The delightfully absurd horror comedy Hanky Panky is now available on various streaming platforms after premiering at the LA Comedy Festival last year. Since the film earned no fewer than forty-seven awards throughout its festival run, it certainly deserves all the recognition it can get.
Based on the 2014 short film of the same name, Hanky Panky co-directed by Nick Roth and Lindsey Haun, with Roth also providing the screenplay. Rot and Haun have collaborated on many other projects in the past, including Eva & Liza, Coming To, and Nanoblood. And Roth also co-wrote the screenplay for the acclaimed Chinese giant monster movie, Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe, in addition to playing a small role in Hanky Panky.
Hanky Panky stars Jacob DeMonte-Finn as Sam, a socially awkward, middle aged man who was accidentally invited to a vacation at an isolated cabin deep in the wilds of Utah with various other individuals who clearly do not want him to be there. Sam also brings along his permanent companion, a talking napkin named Woody, to the cabin, and the pair quickly begin arguing instead of enjoying their trip. Woody was voiced by Toby Bryan, who did a fantastic and hilarious job of brining the character to life in a way which you will certainly remember.
However, the situation soon becomes even worse when an evil hat named Harry (voiced by none other than Seth Green) crashes the vacation and announces his plans for world domination. You may know Green for his roles in films such as Old Dogs, Airborne, the Austin Powers franchise, and Woody Allen’s Radio Days, in addition to being the creator of Robot Chicken and the voice of Howard the Duck in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It was certainly generous of Green to have joined a small and relatively low-key indie production, and he certainly delivered an impressive vocal performance.
The supporting cast of Hanky Panky includes Toby Bryan, Azure Parsons, Christina Laskay, Anthony Rutowicz, and Clare Grant. And if you would like to see the truly bizarre film for yourself, it is now available to purchase and rent on Amazon Prime, YouTube, Apple TV, and various other outlets, which are all listed on the film’s official website. It can also be streamed for free on Tubi, and a DVD is available for those of you who still purchase physical media. To celebrate its release, Roth granted us the following interview about Hanky Panky, in which he offered a detailed analysis of every stage of the production. And since Hanky Panky was certainly a film which had a strange and unique development history, it was both insightful and hilarious to hear Roth’s account of how it got made. You can read the full interview with Roth below, and be sure to also watch Hanky Panky when you get the chance. Because it is certainly a movie which is too utterly strange and unique to ignore.
Infamous Horror: Firstly, how did you come up with the initial idea? The film certainly has a unique premise.
Nick Roth: The hard truth is nobody remembers who came up with the killer top-hat idea.
I mean, co-director Lindsey Haun and I were basically like, let’s make a feature film, what do we have? And we knew we had a cabin (that’s her dad’s cabin, Jimmy Haun, who also did the music for the movie), a camera (we had won a decent one with a short film at Slamdance), and most importantly a bunch of friends who could act and were funny.
And so I suggested we make a feature version of our whackiest short film, which was a cute comedy about a talking napkin, and given the cabin and whatnot we could develop it into a Christmas horror murder-mystery. But as for Harry and the whole alien invasion sadistic evil top-hat thing, I don’t remember who or where that came from. It’s almost like maybe he just manifested himself?
Infamous Horror: Was it a challenge to ensure that audiences would remain engaged by a story about a talking handkerchief? Toby Bryan did a great job of bringing Woody to life, and Woody has a unique personality, to say the least.
Nick Roth: Short answer: yes.
Long answer: Toby really did a wonderful job as a puppeteer. One thing that’s maybe not immediately apparent is that almost all of Woody’s lines were voiced by Toby live during the production, not recorded later as we did with Seth Green voicing Harry. And we hadn’t actually planned it like that. We had planned to re-record both puppet characters later, likely casting them both with big name actor friends like Seth, who I didn’t feel comfortable approaching for a live action role because I was concerned he’d feel put on the spot for a big favor, but did feel comfortable asking for a voice performance because, I reasoned, it would be quick and easy and fun. So the plan was to do that with Woody as well, but while editing Lindsey and I fell in love with Toby’s vocal performance. It really became inseparable in our minds from the character.
And the live quality of it seems in retrospect totally essential, both in that it really perfectly matches the hand movements but also in the way that the tone of the recording is clearly done in the same space as the live action actors. Harry is otherworldly, so it actually really works that Seth’s voice comes booming in with a totally different microphone, but Woody has to feel dirty and grounded and real.
Infamous Horror: And why did you choose for the protagonist, Sam, to be socially awkward? Sam encountered some hostility from some of the other people who were staying in the cabin, who clearly did not want him to be there, although his vast knowledge of fabrics came in useful at times. Jacob DeMonte-Finn also did a great job of bringing Sam to life.
Nick Roth: I am myself somewhat socially awkward. All of the horror of the film is really just a metaphor for what it feels like for me to go to a dinner party.
Infamous Horror: And can you talk about the unique supporting characters and the actors who played them?
Nick Roth: This movie is really a family affair. We’re a close group of friends and we built everything around who we had and who was on board to do this crazy thing. And that’s a thing we did very collaboratively together. All the actors had a lot to say about what their characters would be like, and we really just crafted the story around who we had and when we had them. Literally. Actor availability determined a lot of parts of the story.
If someone had to get back to LA, they got killed by the hat.
Infamous Horror: Since Hanky Panky takes place almost entirely within an isolated cabin, did you want to create a feeling of isolation and solitude? You certainly succeeded in this regard.
Lindsey really was more focused on crafting the aesthetic and vibe (as well as crafting performances), whereas I was pretty much just trying to focus on comedy and the nuts and bolts of making it all happen. But we both very much from the start wanted to make sure we got everything we could out of that cabin and the natural beauty of the Utah mountains in the winter. We were blessed with record-setting snow during prep, which was key because there was no way on Earth for us to fake five feet of fresh powder.
I should also mention that the entire cast and what we had of a crew was staying in that cabin for the whole shoot, so we truly got everything we could out of every inch of it.
Infamous Horror: Can you discuss how principal photography went? You apparently had a very limited budget, and so everyone needed to chip in so that the finish line could be reached.
Nick Roth: Yeah, we didn’t have a budget. Literally. There was no pot of money, no spreadsheet saying what we’d spend. I just sort of sent everyone an email that was like, I think if everyone puts in a few hundred bucks for food and brings all the batteries and gaffers tape they can, we can make it work, and everyone can split the backend.
So, that was pretty simple. Once I actually sold the film ironically I ended up spending a lot more money out of my own pocket, since, as is typical with independent projects of this scale, the advance on the sale was significantly less than the costs of delivery and marketing, etc.
Infamous Horror: And you filmed with a camera which was won in a competition?
Nick Roth: In 2015 Lindsey and I collaborated on a short film called Coming To, which also starred Jacob DeMonte-Finn, that we entered into a special block of shorts at Slamdance Film Festival all short on this same camera, the Digital Bolex D16, and the prize was whoever wins gets to keep the camera basically. We did this more or less because Toby Bryan was working at the time with some people from the company. It’s a good little movie we made! It’s five minutes and we shot it all in one take, which really showcases the camera, and we told this little true story based on a piece of short nonfiction written by another good friend of ours, Tony De Marco. We were pretty stunned to win though, and so right away we were like, “Okay let’s take this camera and shoot a feature.”
As it happened at the time nobody had tried to do that yet, so Digital Bolex was very happy to lend us two more cameras and a bunch of lenses to help us make it happen. That’s sort of the story with this movie, which is that we used absolutely everything we already had at our disposal, cashed in every favor and connection, and then built the movie itself around those things. The D16 has this very unique cool grainy look. It’s a digital camera and shoots 2K but it has this funky 16mm vibe. So that was part of what motivated the kind of timeless look of the movie, which kind of feels both 1970s and contemporary at the same time.
Infamous Horror: And can you also discuss Jimmy Haun’s score?
Nick Roth: Lindsey’s dad is an outstanding composer, and really did a great job with us throwing him all kinds of weird stuff as temp. Obviously we used a lot of the score from The Shining as inspiration, but there’s actually a very wide variety of things we pulled from. Ultimately, he brought a really weird set of things (salsa, epic fight music, horror stings, etc) together into something that feels unified. Much of it was actually composed and recorded in that same cabin!
Infamous Horror: How did Seth Green come onboard, and can you discuss his vocal performance? He was deeply menacing as the sinister Harry, an evil hat from another dimension.
Nick Roth: Seth is just another good friend of ours, and his wife Clare is also great as Kelly in the movie, so he knew about this whole whacky thing from the get-go. At some point in the editing process, we showed Clare and Seth a cut and were like, “Wanna voice one of the puppets?” And he was like, “Sure”.
I basically always had Skeletor in mind for Harry the Hat, and I know Seth has Skeletor very much in his repertoire, so that was the point of departure for the character. Once we picture-locked, I just had Seth come over for a day of ADR, and he absolutely crushed it. There is a lot of hilarious evil hat nonsense on the cutting room floor.
Infamous Horror: We also need to discuss the climactic fight scene between Woody and Harry. How did you manage to make a fight between a napkin and a hat so engaging?
Nick Roth: I’m glad you think so! It remains a point of controversy, whether that fight is a little bit long, or, as I maintain, exactly the correct length.
I think it works because it caps off something that is absolutely essential to the whole project: this movie is silly, but it leans into its silliness with total commitment. There are a lot of ways a movie like this could cop out or half-ass it, but we really do give it our all throughout. We are just giving our all to something inherently ridiculous. So a movie like this has to have a climactic battle. It just does. You can’t shy away from that.
Infamous Horror: What do you ultimately hope audiences will take away from Hanky Panky?
Nick Roth: Short answer: just laughs.
Long answer: It’s really rough out there for the film industry. Big movies are more sequelly, IP-driven, and risk-averse than ever before (which is saying something). Meanwhile, Coppola and Costner are out there self-financing their own things, which I absolutely hope is not the only way for independent cinema to thrive. Nobody has any idea how to make money with movies right now, no matter what they tell the suits. So, I honestly don’t know what else to do besides make weird, cheap, totally original things that aren’t cynical or despairing, and I hope there’s a world out there that appreciates that.
