Making the Puppets, ’80s Feel on a Low Budget

Horror writer and director Steven Kostanski, who helmed indie hits like 2016’s “The Void” and 2020’s “Psycho Goreman,” knows his interests don’t always align with what’s trendy for genre fans.

“For years, I’ve been trying to push my fellow filmmaker friends into trying to make some kind of little creature movie,” he says. “It would be great to have little puppets running around torturing people. Who doesn’t want to watch that? Everybody said, ‘Oh, there’s no market for that.’ Everybody talks in terms of, ‘What is the popular thing in horror right now? Is it zombies?’ Nobody ever says, ‘It’s little trouble-making gremlin creatures.’”

Feedback be damned, Kostanski started developing a film in the spirit of genre classics like “Gremlins 2: The New Batch” and “Ghoulies.” The result is “Frankie Freako,” opening Oct. 4 in theaters via Shout! Studios. In the movie, Conor (Conor Sweeney) is an uptight businessman who isn’t interesting enough to keep his wife (Kristy Wordsworth) and boss (Adam Brooks) happy. Looking to loosen up, he calls a 900 number for Frankie Freako (Matthew Kennedy), a puppet who drops by your house with his friends to throw a rager. What follows is part party animal hangout, part mission movie where everyone heads back to the Freako home planet to defeat an evil ruler, and part sentimentality, where everyone learns some Very Important Lessons.

The whole affair feels very ’80s, with period tone, clothing and decor, an intentional nod to the era that produced scores of little creature features. Yet Kostanski and his team had a surprising muse to get the visual feeling just right.

“[DP Pierce Derks and I] pulled inspiration, weirdly enough, from De Palma movies,” he says. “I’m a big fan of ‘Body Double,’ so he was tackling it with the attitude of, ‘What if a De Palma movie got derailed by a bunch of rambunctious critters?’ A lot of that comes out not just in the lenses and filters we use to give everything that gauzy look, but also the production design, the wardrobe, the set design.”

Yet the most important part to get right was the Freakos themselves. The Ontario-based production only had a CA$50,000 build budget and eight weeks to do everything with the puppets in the movie. But Kostanski knew he’d be battling serious limitations.

“This was a movie I went into it knowing, ‘This is going to be a budget thing. Let’s be resourceful and figure it out,’” he says. “We definitely did. I’ve got to give a lot of credit to my team, who pulled out all the stops to make this thing awesome. It was a lot of fun — stressful, but a lot of fun.”

Despite the challenges, Kostanski would be thrilled to do another chapter in the “Frankie Freako” universe — but he’d want to bake some rest and relaxation into the production.

“Now that we’ve worked out the kinks of the puppet stuff, I think we’d have an easier time if we did it again,” he says. “I know Conor and Adam are into coming back to doing another one, but they want it to be as low effort for them as possible. It might just be a ‘Freakos go to Hawaii’ situation, where we shoot for a week and then it’s three weeks of sitting on a beach. Maybe it’s not the sequel everyone wants, but it’s the sequel that our tired, old bodies deserve.”

Watch the “Frankie Freako” trailer below.