Fran Kranz vs. the Bloodsucking Bastards

Er, I think you've got something on you. Fran Kranz (flanked by Emma Fitzpatrick and Joey Kern) gets messy on the set of office horror comedy Bloodsucking Bastards. (Image courtesy of Bloodsucking Productions/Shout! Factory)

When you're part of one of the most beloved deconstructionist horror movies of all time, you'd be wise to avoid the genre. But when The Cabin in the Woods star Fran Kranz saw the script for Bloodsucking Bastards, he was sold on the office comedy, not the gore. In fact, he didn't even see the vampires coming.

Kranz plays Evan, an office drone in a telemarketing company with no gumption, and no career prospects. He's so busy going nowhere that he doesn't notice that his coworkers are steadily being turned into creatures of the night. That obliviousness is something with which Kranz could sympathize. He said, "Maybe I'm just an idiot, but I didn't realize that it was a vampire horror film until my character does. I was reading it as an office comedy for 40, 50 pages."

That verisimilitude carried on to the set. The film was shot in a real office building, much to the interest of the employees on other floors. He said, "One of them came down to look at the set and actually envied our office space. Yet we'd walk around covered in blood and they wouldn't even look up."

If Kranz hadn't initially read the script as an office comedy, he probably would have tossed it away. He said, "I'm generally wary of horror comedies, especially after Cabin in the Woods. I thought that was so good and so well done that I wouldn't want to continue in that subgenre for fear of being stuck or typecast."

However, when the script arrived from L.A.-based comedy troupe Dr. God, he was quickly sold. On paper, this was undoubtedly their picture: Aside from a joint writing credit for the group, the cast includes members Sean Cowhig, Neil Garguilo, Justin Ware, and Dave Park, plus Brian James O'Connell got to take the director's chair home with him. Kranz said it was immediately a question that they had "a majority share. … They're an improv group, and they operate on another level, so to work your way into that would be a challenge." But as soon he met O'Connell and Ware "we just immediately clicked." Moreover, he said, "They put together such a cool cast, and once you're on set there's the crew, and eventually you disappear into the movie set environment."

For Kranz, the improv aspect of Dr. God's style is already an inherent part of the cinema experience. He has a sense of perspective on that issue since he's no stranger to the stage, having appeared in Death of a Salesman opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman, You Can't Take It With You with James Earl Jones, and China Doll with Al Pacino. He said, "The rehearsal process for a play is so heavy, it's so intense, because you must know what you're going to do and what everyone else is going to do on stage. Obviously, there's going to be freedom up there, but you need to rely on a structure that everyone's worked on and agreed on. Whereas in a film, it's so important to come to set, for lack of a better word, unprepared. You need to come with all your ideas of what it is, but you shouldn't feel constricted to one idea of what the film's about. You want to come in and give options and multiple takes, and take chances, and you want to fail some takes, because ultimately you don't know what the movie's going to be."

That freedom from the rigor of stage can be a welcome relief. "You get to a point when you're stir crazy. You want to try something different, and the muscle memory is so strong that it's hard. You go, I want to try this tonight, but the moment passes. Once you're up on that stage, something takes over." The muscle memory can be quite literal. "You try to mix up the inflection of a speech and suddenly you've run out of breath. Your body is prepared to work in such a way that, if you stray from it too far, it actually breaks down for a minute."

The light-hearted if gruesome comedy of Bloodsucking Bastards also provided a tonal shift for Kranz after the much heavier content of his Broadway run as Bernard in Salesman. However, it came with pressure of its own, with one particular line carrying a disproportionate amount of narrative and character weight.

It's one word. "No."

Stupidly simple as it sounds, it's a pivotal moment for Evan. Kranz said, "It was one of those things that you could sit and do over and over and over again, but I think the one in the movie was the first one. There was so much build-up to it, and the understanding that the joke has to work, that there was a pressure that helped us to get it. It was like in the story, there's so much pressure on one person that I hope it's just over soon."

Bloodsucking Bastards opens in theatres and on VOD today. See Film Listings for times and review.