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Now that Renfield is available on Blu-ray and DVD, I think a lot of people will be kicking themselves for not sinking their teeth into the horror-comedy on the big screen. The home video release boasts an hour of making-of featurettes and deleted/extended scenes, plus an audio commentary with eight crew members.
The track features producer Samantha Nisenboim, screenwriter Ryan Ridley, makeup effects supervisor Christien Tinsley, visual effects supervisor James E. Price, assistant editor Noah Cody, supervising sound editor/sound designer John Marquis, supervising sound editor Nancy Nugent, and supervising digital colorist David Cole.
Here are eight things I learned from the Renfield commentary…
1. Using footage from the original Dracula was Adam McKay’s idea.
Renfield opens with Nicolas Cage’s Dracula and Nicholas Hoult’s Renfield inserted into footage from Tod Browning’s 1931 classic adaptation of Dracula, a concept that came from McKay after boarding the project.
“This idea actually wasn’t even in the original script,” Nisenboim explains. “It was something McKay had brought to the table just to be able to talk about their backstory, ’cause we wanted to make sure [viewers] were familiar with the relationship and put them in present day. Believe it or not, there are people on this earth who don’t even know who Renfield is, so this felt like a really great intro.”
“This was a fun way for us to sort of introduce the relationship between the two characters,” Price adds. “In terms of shots and effects, we were able to access the original 1931 Dracula from Universal and then shoot elements of Nicolas Cage and Nicholas Hoult to replace into that footage. There were a lot of interesting lighting and technical decisions that we had to make when we did that, and that carried through all the way into the final color of the film.”
2. The codependency angle wasn’t in the original treatment.
Renfield is based on a treatment written by The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, which Ridley fleshed out into a screenplay. One major addition the writer made was the codependency angle.
“The original treatment that Robert Kirkman wrote had a more vague support group that he would use to poach victims from, and it didn’t really have a specific concept. So the concept of codependency when you’re a guy like Renfield working for a guy like Dracula seemed like a fairly obvious allegory,” Ridley chuckles.
3. Two horror icons make cameos in the film.
Nisenboim calls McKay “king of the Easter eggs,” which extends to casting. Did you know two horror icons appear in Renfield?
Fright Night star William Ragsdale plays a vampire-hunting older priest that suffers a fiery fate at the hands of Dracula in an early scene. (“I think it’s also important to note that we blew up the priest on Palm Sunday,” Tinsley says.)
Later, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 actress Caroline Williams pops up as Vanessa, the lawyer for Lobo crime family. Additional scenes were reportedly shot with the character but cut for time, although they’re not included among the deleted scenes on the disc.
4. Terrifier‘s Jenna Kanell impressed the crew.
Ragsdale and Williams aren’t the only genre favorites in Renfield; Terrifier star Jenna Kanell plays a member of the support group named Carol. It’s always great to see someone who came up in indie horror get bigger opportunities, and Kanell seems to have left an impression on the crew.
“Jenna Kanell, she’s amazing,” gushes Ridley. “She wrote a bunch of lines. I was like, ‘Oh, my god, this is amazing! Could you do a pass on the whole movie?’ Not just improvised but actually have lines written in the movie were amazing.”
Tinsley notes that she also performed her own stunts and is able to cry on command. “She was instant with whatever you needed her to do, emotionally, and it was pretty impressive.”
5. Nicolas Cage’s most extensive makeup took three and half hours to apply.
Dracula goes through four phases of special effects makeup as he rejuvenates back to his former glory. The first stage, dubbed the Picasso phase by McKay, was the most extensive.
“[McKay] was really looking for, at the beginning, to find this Picasso-esque silhouette,” says Kinsley. “If you notice, the ear is dropped to one side, pushed forward, so as Dracula is sort of rejuvenating and becoming a whole human being again, we see this sort of contorted figure, and that’s how we came about it.”
Cage’s body from the waist up — face, head, chest, arms, hands — was almost entirely covered in prosthetics, which took three and half hours to apply and another hour to remove after full day of shooting.
“The thing about Cage is he really embraced the whole process,” says Tinsley. Each subsequent stage required less makeup, with the second phase taking two and half hours to apply.
6. Nicholas Hoult ate real bugs.
Like spinach for Popeye, Renfield eats bugs to get his lifeforce, and Hoult chomped down actual bugs — albeit not live ones — for the role. While he had no issue eating dried crickets and cockroaches, he didn’t like potato bugs.
7. Corn on the cob was used for a crucial sound design element.
Sound design often utilizes unexpected objects to achieve sound effects. Case in point: breaking corn cobs were used for the sound Dracula biting into victims necks.
“Chris is very particular about his vampire bites, so they needed to be ‘more corn cob, please.’” Marquis says. “Chris is just super visceral, so he really wants whatever sound is gonna communicate the gore.”
8. Renfield shares a location with 21 Jump Street.
The church featured in Renfield was previously used as the clandestine police headquarters in 2012’s 21 Jump Street. Both productions were shot in New Orleans and shared some crew members. I’d watch that crossover!
Renfield is available now on Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital via Universal Pictures.
