Cutting comedy: Humor and horror make tricky bedfellows, but director Christopher Smith had a clear picture about how to mesh the two elements in his movie "Severance." "It's very easy when you make a horror comedy to go, 'I'm going to be ironic,' " he says. "Then you become a smart-ass and your film becomes annoying. What I wanted to do was to use all of the horror cliches and come up with the most ridiculous things that would turn those conventions on their head."

Initially pitched to Smith as "The Office" meets "Deliverance," "Severance" sends members of a British armaments conglomerate to a team-building corporate retreat in Romania. Stranded in a spooky house, they get attacked by sadistic mercenaries and blown up on the very land mines their employers have sold to warmongering clients over the years. " 'People trapped in the woods' has been to done to death, which is one reason I put so much effort into giving this film a different tone," says Smith, who points out that the film's funny/grisly dynamic required cast members Danny Dyer, Laura Harris and Andy Nyman to come across as absolutely average.

"There's a difference between looking good when your T-shirt's off and you're covered with blood, and getting all beefed up like you're Arnold Schwarzenegger. I didn't want Danny going the Arnie route. Laura Harris is not walking around in a miniskirt -- she's looking like a proper lady who works for a corporation, and we actually made her look more dowdy rather than build her up to look sexier. These characters are not to meant to be glamorous."

These ordinary people are caught in extraordinarily grisly circumstances, including a bear trap sequence for which Smith employed a member of Amputees in Action. "That scene where Andy Nyman gets his leg chopped off and takes the ecstasy tablet as a painkiller was funny because Danny Dyer has been in a lot of drug films, and it's no secret that he's taken a couple of ecstasy tabs in his life, but Andy had never done it. So I said to Danny, 'Go up and speak to Andy about how he's going to perform when he's on ecstasy.' Andy overheard the conversation and told me, 'I've never had my leg cut off either you jerk, but you're asking me to fake that! They call it acting.' "

Coens to Cannes: What's up with the Coen Brothers? Since "The Ladykillers" three years ago, filmmakers Joel and Ethan have kept a fairly low profile. But this week, their new movie, "No Country for Old Men," premieres at the Cannes International Film Festival. And late this summer, the Oscar-winning writer-directors will re-team with their man muse George Clooney on a black-humored spy comedy called "Burn After Reading." Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt are also onboard for the picture, which begins production later this summer as part of a two-picture deal between Focus Features and Britain's Working Title Films. It's not surprising that Focus has cozied up to the brothers. The company's president of production is John Lyons, who served as casting director on their early classics "Raising Arizona," "Miller's Crossing," "Barton Fink," "The Hudsucker Proxy," "Fargo" and "The Big Lebowski."

Gone buggy: Special effects supervisor Dave Nami vividly remembers the first time he saw "The Exorcist": "What made me go want to go see it in the first place was hearing all the ambulances driving to the theater to pick up customers who passed out during the movie."

Little did Nami know that one day he'd be working with "Exorcist" director William Friedkin on another psychological thriller, this one titled "Bug." "Bug," which opens Friday, stars Ashley Judd and Harry Connick Jr. with Michael Shannon as a paranoid loner who believes the government has implanted him with chips designed to read his mind.

"The Exorcist" suffered a famously difficult production -- Ellen Burstyn to this day suffers back pain from her arduous stunts -- and "Bug," filmed in Louisiana shortly before Hurricane Katrina, had its own share of on-set mishaps. "The main challenge was the knife-fight scene," Nami recalls. "Billy insisted that the actors really stabbed each other. Michael Shannon was so intense that he kept breaking the retractable blades because he hit so hard. We were rebuilding knives left and right."

Most of "Bug" was shot on a gymnasium-turned-soundstage in Nami's hometown of Metairie, near New Orleans. I asked Nami, whose own house narrowly escaped destruction, for a progress report. The bad news: Bureaucrats continue to bungle recovery efforts, he says: "It's so bad you'd think it's a joke that can't be true, but it's all true. It's unbelievable."

The good news: Film production is thriving. "For 10 and a half months after Katrina, not a single movie started production here, but now it's booming and tight. Now in Louisiana, there's nine movies in production in a 300-mile radius. I'm working on 'Autopsy,' 'American Summer,' 'The Yellow Handkerchief' and ... 'Black Water Transit,' and Shreveport has five shows going on there."

What's more, LIFT Productions, a private outfit, has just broken ground on an $85 million film complex. "It'll be three blocks wide and 12 blocks long, with studios, soundstages and production facilities right in the heart of New Orleans," Nami says. "That's encouraging."