At Comic-Con, Danny DeVito is Looking for a Twisted Soul to Have Dinner With

He may be 65 years old, but Danny DeVito is plugged into youth culture: He has a twitter, a cult TV show, and a website called The Blood Factory full of low-budget, do-it-yourself horror shorts that he's directed. He was promoting the latter at Comic-Con, where I found him holding court with wife Rhea Perlman in front of a bloody, disemboweled corpse.

So people are coming here at Comic-Con to shoot their own shorts for your company?

Yeah, we have a little contest going where people come to the booth and they have a minute [to shoot something]. We have a camera, we offer them a set, props like bloody knives and stuff, and models. We have the contest posted on our website, and we've done a couple thousand already.

Seriously?

Seriously! We're going to look at them all, and they're all about a minute long. They all get posted, so they'll all be up on The Blood Factory, and [partner John Albo] and I are gonna pick the one we like best. It'll take a little while. [Laughs]

What does the winner get?

We're going to buy the winner dinner with us. Whoever's done the best short, they'll have dinner with the two crazy people. We're having fun doing that.

You sound very excited about it.

Oh, I have a ball doing it. Like, our Blood Factory movies are all tales of revenge or comeuppance or obsession in some way, and it's fun to tell a story in five or six minutes. We make the movies on a very, very low budget, and all the artists that are involved, everybody just pitches in. The excitement is in the making of the movies, and the community of people we've got gathered together in this dementia.

You've directed some movies with sizable budgets before. What is it like to go from that to this?

It's great! I've always made little movies, even before I did Throw Momma from the Train. I did do a movie once at Showtime that cost less than Throw Momma, which was The Ratings Game, but before that, I'd done lots of short films. It's where I came from, basically, cutting together these little Super 8 movies and playing them with a phonograph or a tape player in the room. That's the great thing about it, is that everybody can do it. No matter whether you work on a no-budget movie or a big-budget movie, it's pretty much the same creative process. Sometimes the stakes are different, and you have more people tampering with the work, so it's freer to do it without anyone saying, "We're paying for it, so this is the way it should be." It's a lot freer.

It sounds like for you, horror should have a fun factor.

Oh yeah. There are those movies like Audition that are just so scary, I mean, she's cutting people's feet off--

Although Audition is so scary that you almost have to laugh.

Our movies, we have bodily mutilation and all kinds of cool things that happen that cause you to squirm in your seat, but as you say, you gotta laugh at it. It's just so Grand Guignol and over the top. Our whole premise is to do things that are operatic.

So your blood budget is very high.

Oh, the blood budget is enormous! [Laughs] Like, we pour so much kero syrup that you could eat pancakes forever, baby!

What's the secret to good movie blood?

Add a little food coloring, some mint so it tastes good, some thickening agents, try to keep it organic and pure. We're all full of it, man. I mean, "full of blood," although we're also full of s**t.

They're not mutually exclusive. Are there certain recent horror movies you've responded to, like Paranormal Activity?

Oh yeah, I liked Paranormal Activity. That was, like, scary as hell, especially at the very end. I liked Drag Me to Hell. I like all the Corman stuff, Premature Burial, The Dead Man's Eyes, movies like that. Mario Bava. We have some movies that have religious overtones. Like me, they've got lapsed Catholic things. [Laughs]

[Lead Photo Credit: Theo Wargo/Wire Image]