Stefan Hutchinson’s been a great friend to Cinema Crazed since we began reviewing his comic books and our raves about his takes on “Halloween” and the mythos of Michael Myers have not been sycophantic. If you’ve ever read a comic from this man, you’ll know he’s one who understands the world John Carpenter unfolded for horror audiences, and why it’s remained so prevalent in the film community in spite of bad sequels and remakes. With that said, we hear from Hutchinson and his approach to the comics.
So what inspired you to write Tarantula Man?
Tarantula Man came about as a result of a long discussion between myself and the team who write the website material. We were having a conference about potential new content for the site, and Greg Mitchell (one of the site writers) suggested possibly doing Tommy Doyle’s comic books. My thoughts went into overdrive at that point and I came up with the rather wrong idea of a pedophile arachnid. I was thinking about things that would scare a child, and I instantly thought of how myself, as a child, I was constantly warned to avoid strangers. In my mind when I was young, strangers were shadowy figures that hung around by the school gates and in the garden at night. That was the sort of thing I was trying to tap into there.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, are you seriously jerking me around Kirkman? The final splash is all one big tease, right? It has to be. These three new characters would say anything to be let in to the farm and I believe it. This series was originally called “Night of the Living Dead” and we only had an inkling of what may have caused the dead uprising in that movie, and one possible explanation. There’s no way Kirkman would explain and hold our hands through why the dead suddenly started rising one day.
As a product coming out of the gates of the Weinstein throes where they took a painfully mediocre television series and turned it in to a form of producing an honest to goodness horror film, “Feast” kicked my ass from here to Thailand as a truly great horror comedy with some bone breaking action, creepy horror, and genuine comedy that induced laughter whenever it damn well pleased. “Feast II” takes the same turns as the original did but this time with Gulager able to take his own twist and storytelling abilities and include his own usual suspects i.e. his wife and father who prominently featured in the first half of the sequel known as “Sloppy Seconds.”
