A shiver runs through it

By REBECCA BARRY

Barry Watson wrestles maggots from his hair and hurls off his shirt.

The dead cat that has just struck him hits the ground like a flat basketball, convulsing gently with the squirming larvae. A camera zooms in on its entrails.

"That's not going to make the movie," he says, grimacing at the monitor.

Playing the lead in the horror flick Boogeyman seems more like Fear Factor than the moral American drama 7th Heaven he has starred in for the past seven years.

But he's in his element as Tim, a young man plagued by disturbing memories - and fake flying expired moggies - who revisits his childhood home to confront his demons. Whether or not they're real is the mysterious premise of the film.

A storyboard marked "Uncle Mike's Demise" dilutes the enigma, its comic-style grid of drawings depicting an ominous, faceless figure and a grisly slaying.

"It's a standard monster movie," says American producer Rob Tapert, whose inspiration came from Japanese horror films The Pulse, Dark Water, The Eye. "But by making it more psychological and embracing the films coming out of Asia, we thought we could play into the strange, 'Is it real, is it not?' aspect.

"There's been a resurgence of incredibly inexpensively made movies out of Korea, Hong Kong, Japan that have revitalised the horror genre. We're not remaking anything but taking that idea of westernising it."

That's nothing new for Tapert - he produced Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess, the cult drama series filmed in New Zealand that brought the age of mythology somewhat absurdly to the American mainstream, and Kiwi actress Lucy Lawless international fame.

Tapert and Spider-Man director Sam Raimi are making Boogeyman in New Zealand on US$20 million ($34.24 million) - a tough budget, according to American director Stephen Kay - and have employed a virtually all-Kiwi crew.

Lawless (also Tapert's wife) plays Tim's troubled mother, Charles Mesure of Street Legal plays his father and Pokeno plays the rolling countryside of small-town Pennsylvania. No one will realise it's too green to be America, he grins.

But with the winter come bare trees, and that's not much help when the film is supposed to be set in "fall".

So within a barren industrial area in West Auckland, its drab rows of buildings surrounding a rusty motel signpost to nowhere, a warehouse stores dead leaves that were collected during autumn.

It's an odd room - not only must the leaves be turned daily to avoid rotting, the wall is plastered with photographs, newspaper articles and drawings of smiling, missing children. On closer inspection, they are the identities of Boogeyman's cast and crew and much of the text is meaningless.

Next door, builders are constructing a replica of the main set which will be used in just one scene - but this partly renovated living room is capable of shaking as it would in an earthquake.

Scrupulous attention to detail has also been paid outside, where a rundown house, its windows broken like jagged teeth, gutters sprouting moss and dilapidated picnic table look 100 years old. But they were built - and wrecked - from scratch.

Inside the main set an uneasy half-light offsets a peeling bathroom. A quick glance outside shows it's not outside at all - a wall painted electric blue is lit up to look like sky. A surreal neon light illuminates a weathered rocking horse, tiny shoes and children's books.

It wouldn't be a pleasant place to find yourself alone at night, but Tapert says the film won't be so scary that it won't get a PG-13 rating.

"We dialled back on the blood. The Ring had a PG-13 rating in America," he says.

When Boogeyman is released in a year under a different name, he expects it will be promoted heavily, that the film's marketing will far outweigh the cost to produce the film alone.

But Tapert is a canny businessman.

"Spider-Man 2 is coming out a couple of months before Boogeyman so if they want to maintain a good relationship for Spider-Man 3, should there be one, they will go out of their way to push it."

Perhaps the distributors should take heed of director Kay's favourite Emerson quote: "He has not learned the lesson of life that does not every day surmount fear."