Jesse Metcalfe (TV's Desperate Housewives) and Peter Stormare (Fargo) star in this horrifying thriller about a man who breaks into a mental hospital in order to save his sister, only to find out that the head physician is turning his patients into bloodthirsty killers.

BD: How did INSANITARIUM come to be?

JB: I spent my childhood in an insane asylum where sister was killed by an ice pick lobotomy. This was a very autobiographical piece. Well, no, that’s not actually true. I made all that shit up. INSANITARIUM was honestly the result of watching way too many horror films as a kid. I soaked that shit up since I was a little brat. We used to make bloody super-8 movies. I just love the stuff so it was natural that I would try to do something like this. Luckily I found some people like Mason Novick and Nick Phillips from Stage 6 who are equally fucked up and thought it was a good idea!

BD: Where did you come up with the idea for the film?

JB: INSANITARIUM is (obviously) homage to a lot of other movies. Starting with the concept which harkens back to Sam Fuller’s “Shock Corridor”, and of course, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” There’s also a healthy portion of good old George A. Romero zombie action thrown in for good measure. The difference being that our patients are not zombies in the un-dead sense of the word. There’s just cannibalistic psychotic freaks. It’s a subtle but important distinction, especially to horror fans of zombie flicks who get their panties all twisted up when you start messing with their mythology.

BD: Were you nervous going into your first directing gig?

JB: I was terrified. The first day was like an out of body experience. I could hear myself saying things and then wondering who was inside my head making all these decisions. From Day 2 on, everything was fine.

BD: How did it go?

JB: The biggest surprise to me was the level of questioning that takes place on the set. A director is basically a human answer machine. In between takes, the department heads and everyone else within earshot would swarm me with all kids of questions – how much blood over here (a lot more), what about this cat (rip its head off), where should the machete go (through her face), etc. You get the idea. It’s overwhelming and exciting and then it’s all over so fast and your locked up in the editing room like the characters in the film, being forced to watch your footage over and over again like Alex in “Clockwork Orange.” A beautiful kind of torture.

BD: What were some highs and lows of the production?

JB: Shooting the Maximum Security set was a real high. We built that entire set from scratch in an abandonded wing of this closed down hospital called RFK Memorial down near LAX. Those are real glass doors and we put the floor down, everything. For the amount of money we had, I think our production designer (Talon McKenna) did a great job.

Of course, the other high was working with such a great cast. Peter Stormare? Are you kidding me? And Jesse Metcalfe who jumped into a role miles away from anything he’s ever done before and nailing it. Everyone was great and we had a blast. Most importantly, everyone really supported my decision to play the material as straight and grounded as possible and let the situations and characters as written bring the weirdness and humor into the film. The result is very strange and that’s exactly what you want if your film is called INSANITARIUM.

The lows were having little money, no time and the fact that it was all over so quickly. I am still waking up in the middle of the night thinking about things I could have done differently. Oh, well… we’ll get it on the next one.

BD: How gory is the film, did you get to make it as bloody as you wanted or were there rules from Sony?

JB: The film I presented to Sony originally was quite a bit bloodier. All the major sequences are still there but they didn’t like the sub-plot of Jack’s Mother appearing to him so we had to cut her out. She actually appears to him when he is unconscious for a moment but for the most part you will find her in the deleted scenes on the DVD. This was sad for me because Dale Horowitz really sunk her teeth into the role and endured like five or six hours of make-up to show her progressive decomposition. We had live maggots on her and pieces of brain being pulled out through her lobotomy scars. You know, the juicy stuff. But at the end of the day, I think that was too much for Sony. They also made me scale back the gore somewhat but I think most people feel like there is plenty of blood in the film to go around. Maybe the B-D crowd could stand a little more splatter, God knows I certainly wouldn’t mind it, but you gotta hate the game not the player. I was just trying to get as much in the film as I could!

BD: Is horror your first love?

JB: Yes. I’ve been a fan for as long as I can remember. My dad took me to see The Who’s “Tommy” when I was like five or six years old and it FREAKED me out. Tina Turner as the acid queen when she puts Tommy in a sarcophagus laden with hypodermic needles and snakes? It leaves an impression on a five year old. Later I realized that Ken Russell was a genius, of course. Then there was the 80’s. I was a big fan of anything that was touched by Tom Savini, Rick Baker, Dick Smith, Rob Bottin. These guys were like rock stars to me and my friends growing up!

BD: What films or filmmakers inspired you as a filmmaker?

JB: I like movies that are realistic and weird. Ken Russell is a good example of this. His movie “The Devils” is very strange. Also, the work of Kubrick. That is a very lofty reference, I know, but we really tried to replicate that sterile, over-lit, austere atmosphere that he basically invented in our Maximum Security sequences. The problem was we had like 25 bucks and a day and a half…

BD: MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN is coming up soon, how did you become attached to write that?

JB: I have been friends with producer Joe Daley for many years and he approached me to adapt one of the short stories from Clive’s famous anthology “The Books of Blood.” After securing a signed, hard cover version of the books from his I told him I didn’t need to read them again because they had been imprinted on my DNA already and the story I wanted to adapt was “Midnight Meat Train.”

BD: Was it difficult turning that into a feature film from a short story?

JB: I got some static from Joe when I mentioned this story because everyone loves it and there had been a few attempts at coming up with a script which had failed. My approach was simple, for the film to work we needed to be able to share Leon’s wonderment and obsession with the city in a visual way that would translate on film. That was why I chose to make him photographer. It allowed us a visual device to draw Leon (and the audience) into this dark world below the city.

BD: Was Clive involved at all?

JB: Clive liked the approach I was suggesting and agreed to let me take a stab at the script. He was great to work with, giving me plenty of freedom to play around with his characters and world as if they were my own. He would also come in during the process and give some fantastic advice. He is a genius with story. What has he written, like three thousand books? So any advice he would offer I was happy to take. But for the bulk of the process he was very hands off. When I was done, Clive came in and gave the script a polish to make sure that his characters and creatures all lived up to his expectations. He’s been waiting a long time to see this story on film so I was glad he had the opportunity to be involved.

BD: Did you see the film? Did it live up to your own vision?

JB: When Lakeshore brought in Ryuhei Kitamura to direct, I thought it was a stroke of genius. His visual style compliments everything we were trying to do with the story. There is a sense of beauty that he extracts from a very ugly side of our world. It’s amazing he can do that. And the action sequences he creates are unlike anyone else.

I remember the first time I met Ryuhei, he is a Barker fan like myself and we both very much wanted to treat Clive’s material with a sense of respect. To give Barker fans the gift of seeing one of their favorite stories in a way that honored the spirit and themes of the original piece of fiction. There will always be those people who say you should have shot the actual short story, word for word, but that is not realistic so we tried to stay true to what makes the story work. I think we were successful.

BD: What do you have coming up next? More horror? Can you give us any details?

JB: I just finished a script called “The Hell Within” based on an original idea by Brazilian horror director Dennison Ramalho. He is best known for his short film “Love From Mother Only” which basically destroyed audiences at Fantasia Fest a few years back. He has just finished the latest Coffin Joe film in Brazil called “Embodiment of Evil” which he co-wrote with José Mojica Marins. He is a wicked bastard which is why we get along so well and when he came to me with the idea for “The Hell Within”, I jumped at the chance. Think of it as “Rosemary’s Baby” meets “The Serpent and the Rainbow.” Much of the film takes place in the Brazilian jungle and there is some serious Macumba going on. Basically the most evil piece of material that we could come up with. If we are able to get half of it on the screen it will seriously mess some people up. Which is what all this bullshit is all about, right? Fucking with people’s heads.