Before Slither or even Killer Klowns From Outer Space, back when VHS genre hits were truly built on word-of-mouth, there was 1986’s horror comedy Night of the Creeps, a camp classic about a small college town ravaged by killer slugs from outer space. Out this month on DVD for the first time ever, the movie arrives in a special director’s cut with its original, never-before-seen ending and over an hour of bonus features, in the form of deleted scenes and six all-new behind-the-scenes featurettes which include examinations of the movie’s effects and creature work; cast members Jason Lively, Tom Atkins, Steve Marshall and Jill Whitlow reminiscing about the making of the cult classic; a special look at beloved genre star Tom Atkins; footage from a June 2009 cast reunion screening at The Original Alamo Drafthouse Cinema; and more. Two separate audio commentary tracks are also included. In advance of the movie’s DVD and Blu-ray release, I spoke with writer-director Fred Dekker; the conversation is excerpted below:

Brent Simon: What’s it like to have the opportunity to revisit the movie and give something back to fans, given that there hasn’t been a commercial home video release in so long?

Fred Dekker: It’s awesome, and in the case of Night of the Creeps it’s an opportunity to finish a painting that I literally didn’t finish however many years ago. The ending of the movie in the screenplay was not the ending that we ended up releasing, because of a disagreement between the studio and myself. So when Sony came to me and asked if I wanted to remaster it and do a bells-and-whistles DVD, I said, “Great, can I put the ending back on?” and they didn’t bat an eye. So that, for me, is the real prize — that this is the version of the movie that I wanted to release originally.

BS: How much longer is the director’s cut, or can you address some of the differences therein?

FD: Well, let’s just assume that spoilers aren’t involved, and that the movie is old enough where if you haven’t seen it by now, it’s your loss. It’s not that much longer, but spiritually — or maybe that’s too prosaic and pretentious a word — or in terms of intent it’s quite different. And in fact we did a transfer from an interpositive for the feature, which looks unbelievable, but we could only find the ending as a three-quarter-inch videotape, so we had to really finesse that ending in order to make sure that you don’t notice that we’re going to a slightly degraded image. But I’m thrilled that it’s the movie that I intended it to be.

BS: What were your inspirations for the film, and what do you think of some of the other movies that it perhaps in turn inspired, from the Chiodo brothers’ work to something like Slither?

FD: The obvious ones are the George Romero Dead movies; at that point there were only three of them, Day of the Dead being my personal favorite. I’m so clearly taking a page from George’s book. And Alien is obviously an inspiration in terms of the parasite that gestates inside the body. And then there’s a whole handful of references from the 1950s, visually and plot-wise, from B-movies like It Came From Outer Space, Plan 9 From Outer Space. And the other big influence that I’ve come to realize and appreciate only in the wake of his death is what an impact John Hughes had on the movie in terms of the tone of the characters and their relationships and dialogue. …I’ve never been a horror-movies-only kind of guy, and I realized in resurrecting this movie that it was an early example of a mash-up.

BS: And yet when someone comes out of the gate and has any degree of success or notoriety within the horror genre, it seems like they maybe have a harder time breaking out of that mold.

FD: I’m glad you said that, because it’s absolutely true, and if I’d had my druthers I probably wouldn’t have elected to do a horror movie as my first film. But one of the things that you’ll hear quite a lot from directors is that when they get their first shot they try to put in the kitchen sink, and so one of the things that I attempted to do with this movie was to do as many different kinds of movies in one as I could, just in case I never got another shot. So there’s a film noir element, a detective story in there. There’s at least one romance — actually two romances in there. There’s some horror, some comedy, some science-fiction. There isn’t a western sequence or a musical number, but pretty much everything else is reflected there.

BS: You mentioned your disagreement with Sony — what was the nature of the conflict regarding the ending, and do you have regrets about how you handled it?

FD: Long story short, as people will see in the director’s cut and hear about in the DVD extras, is that the ending rests on an optical effects shot, and in those days there was no pre-visualization or CGI, where you could just sort of put it together in rough form. So what I had was a matte painting, a miniature and a whole bunch of elements that were ultimately going to be superimposed together. But I made an enormous mistake — and I have to take the hit for it myself — and I showed the studio, and I even showed it to an audience, unfortunately, the effects before it was finished. It had a galvanizing, negative effect on everybody, they said, “Oh, well that sucks.” And I explained to them, “Well, no, the effects aren’t finished.” But they kind of just dismissed it. And this was also the ’80s, where at the end of Carrie Brian DePalma does a wonderful scare that was hugely influential. Sean Cunningham stole the idea and had a cheap scare at the end of Friday the 13th. So it was kind of the era of the cheap scare, and at their urging I [followed that lead]. So the [ending of the] theatrical version has always had this kind of dumb, cheap scare I’ve hated. So now I’ve been allowed to rectify that mistake.

BS: Prior to recording the commentary track, how long had it been since you’d seen the movie in whole?

FD: I’ve been lucky enough with a fan resurgence over the last couple of years, so I’ve actually been lucky enough to show it a few times — in Toronto a couple of years ago, and just earlier this year in Edinburgh, Scotland. So I’ve seen it a couple times, on and off, in the last couple years. There was a fallow period in the 1990s where I’d run across it on television and avert my eyes and run away. But I’m beginning to appreciate it more than I used to.

BS: So why do think Night of the Creeps holds up and still connects with fans? Or, for that matter, why so many horror films do?

FD: Horror is a wonderful metaphor for high school. We all go to high school terrified, and to take those terrors and turn them into vampires and zombies and stuff like that is not much of a stretch. In making Night of the Creeps I didn’t have a political or personal agenda, I was just making something that I thought was fun. But in retrospect it was a really smart move, if I can pat myself on the back, to superimpose the fact that the movie takes place in 1986, rather than say present day and have everybody with the big hair and shoulder pads and that awful color palette, because by saying it’s 1986 it makes it a bit of a period piece, and it also calls to mind an era when everything was very shiny and happy and Reagan was the president, but underneath, I think, was a great sense of, “What the fuck?” And I think that’s kind of the movie — it’s colorful, fun and catchy, but there’s this undercurrent of being headed for something b
ad.

BS: When did idea first take hold, and was the screenplay something you slaved over?

FD: Oh God, no. I’ve told this story before: I was having trouble sleeping and the line, “Thrill me,” came to me, and I thought what a great way to introduce a character, to set up a guy who doesn’t give a shit. So I got up and wrote the first scene of Detective Cameron waking from a nightmare and talking to a police sergeant about a body that had been found, and I hammered the rest of it out in maybe three weeks.

BS: Do you have any other projects definitively lined up?

FD: It’s been a tough road for me, because it’s taken my movies a while to find their audience. Probably my most successful movie financially was RoboCop 3, which everybody hates. So it’s been tough. I’ve been developing [things] for three years. But in my day job, I just turned in the script for the sequel to Cliffhanger, which I had a lot of fun writing. It’s a big, smash-’em-up, fun, popcorn action movie. And then I’m developing, with producer Curtis Burch, a very low-budget drama based on a documentary film about a playwright named Oakley Hall III — a really charismatic, interesting guy in upstate New York who in the 1970s fell off a bridge and suffered brain damage. And the film is about his resurrection and redemption, and finding his way in the world. No zombies or explosions, monsters or gunshots, it’s just people.

BS: So would the Cliffhanger sequel bring back Sylvester Stallone?

FD: I cannot comment on that at this moment.

To purchase Nights of the Creeps on DVD via Amazon, click here; to purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here.