MCNAUGHTON: We shot two takes and after the second take, which is the one that plays, I just turned and said “None of us are going to Heaven after shooting this.”

ROOKER: The second time was the take and I grabbed the kid and threw him down and he landed exactly in the right position to be seen on camera—the first time, he was a little off and I had to jerk him into the frame. The second one, he was right there and he fought me hard that second time—I told him “Dude, don’t let me do shit. You are going to have to fight me.” We were going at it there and it was a great sequence.

Having been given the money by him to go off and do a horror film, what was the reaction from Waleed when he first saw what he was getting in return? I suspect it was like that part in “The Producers” when they cut to the reaction of the opening night crowd at the conclusion of the “Springtime for Hitler” number.

MCNAUGHTON: In their defense, what they saw was not anything close to the final film. We shot 16mm and back in those days, we rented a flatbed 16mm cutting machine and installed it in Elena Maganini’s apartment —she worked her day job and would edit at night and weekends until she went half-crazy. Elena, who was my editor for 25 years, didn’t have a child until later in life and she is very maternal, so the films we made together were her kids and you do not touch a hair on the heads of her little ones. The first cut was 2:20 and it is now an 83-minute film. She had cut commercials for years but none of us had ever worked at making a full-length dramatic feature film. Not only was it two hours and twenty minutes long, the company that made it was a video distribution company and there was never going to be a film print. Once we got the cut negative transferred to video, that would be the print master to create videocassettes. The way that we presented it to them—that video camera that the boys used in the film? That was a real camera and when they threw it out the window, we bought a dummy for $45 that was just a shell because we bought the real camera for $900 and that was almost 1% of the budget. We mounted it on a tripod, aimed it at the flatbed screen, which was not of particularly high quality and had only one crappy speaker, and we recorded the movie. That is what we showed them because that was all we had. I have to say, our relationship has never been the same since then and I learned an incredibly important lesson. Some months later, when we had a 16mm print that was properly timed, it looked like what you will see tonight but it didn’t matter because all they remembered was the 2:20 black-and-white flickered version.

The film had its world premiere 30 years ago at the 1986 Chicago International Film Festival. What do you recall about the experience of unleashing the film on an unsuspecting audience for the first time?

ROOKER: It was my very first time seeing it too—at the Music Box, right?

MCNAUGHTON: They had a program within the program called “Illinois Filmmakers”—who to this day are considered to be third-class human beings in this international film festival—and they gave us 2:30 PM on a Saturday at the Music Box. Again, we didn’t have a film print—we had a ¾-inch videocassette—two of them because one cassette only ran for an hour. We had to find a projector so we went to this equipment rental joint and got a projector. Michael and I took it to the Music Box and it was big. It cost $175 and I don’t know who paid it because I don’t think either of us had $175 in those days. We weren’t techs but it had to be set up and focused and adjusted, so we did it. We got it all lined up and when the crowd got there, we turned it on and it had to be changed out after one hour. Always in those days, we lost a few audience members at the home invasion scene. I am curious tonight because we just resubmitted to the MPAA and we got an X again. I have family members coming who have never seen it and they are not people who see this kind of movie, so I am wondering how they are going to react.