Walking onto the Brooklyn set of the independent horror-comedy Flapjax for our exclusive set visit is like entering a big-city resident’s gooiest nightmare. The team led by director Rocko Zevenbergen is shooting the “flesh apartment,” which in the film was once an ordinary flat and has now been transformed into something Cronenbergian. Or maybe Yuznian, since Society is an evident inspiration cited by a few of the people Fango talks to. Either way, it’s an impressively detailed piece of work, the walls and furnishings covered with drippy, oozing flesh. And what’s even more impressive is how quickly it was accomplished.
“We had a lot of talks about it beforehand,” says makeup FX artist Beatrice Sniper, “but when it came down to building everything, it was very time-sensitive. I think we were given two days to create the room, but then they were shooting on the first day, so we had to stop all work. It was in the dark, too, so we weren’t able to fully work on it until toward the end of the day. I think they wrapped two hours early, and we were able to really work on it then. And yesterday was when we got about 85 percent of it done. We tried to keep it weird, but also organic and lifelike, with realistic references.”
How the room came to this state, and what happens within it, can’t be discussed in any detail, since this setpiece appears at the film’s finale. What we can say is that it exemplifies Flapjax's uniquely weird approach, and it has its world premiere tonight at Fantastic Fest, with another screening on Monday, September 21 (go here for more info).
Zevenbergen offers a general explanation: “The logline of the film is, an overzealous fast food manager unknowingly executes the plans of an alien race by promoting a new breakfast item called ‘Flapjax.' Essentially, what leads us to this point of the story is a certain character gets a taste of the ’jax and wants more and more and more. And our protagonist Arrow, having kind of a fractured relationship with this person, bends to their will and brings them quite a bit too many, which results in the mess that we’re filming today.”
Zevenbergen and co. are at the tail end of the Flapjax shoot, with just two more days of principal photography left. It’s the end of a long, two-part production first sparked by the 2020 release of the director’s debut feature, I Need You Dead! He and that film’s star Estevan Muñoz began writing Flapjax, and “we spent two or three years just working on the script,” Muñoz recalls. “It didn’t start really making sense until about draft seven, and then it was like, ‘Oh, OK, OK. Now we’re getting there. Now we’re getting somewhere.’”
Part of the challenge lay in Zevenbergen’s aim to do something different with his sophomore feature. “I Need You Dead! was very experimental and intentionally challenging for the audience,” he explains, “and I thought we had succeeded in that. So with Flapjax, it was like, we wanted to make a pop-song movie. I thought, ‘Do we actually have the ability to make a film that people just like?’”
He and his cast and crew headed to Troy, New York, in 2023 to shoot in an abandoned restaurant they transformed into the movie’s fast-food joint, Hamudders. However, Zevenbergen relates, “We very quickly realized we didn’t have enough money and that the script was much more ambitious than we thought. There were a lot of growing pains there, and we had to basically decide to only shoot half the movie and try and make it as good as we could—and then pray we would find a way to make it work. Then there were almost two years of me trying to get the financing for the rest of the film. It was a pretty relentless hunt, with a lot of side adventures along the way that helped get us here.”
Zevenbergen continues, “Eventually, we were selected for the Sitges Film Festival’s FanPitch. We had all the footage, of course, so that really gave us an edge. Fatima Hayward from Blue Finch Films approached us and was very excited about the project, and clearly understood it. And then she spent about eight months pitching the movie to potential investors, and that’s how we ended up collaborating with Terrible Thrills and Prowler Pictures, who were able to bring the financing and also the structure for us to finish the shoot. And now we’re here.”
The Flapjax ensemble is headed by Gabriel Cagan as Arrow, Georgia Kate Haege as his mother Eleanor, Madeline Barbush as his best friend Louie, and Muñoz as Zeke, whom Zevenbergen describes as “the Kramer of the movie. He brings all the laughs.” The makeup FX team on the first portion of the shoot included Jackie Green, Kristina Miljacki, RJ Young, and Veroljub Naumović, with Young joined by Sniper for the second round. Throughout, Zevenbergen says the guiding principle behind the FX has been weirdness rather than violent bloodshed.
“The temptation is always to go gory,” he notes, “and there is an element of gore to this, but I feel like it’s better to try and invent something new. With Flapjax, we wanted to infuse the idea of melty pancake batter. I always think about how Sam Raimi on Evil Dead II had to change the colors of the different slimes flying across the screen from green to black to try to get the rating they wanted. And how it ended up giving that film more of a unique feeling than if they had just used red blood all the time.”
“That really stuck with me,” he continues, “and for this movie, it was like, well, instead of blood and guts, let’s have creamy batter colors. And the Flapjax are black, so let’s have black ooze and things like that, combined with cartoonish reds and pinks for the flesh. It came together in a fun and creative way that feels more akin to a cartoon than real life, which is always my preference.”
