“I’m basically retired,” makeup artist Ve Neill tells me. “When people say, ‘Why don’t you do makeup anymore? You’re so good!’, I tell them, ‘Because I don’t want to get up at 3 in the morning to do makeup.”
But that doesn’t mean she’s done with the movie business – not by a long shot. Because as of this month, Neill is in various stages of production or development on two different horror movies, both of which inspired her to try producing for the first time in her career.
The first is The Wolf and the Lamb, which is out in theaters and on VOD as of today! Directed by Michael Schilf, The Wolf and the Lamb is about “a widow in 1870s Montana Territory [searching] for her son – the latest child to go missing from a rugged mining camp – but when he returns consumed by a ravenous evil, she must choose between her love for him and an impossible sacrifice.”
Watch the trailer here, then read on for more scoop from Ve, including exclusive behind-the-scenes pics!
Despite being “basically retired,” Ve says, “I had told my agent, ‘Don’t take me off the books yet, because if someone calls and wants to do a Western, I want to do a Western.’” When her Austin-based filmmaker friends told her they were making a vampire Western, Neill knew she had to be onboard. She loves vampires. She loves Westerns. This was her movie.
“I said, ‘I’m in.’ They said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘I want to do it,’ but they said, ‘No, we can’t afford you.' I told them, ‘I’m not doing it for the money. I want to do it for the fun of it.’”
That’s how Neill started producing her first film, shot in Yellowstone Movie Ranch in Montana, and raiding the KNB EFX warehouse for materials.
“We had a lot of effects in it: autopsies, broken legs, all kinds of wounds, then the vampires with the teeth and the nails, and we had little kids as vampires – we had all kinds of shit going on. I thought, ‘All right, I’ve got to do this as cheap as possible.’ So my friend Steve La Porte made all our teeth for the vampires. We cast the ones that we could, and then he made some pliable ones that we could adjust by heating them and making them fit when we got there. Then I called up Howard Berger at KNB and said, ‘Okay, Howard, I need to go through your stash of stuff. I need autopsy bodies. I need broken legs. I need brow pieces that I can use on vampire makeup.’ Howard said, ‘Come on over, Ve.’”
Neill said she went through the binders of images of different makeup prosthetics that KNB has stored up over the years “because they have done so much for so long. So I picked out the prosthetics that I liked. It was kind of like picking from the Chinese menu.” Neill brought her selections with her to Montana and redid it all with that special Ve Neill touch, making everything her own. Take a look at these exclusive behind-the-scenes pictures! All images courtesy Ve Neill.
Neill is serving as executive producer alongside James Macmillan, Cassandra Scerbo and Mike Manning; the film is produced by Lunar Door, One of One, and Wagner Entertainment, with Chase Kuker, Jordan Kuker, Jordan Wagner, Nicholas Adam Clark, and Miah Smith serving as producers.
You can watch The Wolf and the Lamb TODAY, but you’ll need a little patience before you can catch Neill’s next picture. The day we spoke, she was getting ready to drive her pink T-Bird to Bob’s Big Boy in LA and promote Haunted Hookers, starring David Sheridan (Scary Movie) and Fango fave Felissa Rose (Sleepaway Camp, Terrifier 2).
According to the Kickstarter: “Haunted Hookers is set in a previously abandoned Nevada brothel just bought by Erica Lauren, a New York madam. Looking for a new start after being hounded by NYC police, Erica and her girls get more than they bargained for when the vengeful ghosts of past courtesans show up to get even with the men who wronged them. Inspired by actual hauntings at the World Famous Mustang Ranch in Sparks, Nevada.”
Neill laughed as she shared the title with me. “It’s a comedy, obviously.” She’s just looking to have some fun with this latest chapter in her impressive career, and she misses when film productions were just that: fun. “That’s why I want to produce, because I just want to make it the way it used to be for me.”
