ON SET AT JEEPERS 2
Actor Eric Nenninger talked with Dreamwatch Magazine on set about the upcoming sequel to Jeepers Creepers…..
Dark Universe took the time to type this all in for everyone, what nice guys! ‘Today I picked up the new Dreamwatch magazine and found this little onset news for Jeepers Creepers 2, read on…’
‘For actor Eric Nenninger, it’s the blood and mayhem that separates Jeepers Creepers 2 from the standerd teen fare, and its the teen drama angle that separates it from the standerd horror fare.’The Friday The 13th’s are all the same,’ he says. ‘It’s ‘Come to lake, hang out, wait for the attacks.’ In this one, you watch these kids go crazy. It’s crazy [and] stressful.That’s what we have; real people and some kind of storyline.’ Nenninger plays Scott Braddock, a member of a high school basketball team headed home from a victorious championship game. Their journey takes them along a lonesome stretch of Florida highway, where in the first Jeepers Creepers film, Justin Long and Gina Phillips fought for their lives against an inhuman stalker known only as The Creeper. This time around, the monster chasing their bus isn’t the only problem faced by the hapless victims: they also have each other to deal with. ‘My character is a little bit racist,’ Nenninger says. He’s kind of a closet racist, he’s a little bit homophobic, so there’s confront ations going on. God, I hate saying it, but I’m the asshole of the movie. The sarcastic, counter-acting one to everything that goes on. Just a prick. You’ve got all these kids who get into a horror situation, then you watch how each one [handles] it. I’m the bad guy, basically – except for The Creeper. I’m the one who tells everyone their ideas are dumb.’ Adding to Braddock’s problems is his girlfriend, Rhonda Truitt. She has just broken up with him. ‘She’s not afraid to put him in his place,’ says Marieh Delfino, who plays Rhonda. ‘He’s kind of a smart-mouth, doesn’t treat her very well, and she lets him know who’s boss. I think she has a lot of vulnerabilty, too. I try to bring that to the role. She’s young, she’s 16, and she’s in a relationship where she’s not being treated properly, even if she does put him in his place.’
‘Nicki Lynn Aycox provides the group with explanations of their situation as Minxie Hayes, Rhonda’s best friend and the only clairvoyant cheerleader among them. ‘I decided that maybe it’s something that she’s had previously,’ Aycox says of her friends, because she knows how crazy it sounds. She isn’t ready to have these visions, or to think about them and come to terms with the fact that there was something different about her. She’s got the strength because she’s forced to do it, and she has to accept herself very much earlier then she would have had this crazy Creeper not been in the cornfield. ‘I’ve never been someone that’s been able to watch actual horror,’ Aycox adds. ‘That’s why I don’t watch horror flicks. When it gets to that part, I just can’t look at it. It’s the gore… The suspense I love, it’s the gore that I can’t handle. When I got this part I thought, ‘How am I going to do this?’ You have to think really hard about what you want to get across, and how you want to lead your audience to those important moments. They’ re always on the edge of their seats and they’re always wanting more, throughout the rest of the film.’ For Delfino, the key to leading the audience is keeping the performance fresh. ‘There’s so many intense scenes, you don’t want to have the same scared face, you want to have different levels,’ she says. ‘There’s a lot of things where we blow up at each other, or we’re screaming because of The Creeper, so there have to be different colours with each.’ Kasan Butcher agrees, but for slightly different reasons. ‘Whenever I watch horror movies, I never jump,’ he explains. ‘I laugh when people get killed. Not that I’m a sick individual, but I kind of laugh. It was really hard, especially with a scene when I have these birds that fly out at me and I have to fall down and scream. They were like 20 feet away from me, and they were flying away from me, but I had to act like they [scared me].’ Though it may not compare to being killed by a flesh-eating demon, the production itself involved some other difficulties for the cast. They point to a sequence in whice the group bolts from the relative safety of the bus to make a mad dash across a field, only to be attacked from above by The Creeper. ‘It’s a full-on sprint, late at night,’ Nenninger says. ‘Night shoots are really weird, because you go to work when it’s light, and you leave when it’s light, and it’s like the night never happened. So you get really disoriented. But the hardest night was that night we were running. It was about 150- or 200-yard sprints – because they need you running full speed.’ For others, there was a certain surreal strangeness just in seeing Creeper actor Jonathen Breck on the set. For the first film, he was kept separated from the actors, so that the monster make-up would be less familiar and more frightening. That segregation was abandoned for the sequel, but that didn’t make the Creeper’s appearance any less strange. ‘It’s weird to see him walking around,’ says Delfino, ‘because you’ve been building this whole story in your head about The Creeper, and then the guy’s just walking around, eating a Twinkie.’
Courtesy of Bloody Disgusting
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