Kaiju United continues their crusade to find interesting and fun voices from all over the world! Richard Svensson, otherwise known as The Lone Animator (or YouTube username bluworm), creates amazing stop-motion films. From the macabre atmospheres of Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft to fun homages of classic Roger Corman monsters of yesteryear, Richard’s passion for keeping stop-motion as an art form alive and well knows no bounds. For those of you paying close attention, we gushed about Richard previously, with his short film Rumble on Monster Island getting high praise. KU’s very own Jacob got to sit down with Richard near the beginning of the year to discuss his stop-motion, legendary Swedish filmmakers, and never letting go of the things we love. Read on and learn more about this brilliant filmmaker from Sweden!
You can find him on the following:
Our Interview:
JL: Jacob Lyngle (KU)
RS: Richard Svensson
JL: Hello, Kaiju United readers, listeners, however you’re tuning in… we are here today with Richard Svensson! Richard is a Swedish filmmaker, known as The Lone Animator, or on YouTube as bluworm. He has a wonderful YouTube channel, where he makes incredible stop motion films involving creatures, bumps in the night, and other spooky entities! He also does some fun kaiju art on the side. You can just call him a renaissance man. He does everything. It’s pretty great. Richard, do you want to introduce yourself?
RS: Yeah, sure! I as you probably mentioned, I’m Swedish, and I live in Sweden. I was born in 1974. Growing up in the late 70s and during the 80s, we had all the good stuff. We had a bunch of pop culture stuff that still influences movies, music, comic books, and literature. I started being creative at a very young age, for example, drawing stuff, making stuff out of plasticine, toy clay, pipe cleaners and stuff like that. Eventually, I got hold of a Super-8 camera, and I started making short films with my buddies, as everyone does, it seems. We did all the stupid things, like vampire movies, dressing up as mummies, and more. We also did a fair bit of fantasy stuff from Swedish folklore like fairytales with trolls and gnomes. My friends and I could use the beautiful Swedish natural scenery, as a free set, if you will.
Eventually, I obtained a computer and then started doing stop-motion animations. I was hooked. I just kept doing it. When YouTube appeared, I got onto the platform, I think, in the second year YouTube existed. I’ve been around from the very beginning and I’m still there. Really, I’m trying to build an audience, because the more people you get to come around and watch, the more ambitious you get. When you have a returning audience, you try to do your best work for them. It’s great having people from all over the world coming to watch your stuff, not just people from your own culture. I also do illustration work. My day job is actually as an illustrator; I work for a couple of companies that produce board games and children’s books and stuff like that.
JL: Have any of those been released here? Are they just in Sweden?
RS: Not to my knowledge, though, I have illustrated books for authors in the US.
JL: What’s your earliest kaiju or monster movie memory? Where did the monster love all begin for you?
RS: My mom and I were at home, and she was sitting on the couch and knitting. At the time we had very little money. My dad owned a gas station. He was always working at the gas station. This was probably the weekend. We had just been given my grandparents’ old TV because they had bought a new TV. We got the old one, which was black and white. And as she recalls it, I was three, three years old. I was sitting on the floor by the TV, changing the channels. If you didn’t know, back then you had to be turning the knobs like dials when we had to change the channel. And it took a while for it to wake up.
Suddenly, the image and sound erupted. There were two giant dinosaur-like creatures tearing down a city. They’re making horrible screeching noises. My eyes went HUGE! I turned around to my mom and said, “Are they nearby?” She looked at me confused, and replied, “What are you talking about?” I figured it was on TV, so this must be happening for real. But how far away? Is it happening? My mom went up and changed the channel and told me that it wasn’t appropriate for me. I was apparently so upset I was crying and I had nightmares for a couple of days after, but I couldn’t stop looking at the damn thing. I was just utterly fascinated by that. When she explained this is a movie, it’s not for real, it’s fake, I couldn’t process that. How could this be fake? Look at it. This can’t be fake. Several years later, I figured out that what I must have seen was Gappa: The Triphibian Monster. I specifically remembered that had these kind of bird-like beaks and hey were making this screeching sound that they do in that movie.
JL: What an introduction!
RS: A very traumatic introduction. I remember it lovingly, though. My mom wouldn’t let me watch any more after that, sadly. It took about to when we got our first VHS in 1980 that I would experience another kaiju film. The first movie we rented, after I nagged my parents, was what the Americans call Revenge of Mechagodzilla. But when we rented it, it was a British copy called Monsters from An Unknown Planet. I don’t know why so many people hate this movie. It’s still one of my favorite Godzilla movies because I think it’s awesomely shot, especially in how they reveal the monsters when they come walking out of the smoke at night in the city, and stuff like that.
JL: Did any of these kaiju films directly inspire you to create stop-motion?
I saw King Kong when I was five. My brain short circuited. I realized it was puppet animation. When I was growing up, Swedish television bought stop-motion children’s films from the Eastern block by the bucketload. Probably wasn’t all that expensive. Short movies from Russia and Poland and Czechoslovakia. You could see that the puppets were made from felt, wood, and paper-maché. They inhabited worlds made from those materials, and it all felt really artificial. But then King Kong came on. Kong and those dinosaurs looked like real animals. Real people interacted with them. They walked around in real jungles. I realized that this was something completely new. And then a few years later, I saw Clash of the Titans and I said, holy crap, this is Greek mythology for real. I thought to myself, so you don’t have to do only dinosaurs with puppet animation. You can do whatever you want with it!
JL: You’re from Sweden and you make movies; I have to ask. As a film fanatic, Ingmar Bergman, do you frequent his films?
RS: I’m a big fan, because he was a very interesting character. He was a terrible human being, and he never apologized for anything of it, but he acknowledged it. He didn’t mind talking about it. His movies are perceived as being very talky, but they’re also often very atmospheric. He worked with a couple of directors of photography, who were excellent. I think the most well-known one was Sven Nykvist, who also work with a couple of American directors, Woody Allen, among others. But, it was always Bergman’s vision of how he wanted the mood, and the lightning and all that stuff. There is this kind of intangible atmosphere within Bergman’s films. You can see it in many other European filmmakers too, for instance, Fellini. Texture, I guess you could call it, there’s a texture to everything. The light, the shadows, colors and everything. And then in also in Italy we had Mario Bava, who did a lot of Gothic horrors. And I actually compare Bava and his visual style to Bergman, who mostly worked in black and white. You can see this if you look at if you look at The Seventh Seal, which is shot and lit like an Italian horror movie, and The Hour of the Wolf, which is Bergman’s only direct horror film.
JL: He’s my favorite director. Hour of the Wolf is something else!
RS: Have you seen Fanny and Alexander?
JL: I own it. I need to watch it.
RS: There’s a TV version, which is four or five hours long. It’s endless. And that’s actually the best version. It is incredibly atmospheric and incredibly creepy and disturbing at times. It has really all of these myths within a family saga. Through that lens, it has real moments of what I consider to be gothic horror as well. Supernatural stuff.
JL: That description almost reminds me of the modern film, Hereditary, where it’s modeled after a family drama. That one goes a little more extreme into horror. But yeah, you know, the roots of it are that family tension and drama.
Do you focus more on the atmospheric monster stuff? In your films, I know that you’ve adapted works by Edgar Allen Poe and HP Lovecraft. Are you a fan of the original Godzilla film with that kind of looming atmosphere? Or are you into more into the fun stuff, like the Roger Corman creatures we see in Rumble on Monster Island?
RS: I like both approaches. Because most movies, even cheap B-Movies, achieve a certain level of atmosphere. Often times, that is by complete accident. How it’s shot, mostly. I would probably assume it is because they can’t show the whole creature, or they have limited access to certain sets, or certain places. And for one reason or another, the film turns out pretty good. As an example, one of my favorite B movies is Robot Monster from 1953. The gorilla with the space helmet. The filming location, the Californian hills, combined with the weird music, creates a certain atmosphere of unpleasantness. It’s just weird. Because, again, it’s weird by accident. But it’s the kind of weirdness that lingers throughout the whole movie. The little kid’s sister is infatuated with this bare-chested shirtless guy who walks around half naked throughout the whole movie. Ro-Man kills him in front of her. As she screams, he picks up her character away, and she quips “Oh, Ro-Man, you’re so strong!” all of a sudden. What the heck is going on here, anyway? How bizarre!
I love the Hammer movies, because they are mostly about atmosphere. You have to build the world which the monster will inhabit. If you have your creature, or your actors, whatever it might be, you have to convince your audience that they’re real even if it’s just a three-minute-long YouTube video. That it’s a weird place. Your audience has to be like, no wonder weird stuff is happening. No wonder the monsters walk the land in this place. And you set the tone with colors and music. Honestly, I go to the extreme end of it. I feel especially as an amateur filmmaker, you have nothing to lose. Go to some kind of extreme; make it an interesting watch. If you are making a short film, make it interesting and fun to watch!
JL: On average, how long does it take to make one of your short films?
RS: It does vary quite a lot, actually. I mean, some projects take months to complete, simply because of the number of puppets. If I have a project with a lot of puppets in it, it will take months because the process of constructing one puppet takes at least a week to finish. But then also, I have to figure out what I actually want as a background for this shot and all that stuff. I don’t build any sets; I only make digital sets in Photoshop using stock footage and stock images and bits of models and textures that I make myself. I simply don’t have the room. I tried it once. I built a few miniature sets for a production, I put them on the floor, and I kept tripping over them. And the cats chewed on them. Eventually, I just packed them up and threw them away. So, that’s the way I work because of that experience. All of these little components sometimes take a bit of time to figure out. I’m lucky enough to have my illustration job just as a part time job. But I still manage my economy well enough, thankfully. I have weekends and nights to work on my projects, and sometimes working on a puppet with a special feature that might take a lot of fine tuning. Maybe I’ll just get halfway one evening working on that special puppet. I’ve made a YouTube video in just one week. That’s the shortest time I’ve been able to do it.
JL: Do you plan to continue with stop motion? Or do you want to go back to some of your other stuff? I was watching your old live-action short, Ninja Vs.Kappa, and thought that was pretty fun prep material.
RS: That’s a friend of mine who made that one. Yeah, he made a film called One Man Army. It’s actually called that! (laugh) It’s about this ninja traveling through this apocalyptic country, which is of course the beautiful Swedish countryside I mentioned earlier. The Ninja encounters dinosaurs and this kappa because he’s a ninja. Sometimes, my friend, the director, played the ninja and he’s very tall. And then he found this guy who was a kickboxer. Local guy; professionally trained in kickboxing, and he is about half as tall as my buddy. Then there’s another guy for some of the running scenes, and again, he’s another size. So this damn ninja changed his size and look in throughout the film. Pretty fun stuff. I provided him with some stop motion creatures. And he did another one about being part of Captain Nemo’s crew. You know, the Nautilus. I made a few giant octopus puppets and some animated fish. But he’s not all that active anymore. Because it’s got a family and a real job. That kind of killed his creative buzz. And he knows it.
JL: Do you want to get into some of that live action stuff? Or are you comfortable with just your animation?
RS: Well, I’ve made a whole bunch of live action stuff with my buddies! I do tons of Lovecraft stuff, of course, because I’m a huge Lovecraft fan. I’m a huge fan of Pulp Fiction from the 20s-40s. They kind of created what sci-fi and fantasy and horror is today. But back then, it was just called Weird Fiction. They kind of blended, often seamlessly, various genres, because you can read something like a Conan the Cimmerian story and get a mixture of science fiction and horror elements all in one go. But my favorite among the weird fiction guys is actually Clark Ashton Smith, if you’re familiar with him. He doesn’t have a famous character, like Lovecraft and Cthulhu or Robert E. Howard and Conan or Red Sonja. He’s got a ton of great characters and absolutely amazing fantasy and horror worlds, and he has a very florid prose. I’ve heard that some people don’t like that. They kind of feel that it’s impenetrable, and they’re like “What the hell is he talking about?”
But ya know, I like it and I have adapted some of his stuff. A lot of these guys are going into the public domain by now, so you can actually adapt their stories. Some of them wrote some really good poems too. And I’ve used a bunch of friends to do shorts based on some of Lovecraft’s short stories. The thing is, working with people is complex. To quote Sean Connery, “That can be wonderful, but it can also be like shoveling shit uphill.” Because you can talk to a person one day, everything’s hunky dory, the next day when you’re going to shoot they’re in a foul mood for some reason. And suddenly, everything turns out to be my fault. I did a completely nightmarish shoot with a 13-year-old girl, the daughter of my boss at the time. I did this movie, and she was horrendous that day. She was mostly a happy person, but she was very moody that week. And that day was her worst day of the week, and she really let me have it. I managed to stagger through the whole thing.
JL: What are some of the challenges with working with puppets?
I’ll give you another example. I did a short film called Hunter of Hyperborea a while ago, which is about this ice age Hunter who’s a complete failure. He goes out and hunts a bunch of monstrous animals. He gets beat up by every one of them; chased away. And the joke at the end is that he is standing in his cave and the wall paintings he makes portray himself as this mighty hunter who kills all these dangerous animals. So, in other words, you see all these spectacular cave painting art about courageous hunters, but you don’t know if it’s all bullshit, if they kind of prop themselves up. They didn’t actually catch any cave bears or elk.
The caveman puppet wears a leather outfit, which is based on Ötzi the Iceman, if you know that archeological find. They found him mummified in ice, I think in Turkey. He was completely preserved, and they could see what he was wearing. From my understanding, he was out hunting in the winter and probably had some accident, then eventually died from exposure. And he was caught in the ice floe. They could see every piece of equipment he had. I watched reconstructions of his clothes, and they were all leather and fur. If I had asked one of my friends to play this Hunter, I would have had to make clothes like that. If I had gone with real leather, it would have been expensive and difficult. You can use fake leather, but it’s different than real leather. You have to use the softer real leather and fur and it would have cost me an absolute fortune. I made the clothes for my little ice man in just one evening. I made it from bits of latex that I cast on a flat plaster surface and painted them in whatever color I wanted them to be and added the textures and stuff.
I’ve had plans to make fantasy projects with a pretty big cast of characters in the vein of Weird Tales. Getting all the people together, finding the right clothes or creating the props and finding places to film it in.. No, I don’t have the stamina to do that anymore. But if I make them as, again, puppets, everything is okay. I can shape their features, their faces, their characteristics, and they can be whatever I want them to be. Now, I have found that most of my YouTube audience have said, I actually like this better. Because there’s no suspension of disbelief. You have your stop motion puppet world. And that can be whatever you want it to be, or rather, whatever I want it to be. But I do have a few live action films. In fact, I’ve shot a few films over the years that I actually haven’t finished. I’m still working on them. And I have some of my friends in those that that will be, hopefully. finished this year. I kind of have a backlog of stuff I’ve shot with real people that will be included with stop motion creatures.
JL: As we mentioned in the opening introduction, you also do some fun digital art. How do you balance all of that within your schedule? Do you just feel creative, and you want to take a break from the puppets, so you just draw some stuff?
RS: Yeah, well, I like doing both and all creative work for me is relaxation, I wind down. And when I work for other people, I have a schedule and it gets stressful, sometimes. I also suffer from high blood pressure, which is an affliction for many of my family members. It killed my granddad, for example. And so, I have to be watchful that, you know, I take my pills every day. I have friends who have kind of tipped over the edge, the stress got to them, and they burned out. Luckily, they recovered, but they’re not the same people anymore. They have afflictions they can never get rid of, and they have to manage that new chapter of their life. It is unfortunate. I want to avoid that. But when I can work on my own projects at my own pace, it’s relaxing for me. That’s why people do crazy stuff like spend months building Spanish galleons out of tiny bits of wood, or whatever it might be. Things like that. Or they have the model railroads.
JL: What are your goals as a filmmaker?
RS: I’ll try to finish one YouTube video a month. And when I say video, it’s a finished short film. Also, I say videos because that’s what they are. I don’t send my films to any film festivals and stuff like that. The feedback I want comes from the YouTube comments. To my advantage, I have so many projects planned that they will last into the next year, no problem. I’m looking forward to figuring them out! There will be characters that I’m adapting from some of these old pulp stories again, and I have to figure out how some characters or monsters will look. I have no idea how they look yet. And that’s a great process. I just keep chugging on and hopefully I’ll add more to my audience.
Also, this year, I’m working on a feature film project with a guy in Texas. But he asked me not to talk about it yet. I’m not mentioning his name, but he started out as an amateur, and he’s now doing a lot of extreme low budget stuff. But he’s very good at it. Very good stories, very good actors, very tight stuff. You know, old fashioned stuff, old fashioned monster movies, Gothic Horror, costume movies. We are doing a very Harryhausen-inspired fantasy, with monsters and great costumes and stuff like that. And that’s a really fun project to work on. I get to have quite a bit of creative impact on the whole thing.
That’s something I’ll have to juggle with all the other stuff. But I don’t want to only finish some old projects. I want to do a bunch of new ones. I just want to do them. I mean, there are people who want to produce stuff on YouTube, and they hope to be discovered. Like, they would say, “I really hope that Guillermo del Toro will watch my monster movie show and then he’ll call me up and I’ll be hired and then I will have my career!” I don’t have any such fantasies. I want to be a part of the crowd who creates new media. I mean, I’m turning 50 this year, but I feel like a kid. And I think most people who are interested in Kaiju movies, genre stuff, or wrestling or whatever it might be, feel the same way. It’s magic. I’m a huge fan of Lucha Libre, for example.
JL: I love Lucha Libre!
RS: Sidenote, American wrestling is so sluggish. But you know, Mexican wrestling is just pure energy. They’re like lightning bolts when they go at each other. What I mean is that if you create, your own creativity and tenacity will have to be its own reward. You will have to be fueled by the kicks you get from coming up with your own ideas and then following them to the finish. That will have to be enough. And hopefully along the way, you’ll make some money from it. And you’ll make a lot of friends and fun contacts. Why am I doing it? I have no idea why I keep doing it. But it’s something I have to have in my life.
JL: What DO these monster movies mean to you?
RS: I think they mean to me what tales of monsters have meant throughout the ages, except that it has changed over time. In Greek mythology, all monsters have the same origin. The gods say, I think after the battle with the Titans; Well, what are we going to do with all these monsters now? And Zeus says, I’ll scatter them across the world, and they will be a challenge to people. They will be the obstacle humanity has to overcome, and it will create heroes and paragons that will inspire them. We will have these mighty men and women who will fight and overcome these monsters. And other people will be inspired to, you know, rise to the occasion.
That’s the perfect explanation for Monster stories. You have the monster as a symbol for something that an individual or humankind must overcome. And sometimes you get past that; the monster also becomes a great character that you can actually relate to. The first one like that that comes to mind is King Kong, who has an arc. Godzilla, to a certain extent, in my opinion. But, man, if you look at Frankenstein’s Monster, he is the perfect example of a monster character. His whole life goes to heck in a handbasket. It’s not his fault. But because of who he is, he’s got this dreadful life. But he’s this powerful creature, that if you poke him, you know he’ll hurt you.
And then you go to something like the alien monsters from the Alien franchise. And they’re just this horrible menace that represent darkness and death and stuff. You can’t reason with them, and they have no personality. That’s not their job, though. The alien monster’s job is just to be this terrible representation of, as I said, death and darkness. So, the monster is an incredibly useful tool to tell interesting stories. Some people say, oh, they’re just you know, too unrealistic and that they can’t relate to it. They can’t relate to a Godzilla movie or a Predator movie or whatever it might be. That’s too bad. But, if you can relate to it, there’s a lot of gold to be mined. I learned from it, that’s for sure. And if you are artistically inclined, you kind of attach yourself. Monsters are ornate creatures; they are physically interesting.
JL: What a great answer. Did you want to leave Kaiju United readers and listeners with any further stories or comments?
RS: Sure. You mentioned Ingmar Bergman earlier. Have you read about his life? It’s a worthy movie in itself, I can tell you. When he was a kid, in the early 1900’s, he wanted a magic lantern toy. The oldest version of these toys just projected painted pieces of glass. But by his time, his age, they had made short reels of film that kind of looped when you cranked the mechanism. You could buy, these short reels cheaply, which were pieces of silent movies and stuff. He got obsessed with it!
It was a Christmas when his brother got the Magic Lantern, and he got something else. I can’t remember what it was, but he [Bergman] was devastated. He made a deal with his brother. The two siblings each got gifts that they were not interested in, but a trade would make them both happy. So, he traded his toy soldiers for the magic lantern.
Bergman says that when he played the first reel, his brain short circuited, that was his Road to Damascus moment. Whatever it is, this is what I’m going to do with my life. After that, he said that theater is probably the best version of the art of acting and directing, but movies have a way of bypassing the logic center of our brains and just making us accept what we are watching as something real. Without question, he says, “Every time I sit down to watch a movie, even if it’s a bad one, I have that same wow moment as when I first turned the handle on my magic lantern.”
It’s the same for me with my animation. That feeling… there it is, again, that childhood fascination. I’m grateful I never lost that fascination for it. I think if you ask people who do anything – whether that’s football, or baseball, or Godzilla, it always comes from something positive happening in your childhood. You watch something on TV, or your dad takes you to a game, or whatever it might be. You get that feeling; that rush of love. The love comes out. It is just about love for something. And love can be that can never be a bad thing. Even if your love is for giant monsters. It’s still an incredible love.
JL: Don’t lose that magic lantern. Keep that with you forever.
Thank you for hopping on and talking to Kaiju United about monster movies and filmmaking, Richard!
RS: Thank you. Wonderful talking to you. Meeting a kindred spirit. It’s always wonderful.
