Quarantine is a horror movie based upon the Spanish language film, Rec. It comes out on October 10, 2008.

From Screen Gems: Television reporter Angela Vidal and her cameraman are assigned to spend the night shift with a Los Angeles Fire Station. After a routine 911 call takes them to a small apartment building, they find police officers already on the scene in response to blood curdling screams coming from one of the apartment units. They soon learn that a woman living in the building has been infected by something unknown. After a few of the residents are viciously attacked, they try to escape with the news crew in tow, only to find that the CDC has quarantined the building. Phones, internet, televisions and cell phone access have been cut-off, and officials are not relaying information to those locked inside. When the quarantine is finally lifted, the only evidence of what took place is the news crew’s videotape.

For our special set visit report, recounting what our reporter, Staci Layne Wilson, observed, please click here [1]. For individual Q&A interviews with the director, makeup effects expert, and cast, please read on:

Interview with Special Makeup Designer, Robert Hall.

Staci Layne Wilson / Horror.com: Another zombie movie? How do you keep them, er, fresh?

Robert Hall: We are not calling them zombies we are really just playing off of a super, super deadly strain of rabies and pushing that to the furthest end of the spectrum that we can go. Like what can we really get away with, with real symptoms of rabies and really push that. So no they are not dead. There are a lot of dead people but they don’t get back up. You’ve seen REC, you know what the skinny is…literally. No, it is pretty faithful. I don’t know how much you have seen so far on it today …

Q: Well, we saw some footage of the attacks.

Robert Hall: It is really faithful which is cool because those of us who have seen it, it is pretty disturbing, which is awesome. The Dowdles [directed by John Erick Dowdle , screenplay by he and his brother Drew] are the perfect people for it with their last movie and their sensibility for it. I think they are the perfect ones to do this.

Q: Do they know exactly what they want?

Robert Hall: Yeah, they do. They are very definitive, which is awesome. That is something that will really drive you crazy when you are trying to do something of this magnitude when someone is indecisive and they are not like that at all, they are very, very clear which is nice.

Q: Talk about the designs a little bit; because if you were trying to avoid 28 Days Later thing, you were trying to avoid Day of the Dead and Dawn of the Dead and all that stuff, where do you find a happy medium?

Robert Hall: Nature, it is all about going back to nature and just looking at the few videos we could find. They sent me a few videos of some people who were literally infected with rabies from the CDC and we were able to look through those and while they don’t exactly manifest the same symptoms that we do like clawing their faces apart, there is a lot there that you can pull from. There is a lot inherently in there. Their skin does get discolored and blotchy and a little bit blue from the lack of oxygen and that kind of stuff but there is a lot of stuff to play from. We also went off on a slightly different note as well and did some fun stuff with teeth because we thought if  you had this inability to speak or swallow and constantly having something projecting from your mouth you would be gnashing your teeth a lot and they would get chipped and that kind of stuff and that would cause more lacerations and abrasions on your lips. So literally sitting down and thinking “How do we make these guys really disgusting and terrifying, but trying also to base it all in nature.”

Q: Did you do anything with the eyes? Contact lenses?

Robert Hall: Yeah, they have two different stages of contacts. The first stage is like really super subtle. The second stage is hemorrhaged spots starting to fill and traumatized and a lot of them have little lacerations on them as well like if they were trying to claw themselves they cut their eyes with their fingernails and that kind of stuff and then the third one is almost like their eyes are solid, full of blood. John [Dowdle], this picture of a boxer he sent me where it looked like his eye was full of blood so we based the extreme level off of that photo.

Q: Would you say that realism was important at all? Ultimately you are making a movie, so does it really need to be faithful?

Robert Hall: It does for me, because that stuff is a lot more terrifying for me anyway because I always find that movies and characters and all that – I can relate to them a lot more if they are real, it is scarier. I think the moment you go introducing a really fantastical element at least for me it pulls me out of it unless the movie is – unless you’ve set that up already and established that this crazy stuff can happen. But with this it is all very guttural, very … have you seen the original?

Q: I have not, no.

Robert Hall: It is very voyeuristic and so for me reading their draft of it I thought even more so than the other one, because the other one takes a little more of a super natural twist toward the end and this one doesn’t so even more so, yeah I feel it is important to stay, to try to stay as grounded in reality as much as we can doing a movie about crazy rabid people eating people.

Q: In terms of the film – is this supposed to all take place in one night?

Robert Hall: It all takes place in one night, in a matter of hours so we don’t have a whole lot of time, but we’ve set it up cleverly with bits of dialogue where they talk about how certain blood types react differently, some blood types react faster, more aggressive to the strain so we had a little bit of leeway that way to play with the timeline.

Q: How is it to manifest that physically at least when according to what we know about the movie it is sort of unknown like for example the idea that certain people with certain blood types would react – presumably that isn’t something that will be revealed in the movie because these people have no idea. Is that a tough thing to figure out?

Robert Hall: There are a couple of moments where that comes up. There are some people who find their way into the apartment.

Q: We understand the finale is really startling, in terms of makeup… can you talk about it, without giving anything away?

Robert Hall: That thing, and that’s what we are still calling it, it is at the end of the movie is one of the  most terrifying things I’d seen in a really long time. That unnerved me and I rewound it a bunch of times trying to figure out how they did it. I knew it wasn’t a total CGI thing but maybe it could be augmented by it…it wound up just basically being someone, we found out the person that they cast is this really tall sort of lanky Spanish actor who really does have those limbs and all of that so it makes it a little more challenging for us, but we have Doug luckily with Doug in prosthetics we can hopefully achieve something as scary as that and disturbing. That’s the big ticket item obviously.

Q: When we were talking to Jonathan, I mentioned the book Rant by Chuck Palahniuk, and about how the rabies characteristics takes them weeks to evolve… so this is accelerated, how do you show that?

Robert Hall: A lot of it is performance believe it or not. A lot of it is the actors selling it through the film. We just take different levels of prosthetics and sort of amp them up and fortunately for us a lot of horrible things happen to each character so there is a lot of trauma and injuries that we can play off of as the night goes on. Mostly with their faces and their body parts.

Q: It seems to be popular now with The Orphanage and other films where people are ripping off their fingernails…

Robert Hall: The scariest thing in this one though for me is what the characters do to themselves so there are a couple of neat moments that aren’t in the original REC that the Dowdles wrote for the characters to sort of mutilate themselves so I like that.

Q: Was there anything particularly challenging about this shoot for you that was a learning curve?

Robert Hall: Yeah, everything. It is completely unorthodox in terms of coverage, in terms of schedule. It is nuts because the nature of it there are a lot of oners, a lot of one takes. They are moving the camera around, every single person – and we could have up to 10 or 12 people that are infected and have really elaborate make ups on and they could all work in one scene because you could feasibly see anyone because the camera is always moving around – also when you are setting up gags and special effects and head hits and all kinds of that stuff any number of things could go wrong and when you are doing them all in one take it is completely crazy, because one little tiny thing goes wrong everything snow balls. So the way we are sort of doing it rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse and then shoot it nine or ten times. Generally it seems for me anyway it seems like the last few takes tend to be the ones where they really nail it. Those are the ones they seem to use.

Q: You seem to be pretty busy with The Burrowers and now this. Have you been able to catch a breath?

Robert Hall: I’m looking forward to catching a breath and getting back to writing because I’m doing my first horror film in March and directing that so I’m looking forward to that. I haven’t had a chance to catch my breath.

Q: It is great for the shop … [Almost Human]

Robert Hall: It is great for the shop, to keep all the guys busy.

Q: So this is a big show, like in terms of Burrowers? Like the creature work and then with Terminator, which I understand you also did?

Robert Hall: Yeah, this is a pretty big show. You wouldn’t think it is if someone described it, but it is fairly elaborate it is huge and almost everyone except for Jennifer [Carpenter] we do something disgusting with so she is the one lucky person who didn’t get to come down and see me, but everyone else had their various appendages dunked and dipped

Q: What about the blood and the way it has developed over the years? Is it easier now with laundry detergent?

Robert Hall: Yeah, that seems to be what everyone is doing now. Ivory hand soap too with fake blood. It will wash out of your clothes and come off your hands easier. If you are ever on a show too and there is a lot of blood and you get blood on you the trick and this sounds weird is put shaving cream on your hands any kind of foamy shaving cream and let it sit for two minutes and then you can literally take a paper towel and just wipe it off so it doesn’t soak in your skin. There is your removal of blood trick.

Q: What's that Alka-Seltzer stuff you use for frothing at the mouth?

Robert Hall: That is a really old school version of Alka-Seltzer they don’t even make it anymore except in a few places, but it is called Bromo Seltzer and most people under 40 don’t know it. It is only the old people in the pharmacies go “Oh I can order that for you.” So it is really hard to find, but Bromo Seltzer fizzes like five or six times more than Alka Seltzer. So putting a bunch of that and a bunch of water in their mouth and blood and – I tell you what’s great is Stacie who plays Elise actually ordered her own from some pharmacy and was playing with it like weeks before so when she came in and met me the second time she was like “Look what I can do!” She was an expert. That’s method for you, she was practicing drool at home.

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Staci Layne Wilson reporting