Femme Fatales Magazine
March/April 2003
by Jeff Bond & Patrick Sauriol

Living Dead Girls
Sonya, Ellie, Ona, Erica and Kira make their escape from House of the Dead

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Major Firepower:
Ellie Cornell

By playing marine patrol captain Jordan Casper, Ellie Cornell continues a tradition of feisty heroism that she began with the role of Rachel Carruthers in Halloween 4 and Halloween 5: someone who's perfectly comfortable kicking a little undead ass. "Jordan is a lot like my character in the Halloween films," Cornell agrees. "She fights the enemy and saves a lot of lives. Jordan is knowledgeable about the use of weaponry - and I'm not a big fan of guns - so it was really fascinating for me to be trained by a weapons expert. I didn't want to look like a schmo out there, and it was so funny because when our armorer, Rob Fournier, started training me, I made a lot of the moves that you see on TV. He kept calling me 'Starsky & Hutch' because I did a lot of the fake things that are not accurate. So because Jordan is supposed to be an expert - especially with the big guns - I wanted it to look like I knew what I was doing."

It turns out that the "big guns" would become the watchwords for Cornell's character in House of the Dead. "As we got even more into it, it became even more fun because the weapons get bigger and bigger and bigger. One was a huge Mossberg 500 stainless-steel shotgun, loaded with incendiary shells. There's also a scene where I roll grenades like bowling balls. Hopefully the action will be in slo-mo as I blow up a bunch of zombies. That was definitely the most fun.

The weapons get so big that there's a far-fetched quality to it - but at the same time I think the audience is going to be glad that there's some hope for our heroes. They don't stand around waiting to get eaten. It's not like one of those films where they just get knocked off one by one. In her mind, Jordan Casper thinks she's going to get everyone out of there alive, and she's really the only chance they've got. Unfortunately, she's wrong."

Adds Cornell, "What's nice about the script is that all the women are really strong and smart. Once can fence, once is a martial artist; they're very empowered and they can take care of themselves. I think there's something about Jordan's use of weapons that will be a lot of fun. In some scenes, the women end up having to protect the men - who are a bit cowardly in comparison."

After her stints in Halloween 4 and Halloween 5, Cornell turned down a role in the Nightmare on Elm Street film series in order to avoid getting typecast as a "horror" actress. "What I like about House of the Dead is that it's not a psychological thriller, it's not a madman in a modern world. Zombies are so unreal that the film has a cool, campy quality to it. The way that Uwe [Boll] shot everything will keep it creepy without the horror getting totally under your skin. It's good, old-fashioned frightening fun."

Part of Cornell's preparation involved studying some of the training used by the Coast Guard, since her "Marine Rescue" character was attached to such an organization. "She's considered marine patrol," Cornell says. "The script was originally written so that she was a Coast Guard officer, so I researched the Coast Guard for women. It seems obvious to me now, but I didn't realize how closely the Guard is tied with other armed services. The combat training is really intense. I had no appreciation for how difficult it is before I did this. It's one of the toughest armed services out there because they never know what's coming at them. It's not combat, but you have to face so many different kinds of things out on the sea. For me to prepare for the role, I had to put aside my sensitivity towards weapons. Jordan is much braver than I am. The thing I like about her, too, is that I was able to create this whole background for her - that her dad was a bigwig in the marine patrol while she was growing up and that she was basically the son he never had. But she's going to make it without his help by doing a good job, and that would include training extra hard. That why she's so gung-ho."

Cornell also worked out some history between her character and [Jurgen] Prochnow's Captain Victor Kirk: "We added a back story outlining how he was my commanding officer back when we were both in the service. We had a little romance action, and he had gone away to launch his private charter company. And so there's a degree of resentment toward him from Jordan because she feels that he turned his back on his country and his duty out of greed. During our scenes, I tried to bring as much of that back story to the foreground as possible so the relationship didn't seem to one-dimensional."

During the shoot, the actress soon found herself playing den mother to a brood of slavering zombie co-stars. "On my second day, I saw a guy come in with this makeup that was basically just some clown white on his face and some scratches, and I thought, 'Okay, the zombies are so completely not scary,'" Cornell remembers. "But that was before I saw the extras who had gone through about four hours of prosthetics. Not only are they really frightening, but they all have different characteristics. It looks so incredibly real. And uncomfortable. During lunch, I had to cut up food for one zombie because he couldn't fit it through his little hole over his mouth. And there's something terrifying about they way they move. They can spring through the air, and they're just relentless - constantly hunting us. The audience is going to completely relate to how horrifying that would be. And there's so many of them! It's not like there's just one guy who keeps coming back to life - like Michael Myers. And they will not stop. I've played the video game - which I love - and the movie is literally a first-person shooter come to life in which you're constantly fending off attacks."