‘If You’re Going To Spend Five Years Making Something, Make It Mean Something’: Steve Hudson Brings Heart To ‘Stitch Head’ Feature Adaptation

When the lights flicker across a towering castle and thunder rolls above the little town of Grubbers Nubbin, the setting feels instantly familiar. A mad scientist, a forgotten creation, an angry mob, it’s the classic Frankenstein setup. But in Stitch Head, opening wide across the U.S. on October 29, director and screenwriter Steve Hudson takes those gothic bones and stitches together something wholly new: a touching, visually sharp comedy adventure about monsters, belonging, and love.

Based on the beloved children’s book series by Guy Bass with illustrations by Pete Williamson, Stitch Head is a Frankenstein tale seen through a comedic lens. The titular hero, an undersized, patchwork creature long forgotten by his creator, spends his days caring for the professor’s many monstrous mistakes. But when a traveling carnival master named Fulbert Freakfinder arrives promising fame and adoration, Stitch Head is tempted into the spotlight, only to discover that true love and friendship might have been nearby all along.

Filmmaking Alchemy

Hudson, whose credits range from live-action features like True North to the Emmy-winning Cranford, brings a rare mix of theatricality, warmth, and British wit to his first animated feature. For him, the attraction to Stitch Head began as a happy accident.

“We encountered the material because we were given the audiobook as a CD,” he tells us. “And it was like super cool. We loved the kind of genre stuff—all the fun that you could have with that. And we also really loved the characters because it really felt like the characters had soul.”

That soul, Hudson says, was non-negotiable when agreeing to the project. “If you’re going to spend five years of your life making something, you want to make something that really means something,” he explains. “This was a story that really touched us. It had the laughs, but it also had the emotions. I didn’t want to give my heart and soul for something that, in the end, was just kind of a funny fall-over. We didn’t want to make a long cartoon.”

A Monster of a Production

The film, produced by Sonja Ewers of Gringo Films and Mark Mertens of Fabrique d’Images, boasts a production scale rarely seen in European family animation. Hudson confirms, “It’s over twenty-six million euros,” an unusually high budget for a continental CG feature. That level of investment gave the filmmakers the freedom to focus on craftsmanship over compromise. “We were fortunate that we could approach it as, ‘This is what we want to do,’ and then be able to pull that through,” he says. “If we’d had to deal with studio executives and all of that, it would have cost twice as much.”

With animation director David Nasser (I Lost My Body, Hotel Transylvania) leading the charge, the film achieves a level of visual polish that nearly rivals major studio fare. “We had a Luxembourg studio [Fabrique d’Images] attached, but obviously, once you reach a certain scale, you’re using people internationally from all over,” Hudson says. “You just have people who’ve spent their lives in the business, who are technically extremely competent.”

A New Kind Of Gothic

Visually, Stitch Head walks a line between spooky and sweet. The source illustrations by Pete Williamson, inky, black and white pen drawings, gave Hudson and his team a strong foundation. “They have that kind of vulnerability and delicacy to them,” Hudson says. “But it just seemed to us that if we were to do that 100% all the way through the film, it would be much more sort of Coraline-y, maybe sort of young teens. We wanted to make an accessible family film that kids could watch from the age of about six.”

The solution? Injecting color and warmth without losing the books’ quirky gothic DNA. “The first thing we did was to take those black and white drawings and then just splash primary colors all over them,” Hudson explains. “We kept some of the shadows, but filled it with fun, making the genre a space in which our imaginations can run free in delight.”

The result is a rich, handcrafted visual world that shares all the visual hallmarks of the books, but is more appropriate for cinemas.

Heart Before Horror

Though it plays with the tropes of horror, Stitch Head is emotionally grounded. “It’s a kids’ and family film,” Hudson says, “but there is a sadness and a melancholy to it that I think kids can really relate to.” He wanted to make a film that respected children’s emotional intelligence. “There’s this idea that kids don’t suffer and kids don’t want to have anything to do with suffering,” he notes. “But man, I was the most vulnerable and probably suffered the most as a child.”

That belief was validated during early test screenings. Hudson recalls one audience comment that moved him deeply: “An eleven-year-old girl wrote, ‘I’m really glad it was a happy ending because in my life I feel like I’m not very loved.’ And I just thought, Christ, now here we are worrying about focus groups, but that’s why you want to make it; if you reach one kid like that, it’s worth it.”

What’s A Circus Without Music?

Another surprise is the film’s plentiful original music. “The idea was always to have a song at the beginning to introduce the circus,” Hudson says. That became “Are You Ready for Monsters?”, a rousing number that bookends the film. A second musical set-piece, “Make Them Scream,” evolved from a smart story note that recognized that one part of the script wasn’t explained well enough. “We took our prompt from Team America: World Police, to go from zero to pro, you need a montage,” Hudson laughs. “So we thought, okay, ‘Make Them Scream.’”

The songs were composed with Nick Urata (Paddington, Little Miss Sunshine), whose band DeVotchKa brings a Balkan carnival energy that fits perfectly. “Nick recorded with his violinist,” Hudson says. “It’s got that crazy Roma feel. It covered all the bases. The music feels super organic, even though it’s completely eclectic.”

The Start Of Something Big?

Hudson hopes Stitch Head finds the kind of lasting love audiences reserve for Halloween-adjacent films like Coraline or The Nightmare Before Christmas, that become part of families’ seasonal rituals.

“We certainly wanted to have that kind of seasonal thing that you can come together as a family and watch,” he says. “There are gags for the kids, but there’s also lots of gags for the adults. Maybe, over the years, people will come back and want to have another look at it.”

After all, Stitch Head is about more than monsters; it’s about empathy, imagination, and finding your place in a world where it’s easy to feel forgotten.