The unlikely rebirth of a trashy titan
WRITER-DIRECTOR MACON BLAIR ON REBOOTING CULT HORROR-COMEDY THE TOXIC AVENGER
WORDS DAN JOLIN
IT WASN’T LIKE Macon Blair harboured a dream of remaking one of trash cinema’s most bizarrely beloved products. As a 12-year-old kid, he and his buddies (including Jeremy Saulnier, who would years later direct him in indie thrillers Blue Ruin and Green Room) would watch and rewatch The Toxic Avenger, Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman’s deliberately offensive yet oddly sentimental 1984 gross-out ‘classic’, about a goofy, mop-wielding young janitor who falls into a vat of toxic waste and becomes what is described in the films as a “hideously deformed creature of superhuman size and strength”. They even “constantly ripped it off”, Blair says, in their own home videos. “But it was not something I carried around in my head as something I wanted to do when I grew up.”