Limbo, 1999 Movie by Tina Krause (Meaning and Anecdotes)
Based on what Tina told me in our interview, as well as what I learned from her many other interviews, I gathered the information about:
- the meaning of the plot (which is quite hard to figure out)
- events from Tina’s life that inspired her for creating Limbo
- various funny, scary, and incredible anecdotes from the filming, production, and release processes
Now, let’s have the Limbo movie explained.
Limbo Plot Explained
Here is the explanation of the film based on the director’s multiple
interviews (including
my interview with Tina Krause) and with her own quotes.
The blond lead (Katherine) is a
sadistic serial killer. She is also a vampire (in one scene, she bites a man
on his neck), but this is not the film’s focus. The main focus is her sadistic
desires and crimes and the price she’s going to pay for it.
Among
her victims is the young girl, whose murder Katherine couldn’t get away with.
Her soul becomes Katherine’s afterlife coming for her.
In one scene
towards the end, we see the faceless woman (Tina Krause) writing on the wall
(she also looks into the mirror, and we see Tina’s eye) — it’s the spirit of
the killed girl. The moment she turns around (showing her absent face) she
takes Katherine’s soul:
So when she comes down until the very end, where you see the writing on the
wall, and the days gone by, and it's just like forever, and it's that
question on the wall. And if you noticed, she looks back, and when she turns
around, there is no face because this is it. Like, you made your choice. You
didn't ask for the forgiveness you probably should have.
It’s her (which is me) turning around to take her soul. There’s a vendetta.
I’m going to take it. This is the idea: you’ve gotten away with so much,
you’ve killed so many, and then you just got the wrong person this time. And
now, we’re coming to collect.
At the end, the goth-looking people Katherine meets in her
personal hell are the unrested souls of everyone she has killed. They are
coming to take her if she doesn’t admit who she is and ask for forgiveness.
She doesn’t, so they take her.
At the same time, Tina leaves room for
your own interpretation:
This had a flow, but if you think about it, what does “limbo” mean? “You’re
in limbo”… And everybody’s limbo is different. So everybody’s interpretation
of a nightmare is gonna be different. This is purgatory… I didn’t want it to
be where you just put your finger on it, and that’s what happens, and that’s
what it means. It can be taken 6000 ways. It all depends on how you view it.
The other thing is that I can’t make anything that horrific that’s gonna
scare you to death if I give you everything. Because whatever scares you is
in your head, not mine. I can only feed you bits and pieces of the direction
I want you to go in to scare you, but you’re gonna fill in the blanks. And
that’s gonna make it more frightening. Because I’m not dictating to you
what’s scary — you are…
Things That Inspired Limbo
Vampire comic book
Tina Krause had a friend, Patrick O'Connor, who had made a comic book about
vampires. He and Tina discussed making a film based on that book. However, as
Tina was typecasted for vampire roles, which she was sick of, she didn’t want
to make a vampire movie. So Tina changed the whole idea from a vampire story
to a story about going to hell.
She did keep a little bit of
vampirism in one scene though — to honor Patrick O'Connor’s original idea, as
he was also Limbo’s producer.
Hallucinations
Tina was at the loft of her neighbor and friend — Joe Coleman (who also later
worked on Limbo as the first director’s assistant). She was waiting for
him to come back from the bathroom and was bored.
Tina saw a candy
wrapped in green foil, lying on a dish. Tina can’t resist chocolate, so she
ate it. It tasted awful, but Tina didn’t have anywhere to spit it out, so she
just swallowed the candy.
When Joe came back, Tina told him,
“Joe, if you have candy for the guests, make sure it’s not stale”.
Tina didn’t know that the chocolate contained drugs. Joe, who regretted the
accident, told her it was a mix of different drugs — a “smorgasbord”, as he
said. He had brought that candy from a hippie gathering (Rainbow
gathering).
Tina had hallucinations during three days. They came in
waves: when she thought it was over, after a while, she started hallucinating
again.
The “trip” had its ups and downs: some of it was awful, some
of it wasn’t.
It felt like I went to hell and back.
It didn’t help that I was listening to the soundtrack to the Natural Born
Killers either.
… looking at trails and laughing at my fingers
and toes…
I put, I think, less than a quarter of what I was
actually experiencing in that movie. When you see the girl peeling her face
off, because it’s melting, in the mirror — I saw those things.
I could not actually create exactly what I saw, but I could get you close.
[laughs]. I saw like a thousand faces behind me in a wall of blood, ripping
their faces off. It was the weirdest thing, and like abortions all on the
bottom. And I was sitting literally like when they take the fetus out… it’s
like… [makes a vomiting sound]... Anyway, the whole bottom of these people
was just this layer. I was in a circular thing sitting on this platform. And
I saw all of these abortions — all around me, but they were like moving,
pulsating. And above them, all these faces ripping their skins off… I can’t
even… It was horrendous. It’s horrendous [laughs].
Another thing Tina envisioned but couldn’t make because of the
budget limitations was a room made of skin. In the room would be a woman
playing a “violin” made of her own veins. She would be drowning in all the
skin the room was made of.
When Tina ate the candy, it was Friday.
On Saturday morning, thinking the effect was over (although feeling tired),
Tina went to work. At that time, she was a graphic designer, the Senior Art
Director, at an Indian newspaper.
At work, Tina started feeling a
little hot. She saw that the letters she was typing were falling off the
computer screen. Tina hit her keyboard, angry with the computer, thinking it
was broken. She continued typing the word, and it kept falling off…
Tina
started sweating heavily, so she went to the bathroom to wash her face. When
Tina came back, she saw that the whole screen was filled with the word she had
been typing over and over.
Tina’s manager, who saw what was
happening, said, “You don’t look very well.” Tina responded she thought
she had caught the flu. The manager (who probably understood what the real
reason was) suggested that Tina go home, which she did.
Before
that, Tina had never tried any drugs, even marijuana, so it was her first
experience, at about 28 years old.
Frustration
After some time working as an actress for different studios, Tina noticed that
the films she was in started to move from horror to girl-girl sexploitation,
which disappointed her. So she wanted to make a film that wouldn’t rely on sex
to be interesting. Therefore, Limbo has no nudity in it.
A sexist
Tina was angry with some director who told her that women must not be taken
seriously as directors, especially horror directors, and in particular B
queens:
“How could you ever think that you’ll ever be taken seriously in anything
in the film industry, even acting?”
Tina’s answer was:
“... your movie — not film, because it really-really sucks — is so boring
and stupid that you couldn’t direct your way out of a paper bag if Martin
Scorsese gave you directions, and there were arrows pointing out.”
So Tina planned Limbo as a “revenge film” to show the guy
he was wrong and to show him how much better her film would be than his own
boring and stupid movies.
The abandoned tobacco factory warehouse
Tina lived for about 7 or 10 years in the abandoned industrial building in
Jersey city — the same building we see in Limbo. The building used to
be a warehouse of a tobacco factory — Old Gold. Tina loved its decaying look
(just like she loves urban decay in general).
Tina relocated to
that building after catching her boyfriend cheating on her. They lived
together, so Tina, disgusted, wanted to move out immediately. She called her
friend who told Tina about an art community living in that warehouse: several
artists who had the necessary skills (plumbing, electrical etc.) had unified
to make the building habitable — with running water and electricity.
Because
Tina wanted to leave as soon as she could, she didn’t care much about the new
place’s living conditions, so she decided to move there.
While Tina
was moving out, her other friend, Phil, was also having a quarrel with a girl
he was living with as a roommate (the girl was Nocera — the musician who wrote
a “one hit wonder” song, Summertime, Summertime). The girl was acting
totally mad. Phil asked Tina to pick him up, as he was standing in the street
while his girlfriend was throwing dishes at him. So Tina and Phil became
neighbors.
When Tina and Phil arrived at the place, they didn’t
have a shower or sink in their loft. It was all dirty, and there was a hole in
the wall. But with time, they had water hooked up, made a shower, and made the
place livable. Tina didn’t have a toilet in her loft though, but she used the
trestle toilets in the hallway.
Tina and the community were
basically squatting in the building. Its owner was angry with them being there
and tried to kick them out. Later, he demolished the building, but he still
can’t build anything there because it’s considered a heritage area.
Once,
Tina and her sister were stuck in the basement of this building. They didn’t
know that on weekends the power went out and didn’t reconnect until Monday.
They had to climb out in complete darkness. After that, Tina thought about how
she could incorporate some of this experience in the film.
The
previously mentioned nightmarish hallucinations experience was also lived
through in that building. So, Tina decided to shoot the film right there.
Tina
loved living there and was sad when she had to leave.
Other inspirations
Especially during that period, Tina was a fan of David Lynch and Nine Inch
Nails (notably their music videos).
Another influence was
Joel-Peter Witkin, a photographer whose works had “nightmarish carnival
qualities”.
Anecdotes from Filming Limbo
A police incident
During shooting Limbo, Tina lived in Jersey City, where violent crime
rates were very high. And in the abandoned building where Tina lived (the same
building where she was shooting Limbo), criminals would sometimes hide
bodies.
One day in the morning, Tina wondered why her crew wasn’t
showing up for filming (except Sean, who was the special effects guy, and one
or two other people who were staying in Tina’s loft).
Somebody
knocked on Tina’s door. It was a policeman who started to ask her questions
about whether she had heard anything weird the night before.
Tina
said she had been there the whole night, and she hadn’t heard anything. But
Tina didn’t say anything about filming — she had to hide it because she didn’t
have permits (her crew was also warned not to talk about it). So she just said
she was doing art.
After looking outside the window, Tina noticed a
line of people. When looking closer, she realized it was her crew — staring at
the building and waiting to be allowed to come in (fortunately, they didn’t
tell the police about filming either. They just told them they came to see
Tina).
Tina asked the policeman what was going on. He answered that
presumably, a murder had been committed in or near the building the night
before. He also told Tina not to come out until they’d let her.
Tina
was worried, trying to understand how the murderer could have gotten past them
(50 to 100 people on set) the night before, as they had been shooting in the
same location where the “murder” presumably had been committed, according to
the cops, how somebody could have been brutally murdered without screaming,
and thinking that herself and her crew should be more careful, because this
could have happened to someone of her crew.
Then, Tina realized
something. The night before, they had filmed the disemboweling scene, which
left a lot of fake blood on the floor. Tina had asked Sean to clean it very
carefully, because there was a lot of “blood”. However, Sean did the cleaning
very fast. Tina was surprised by how quick it was, but she didn’t say anything
and didn’t check if it was cleaned well.
After the police visit,
Tina asked Sean if the place had been well-cleaned and how he had cleaned it.
Sean said it was quick and easy and bragged about the genius way he had come
up with: Sean had found an old mattress in the dumpster and used it to absorb
most of the fake blood. Then he threw the mattress back into the dumpster.
So
what really happened is that Sean didn’t wrap the mattress into plastic bags,
contrary to what the crew usually did when throwing garbage away. Not only
that — he also left the mattress in the dumpster the dirty side up, so it was
visible (and looked like somebody had been murdered on that mattress). There
were still red stains on the floor, onto which he just threw cardboards to
cover it up and figure it out the next day (he was very tired, because the
crew had gotten to filming that scene only by about 4am in the morning, and
then they had to go to sleep for just about 3 hours, get up, and start
shooting again. And it was multiple consecutive days that they worked with
such intensity).
Then, the cleaning personnel (who provided
maintenance services to the building and were “women not from this country”)
came, early in the morning. They saw the mattress and stains on the floor and
didn’t understand it was fake blood. They panicked and called the police.
Tina
imagines that the policemen were probably angry when they took the “blood”
samples to the lab and discovered it was Karo syrup.
The disembowelment scene
A fight with a drug dealer
When filming one of the scenes in the factory warehouse, which was pretty
difficult and involved the main actress, Suze Daufler, there were some guys at
the top balcony who were constantly whistling at the actress, disrupting
filming.
Tina approached them and told them that they could whistle
at the actress whenever they wanted, all day, but asked them nicely not to do
it while she was shooting. They agreed.
However, when Tina returned
to filming, she heard whistling again. Tina was tired and angry, so she went
back to the guy who was whistling and pushed him, ready to kill him — if she
pushed him strongly enough, he could have fallen over the balcony’s edge from
a few stories’ height.
The situation became dangerous and turned
into an exchange of threats. The guy said he was a drug dealer, trying to look
scary and important. Tina didn’t care:
“You are in the wrong neighborhood. This is an abandoned building. Everyone
who lives here is [_] crazy! Hence the person you’re talking to! I told you
to shut the [_] up when I’m filming!”
The guy didn’t shut up. Tina turned around, picked up a piece of
wood with a couple of nails in it, lying among debris, and started swinging
it, going after the guy. He took a BMX bike he had with him and took off. Tina
chased him. Tina’s friends were coming to help her, but they were slower than
Tina, who had already gone after the guy.
Tina, familiar with the
building that was her home, knew a shorter way down — by jumping down two of
the flights down the fire escape, so she caught up with him. Yet, and
fortunately, the guy managed to escape.
Limbo Showings and Release
Tina says she wasn’t even planning to distribute Limbo. She made it, it
had a few viewings, and Tina moved on to working on other things.
One
of those viewings was at a Chiller festival. Initially, Tina submitted the
film under her real name, and it was rejected. Then, her friend advised her to
resubmit it but under a male pseudonym — Steven Krause. When Tina did this,
the film got accepted. So she showed up at the fest and said,
“Hi, I’m Steven Krause”.
Limbo was released in 2004 on DVD
by Sub Rosa, after about 5 years since it was made.
In 2019, Tina
got a call from someone from Bleeding Skull who offered to send it to the
Fantastic film fest at Alamo, Texas. Tina agreed, without even knowing how big
that fest was.
In Texas, Tina’s hotel was about 5 miles away from
the festival. Tina decided to just walk to the place rather than use a taxi.
On her way, she saw an abandoned nursery building. As Tina is fond of
abandoned properties, she broke into it to see what was inside. But then she
realized that there were policemen in the building. She heard them talking
after hearing her walking inside, “Did you hear that?” — and the
policeman was looking around with a flashlight… Tina had to duck so he
couldn’t see her. Fortunately, she managed to leave the building without being
found.
All dirty, with leaves in her hair and with her white dress
covered in dust, Tina arrived at the festival and was given strange looks by
the people there (probably thinking she was homeless). Tina went to the
restroom to clean herself the best she could. So at the viewing, she was
sitting in a wet dress.
At the festival, the film was a great
success. It sold out so well that the organizers had to delay the screening
for about half an hour so they could give Tina a double deck venue instead of
the one planned originally. After viewing, Tina was asked many questions by
the audience…
Tina was very surprised by such a success,
considering the film’s low budget and primitivity of the editing methods (that
turned the process long and tiresome). The film was edited deck-to-deck and
with no computer graphics. Despite the limitations, Limbo stands out from most
American B-movies: rather than doing it shoddily to make a quick buck, Tina had a very
specific vision of how it should look and did her best to achieve it.
Shortly
after, Limbo was released on BluRay by AGFA/Vinegar Syndrome/Bleeding
Skull.
Other Facts About Limbo
The Fracture Films logo at the beginning of the film contains an X-ray photo.
This is an actual X-ray of Tina’s broken hand (probably broken during the
making of Limbo).
Tina operated the camera herself in about
half of the film. She had hired someone to be the cameraman, but from the very
beginning, Tina didn’t like his shots, so she asked him to show her how the
camera worked and then figured out how to use it just overnight. Tina had
never filmed anything herself before.
Tina’s younger sister,
Jessica Krause, who was 15-16 years old at the time, is also in Limbo.
You can easily recognize her, because she resembles Tina.
The
filming was very tiresome for Jessica. They often had to stay up until 5
o’clock in the morning, multiple days in a row, and then start shooting the
next morning after too little sleep. Because of that, Jessica didn’t want to
become an actress.
Tina:
I think her words was “I’ll never do another movie again as long as I
live”.
In the bathroom scene, Jessica was really drunk, after drinking
multiple margaritas in the bar that appears in the film. Tina thought the
bartender (who also appears in the movie) was giving her non-alcoholic drinks.
Tina was worried, thinking Jessica would forget her lines, but everything went
well.
I realized it when she started saying some things, and I was like “I’m just
gonna let her roll with it [laughs].”
Jessica Krause in Limbo
In one scene, an actress had to scream. But she couldn’t manage to do it
convincingly enough. After about 30 failed takes, to finally get a genuine
scream out of the actress, Tina had someone else hold the camera, snuck up
behind the actress, and scared her.
Sources of all these facts,
stories, and quotes:
interview by Unboxing the Underground,
interview by Master Chaos,
interview by the Slices Podcast,
SUB 25 Entertainment interview,
interview with Show Me Something Wrong, interview by Indie Film Cafe Network, interview by Gruesome Hertzogg, as
well as my own interview with Tina Krause.
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