Horror Favourites – Christopher Cooksey

After the announcement of the production of his new animated sci-fi series Escape From Planet Omega-12 we grabbed producer Christopher “Moonlight” Cooksey (The Quantum Terror) to talk about another genre close to his heart.

Inspired by vintage sci-fi and adult-oriented animation such as Fire and Ice, Heavy Metal, and Love Death + Robots. OMEGA-12 is looking to bring back the raw and sexy energy that used to come with pulp science fiction. In a style that Cooksey calls Sci-Exploitation.

Fans can get exclusive behind-the-scenes looks at the first season, upcoming cast announcements, and possible NFTs, comic books, and future game development by joining the producers’ SubscribeStar page. Stay tuned for more information on when and where to watch the show, which promises to be an epic adventure through space and time.

Below Christopher Cooksey, filmmaker of ESCAPE FROM PLANET OMEGA 12 talks about his favourite horror film:

“Horror is a wonderful testament to the mechanisms of the human condition. Through watching a scary movie, playing an intense video game, or immersing ourselves in a nightmarish book we get to watch in terror as the people around us are picked off one by one, we get to barely survive an ordeal where the odds are against us or maybe die. We get to dive headlong into the abyss, struggle through the fires of hell to reach heaven, or maybe become a devil ourselves, committing all the hateful and repulsive acts we strive so hard to avoid in real life, all from the comfort of our living room or a movie theater, without ever bearing any consequences, without risk or real pain, so we can take those fantastical experiences and the lessons they bring and apply them to our lives. They’re useful that way. We get to touch the unknown and let fictional others pay the price for our curiosity and temptations. It’s a hell of a deal.

For me, no horror movie gives us the opportunity to experience these things better than the original Alien. I know, it’s a go-to for most of us but let’s face it, there’s a reason for that. Conceived and written by an arguable madman with a creature designed by an opium-smoking nihilist and directed by a cinematic genius, it becomes a tome of the darkness that lies beyond the boundaries of our world that every pioneer or primal hunter has had to face since the dawn of humanity, but told from the underworld that exists in their own souls. I can’t imagine a more alluring origin for any tale of terror. It’s not an original story by any means but it was their ability to dive deep within themselves that allowed them to come back to us with such promises of death and adventure and that’s what as sentient human beings, we’re really all about. There are great treasures in the darkness but we risk death (and rebirth, which is what the sequel Aliens is so brilliantly all about) to obtain them.

I realize I’m being terribly obtuse so let me explain myself. When I say Alien isn’t original I’m talking in broad terms. Everything about how it’s presented, what it says about the men who made it and the actress who personified it, is completely unique because they laid bear their hearts and souls to create it. No two of us are alike. However, the template they used is as old as the ones told by shamans over bright fires in the pitch-black of many a prehistoric night. Travelers in the dark, daring unknown territories come across something unnatural, never seen before. It’s a deep dark cave, it’s a castle in the Carpathian mountains, it’s The Mountains of Madness in the icy mountains of Antarctica, it’s the flying saucer beneath a hundred thousand years of ice, holding in stasis the promise of gold, status, knowledge, or full shares… but God forbid you awaken the things sleeping within them, so inhuman, so remorseless, so alien as to drive the bravest of us insane before violating and devouring us. Deep down, we know those things are real. We’ve seen better people than ourselves venture out and not return at all and when someone does they’re almost always changed and most times, not for the better. But we learn. We learn and we keep pushing the frontiers until the unknown becomes the familiar and the familiar turns into the boring and then we have to look for new frontiers once again because that’s how we grow.

Ironically, that’s how over the years I began to see my favorite franchise turn into something not only familiar but silly. Alien was lightning in a bottle and it was truly a miracle that Aliens managed to take a story of how small we are in the universe, which is a theme of cosmic horror, and then turn it into an allegory of human perseverance. To go into the void is to be broken but when we come out of it, we are remade stronger and braver, ready to win where before we failed. However, once that story was told the new stewards of the property floundered. I was so disappointed in the movies that followed because all they could do was try to repeat what could only work once and in increasingly silly ways, missing the one obvious spark that made it all work, which was the perseverance of the human spirit in the face of oblivion. Talk about life imitating art!

Believe it or not, my new sci-fi series Escape From Planet Omega-12 was born out of watching the later Alien movies, especially the much anticipated Prometheus, retread old ground without ever stopping once to consider the possibilities of what they had. There was so much potential in the idea of discovering an alien planet where ancient aliens grew organic technology but they dropped the ball, opting to give us the same old baron wastelands and humanoid men from outer space. They could have done anything but they chose to play it safe. At the conclusion our protagonist found herself marooned for all of ten seconds before taking off again, leaving behind a trainwreck of a story for what we all hoped would at least be more interesting adventures. The joke was on us.

But, I started thinking, what if the world had been lush, the creators of it mysterious, like that of the derelict space jockey in Alien, the protagonist beautiful and motivated by her personal desires rather than lofty philosophical notions? What if the promise of new frontiers and adventure, of beauty and wonder filled the screen and inspired the imaginations of the audience, once again? What if we didn’t play it safe? That would be something I’d really want to see and although it’s not the old dark castle at the top of a disparaging mountain, it would hold dangers just as terrible and rewards just as valuable.”

Follow Christopher HERE and check out this video Presenting Escape From Planet Omega 12: A New Kind of Animation from Christopher below: