The SFX Wizard Who Resurrected Deathstalker with His Own Hands

Set in the embattled kingdom of Abraxeon, Deathstalker follows the warrior who inherits a cursed amulet linked to the long-dead sorcerer Nekromemnon. Marked by dark magic and pursued by grotesque assassins, he must assemble three mythic artifacts—a chalice, an amulet, and a sword—to thwart a looming age of darkness.

If that synopsis sounds extravagantly earnest, that’s by design. The film leans into its sillier impulses: Patton Oswalt provides the voice of Deathstalker’s pint-sized wizard sidekick Doodad, and veteran stage actor Nicholas Rice portrays the deliciously theatrical villain Nekromemnon. “I’ve always dreamed of having a villain like that, a classically trained fake Shakespeare actor spouting insane nonsense about the outer darkness and whatnot,” Kostanski said.

For Kostanski, the challenge was to build a lived-in, convincing world — even if its internal rules were intentionally quirky.

“I wanted a world with my own bullshit nonsense rules,” he laughed. “Like, sprinkle some powder on a torch, snap your fingers, and it lights up. Nobody in the audience is going to be like, wait a second…”

Photo: Shout! Studios

When he isn’t directing, Kostanski designs prosthetics, makeup effects, and animation rigs for projects ranging from Hannibal and Crimson Peak to Suicide Squad and Star Trek: Discovery. Even during our September conversation, a half-built monster head cluttered his background — a reminder that effects work is integral to his practice. The new Deathstalker embraces the man-in-suit tradition of the original, but the production faced a scale problem: contemporary “indie” fantasy often reads like cosplayers in a park. Kostanski wanted something larger in scope without the budget for thousands of extras or the digital armies of Middle-earth.

“I didn’t have the budget to have thousands of armies of thousands of guys fighting thousands of monsters, but I could have one guy fighting basically a rogues gallery of weirdos,” he said. “This is a weird pull, but I was thinking of Saving Private Ryan a little bit — these guys going on this journey to do a task, and they’re going through towns and encountering different people in different situations.”

Hiring a director who also understands special effects and storytelling allowed the film to take on a video-game-like structure: a series of escalating encounters that resemble a side-scrolling boss rush. Kostanski cites influences such as Ninja Scroll and Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness — the latter’s stop-motion DNA is especially evident in skeletons and flying heads. “Stop-motion is where I started when I was 12,” he said. “It just felt right to go back to it for this one.”

Photo: Shout! Studios

Having Slash on board as an executive producer helped crystallize financing and even encouraged composer Bear McCreary to go big on the film’s theme. Kostanski marvels at how various pieces fell into place to allow the project to happen.

He’s especially pleased with the film’s flamboyant props. The standout weapon—a four-bladed sword, inspired by the triple-bladed blade from Albert Pyun’s The Sword and the Sorcerer—was a bold design choice. “I added one more blade just to up the ante,” he admitted. “It wasn’t exactly practical. A gentle breeze would shatter it, but damn, it looked cool.”

These kinds of movies are rare today largely because of economics. The healthy home-video market of the 1980s made room for strange, niche productions from producers like Corman and companies such as Full Moon Features. That distribution environment has largely disappeared in the streaming era, and the middle ground of modestly budgeted genre filmmaking is increasingly scarce.

“It’s either you have next to no money to work with or you have too much money and no in-between,” Kostanski observed. “A fantasy movie typically needs an in-between.”

Deathstalker exists because Kostanski was determined to make it. The project is not a career-calculating move but a passion play: a rebootish, half-sequel love letter to B-movie fantasy. “Our budget was still on the very low end, but we just compensated by calling in a lot of favors and me building a huge chunk of the effects myself,” he said. “I wanted to do it. I wanted to make this movie. I wanted to prove that you could make a fantasy movie on a lower budget if you’re resourceful.”

Deathstalker opens in theaters on October 10, 2025.

Source: Polygon