[Ed. Note: The following is the first in The Stranger film section's two-week exploration of porn. There is no overarching theme to this "exploration"; it's just that there were two weeks in a row where porn or porn-related films were coming out. Total coincidence. I don't even like porn. See next week's issue for a profile of Ron Jeremy.]

Kenneth Thomas and Kiyan "the Kannibal" Smith got together and made a porn/gore film called Stethoscope, which stars Janin Callus, whose screen name is "Knighten Daise." Both directors are fans of horror films and porn, and felt the next logical step was to fuse the forms into one nightmarish flesh feast.

In case you miss the screening of Stethoscope at the Little Theatre, visit www.thescourge.com for more info.

Now how did this all begin?

KIYAN SMITH: We put an ad out in The Stranger [classifieds], in the adult services section. If you go to the adult services section, where you have your escorts and your erotic massages, it seems like there's always one or two things where someone is trying to make a film, trying to find actors and actresses. So we did it pretty much through ads.

KNIGHTEN DAISE: Yep, and I was the first person who came in and said, "I'm ready."

Did you actually read the ad in the paper and say, "Yes, I want to be in this porn movie"?

KD: Yeah, I just read it in the paper and it said, "Wanted: Actors for zombie gore porn." And I said, "Wow, that's so right up my alley." Shit, I grew up watching Re-Animator, and, you know, just the sickest films. I mean, hell, if my mother came in my room, she'd usually scream, and forget what she wanted to say to me and leave the room. That was the cool thing about the ad itself; you're looking through the paper and you see "Zombie! Gore! Porn!" A legion of true zombies could not have kept me away from that ad. I was so on it, instantly. "Yeah, hi, I'm your guy."

What was the general response to the ad?

KENNETH THOMAS: Over 100 people responded. Every person under the sun. We had a lot of people who just clearly should not have approached us--they didn't understand what we were trying to do; a lot of people didn't understand that we were actually doing hardcore pornography.

KS: It definitely took a while to sort of get that across to people: This is a porn film; you have to have real sex. This isn't a porn town, this isn't L.A. or New York, and so it was kind of a hard thing to explain what we wanted. Even the stripper community had sort of a hard time understanding that we were trying to be a pornographic production company, and weren't just doing an erotic, independent French film or something.

KD: Which confuses me, because I read the ad and I immediately said, "Porn!" It says, "Zombie! Porn!" Porn entails screwing, right? So [Kiyan and Kenneth] kept telling me over and over, "Now, you know you're going to be having sex?" Well, I should hope so.

I heard you had a special checklist?

KT: Basically, the first thing we did was to make sure that everybody was of legal age. That was the first question. Before we go any further, we need to see ID. We definitely wanted this to be safe and legal and all that stuff, so we let people know there were going to be STD screenings. Things like that were first and foremost. This is gonna be a serious film shoot, and we want everything to go smoothly. So make sure you're 18, and make sure you're STD-free. Once we got past that point of the interview, then we gave them the checklist. The checklist said what types of sexual actions they were or were not willing to perform. For example, if a male was not willing to take a dildo up the ass, we needed to know about that, because we had a scene where a man is penetrated by a dildo from hell.

KS: Our checklist basically listed off just about every position that we could think of. So it was like, for the men: Will you kiss a male? Would you do oral on a male? Will you receive oral from a male? Take a strap-on from a female? Would you have anal sex with a man on top? Would you be a bottom? Just every possible combination we could think of at the time. I think we missed one or two.

KT: Yeah, we didn't consult the Kama Sutra for this.

KS: Call it Zombie Sutra. Speaking of terms, we created for our film the terms "gore-nography," "gore-porn," "gorno," "gorn."