchise is almost on the cusp of being destroyed in a way that it never has been up to this point. I would say, for someone like you who takes this more seriously, as a Deathstalker fan, I’m going with Deathstalker 5.
My favorite moment in the movie is the throwaway shot that you did where the giants are fighting way in the distance.
Oh, thank you! People love that part. It’s so funny. We made that up on the day. We were filming this walk and talk, and we thought it would be cool to have this wide shot. It was raining, and it was foggy and there were clouds, and there were smokestacks off in the distance and we were talking about the fact that we would have to erase them out later. The conversation turned to, “What if we put something in there? What would we put there?” Then, we were like, “What if there are giant rock monsters fighting?” Then, it became this idea of, What if in this universe, there are these gods that are battling outside the kingdom? But everyone on the ground level treats it like road construction? Oh, we can’t take that path, the rock giants are at it again. We need to take the other path. It’s a mild inconvenience. Oh, I guess we need to take the long way today.
That’s so great. Did you have a favorite moment?
I love Daniel, everything he did. The whole cast. I’ve got to say, it was a bucket list thing to have a villain that chews the scenery the way that Nekromemnon does. I feel like I have my own Emperor Palpatine. I’m very proud of that. Everything about that is entertaining to me. I love me a good villain, and this guy is classically trained, a Shakespearean actor. He just went to town. Everything he says and does in the movie. In a horror movie, he might’ve been out of place, but in a fantasy movie? I love that kind of bullshit. I could have a whole movie with that kind of dialogue. I’m very happy with how that turned out in this movie.
I wanted to mention the score. You used Chuck Cirino’s theme for Deathstalker 2. That was a very deliberate choice.
Slash actually came in and teamed with Bear McCreary, and they did a whole theme song, which Blitz//Berlin, the composers, could use. It was originally just meant to be an end credits song, but they peppered it through the whole movie. They got Chuck Cirino to come back and reorchestrate his whole theme song. So we do have the original composer to reprise his theme in this movie, which I’m pretty happy about. Slash pulled that off. He had enough clout to bring Chuck in on this. I did not ask for that, but I’m happy that he showed up, and it was a really amazing bonus to have that in the movie.
Steven, I hope the movie is successful enough to maybe get an equally impossible sequel.
That’s the talk. We’ll see how the next few weeks play out. I’ve got an idea locked and loaded and ready for another one. We’ll see what happens because I would definitely be down to do it. I know Daniel would not shut up about a sequel. He was planning it out the whole time we were shooting this one. He basically already signed on the dotted line without actually signing yet. We’re all ready to go. Great chatting with you!