Speaker 1: Oh he is, folks, it show die.
Speaker 2: People say good money to see this movie.
Speaker 1: When they go out to a theater, they want clothed, sodas,
Speaker 1: hot popcorn in no monsters.
Speaker 2: In the Projection Booth, everyone for tend podcasting isn't boring.
Speaker 3: Got it off?
Speaker 4: Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth.
Speaker 4: I'm your host Mike White. On this episode, it is
Speaker 4: the return of Clark Collis. He wrote You've got read
Speaker 4: on You all about the making of Shawn of the Dead.
Speaker 4: Now he's back with a incredibly ambitious book called Screaming
Speaker 4: and Conjuring, The Resurrection and Unstoppable Rise of the Modern Horror.
Speaker 4: It is a trip through the horror genre for the
Speaker 4: last say twenty five years, that sweet spot between when
Speaker 4: Scream came out and then the Conjuring movie started, and
Speaker 4: a whole lot more. It is a just wild ride
Speaker 4: that he takes you on. Goes before Scream, of course,
Speaker 4: and goes after the Conjuring movies, and talks about a
Speaker 4: whole lot of stuff that as you hear this interview,
Speaker 4: your mind will just start racing with all of the
Speaker 4: other titles that came out during that wonderful time. Thank
Speaker 4: you so much for listening. Definitely pick up Screaming and
Speaker 4: Conjuring and I hope you enjoy this interview. Clark Collis,
Speaker 4: thank you so much for coming back on the show.
Speaker 4: I always appreciate talking with you. I had such a
Speaker 4: fun time talking about You've got read on you and
Speaker 4: am super excited to talk about Screaming and Conjuring. So
Speaker 4: when I saw the title of the book, wasn't exactly
Speaker 4: share what it was about, but I kind of had
Speaker 4: an inkling how did you approach this topic and what
Speaker 4: inspired this book.
Speaker 2: So it is a book that is essentially a history
Speaker 2: of the modern horror movie, which starts with Scream in
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety six and ends with The Conjuring in twenty thirteen,
Speaker 2: although there is an epilogue that sort of canters through
Speaker 2: the last ten years, which proved to be a pretty
Speaker 2: busy ten years. I just felt it was a period
Speaker 2: of time in horror that hadn't really been covered before
Speaker 2: in this particular way. I look at essentially the different
Speaker 2: waves of horror that arrived during that time. So obviously
Speaker 2: following Scream, you had a lot of horror teen slashes essentially,
Speaker 2: and then that was followed by both the short lived
Speaker 2: craze for j horror and the rather longer lived crazes
Speaker 2: for remaking every horror movie ever made, and also what
Speaker 2: became known as the torture porn sort of period. Plus
Speaker 2: you had the French extreme, you had influences from abroad.
Speaker 2: From abroad, essentially the book is very US and to
Speaker 2: some degree UK focus, but primarily US. And then that
Speaker 2: also led to this started the sort of supernatural, both
Speaker 2: fan footage, the enthusiasm for fan footage movies and for
Speaker 2: supernatural horror, which began with paranormal activity and then insidious
Speaker 2: and then ultimately the conjuring. And I think there had
Speaker 2: been books about the screen franchise, for example, and torture
Speaker 2: porn and Jay horror, and I just thought it would
Speaker 2: be interesting to me certainly, and hopefully the readers weave
Speaker 2: together a tale. I could see the story in my mind,
Speaker 2: the way that one wave or one batch of filmmakers
Speaker 2: inspired the next sort of positive legal negatively, So you
Speaker 2: have scream inspiring all the team slashers. But then you know,
Speaker 2: after two or three years of that, you had the
Speaker 2: onslaught of as I said, quote unquote, torture porn movies,
Speaker 2: which to some degree was the reaction to that Rob Zombie,
Speaker 2: and he was like, I was never going to make
Speaker 2: a Screamer, I Know what you did last Summer, or
Speaker 2: an Urban Legends. It was always going to be My
Speaker 2: influences were always going to be from the seventies, essentially.
Speaker 2: Then he went on to make House one Thousand Corpses
Speaker 2: and The Devil's Reject, so that was in my mind. Originally.
Speaker 2: I pitched my wonderful publisher, Matthew at nineteen eighty four Publishing,
Speaker 2: doing a book that kind of described the creation of
Speaker 2: ten or so franchises from the period, because studying it
Speaker 2: was Scream in nineteen ninety six. You do have this
Speaker 2: new wave of franchises because the previous franchises of the eighties,
Speaker 2: Your Halloween's and your A Night We're in Elm Streets
Speaker 2: had run out of gas a bit by the mid
Speaker 2: nineties and then were replaced by Scream, I Know what
Speaker 2: you did last Summer saw obviously hostel and then leading
Speaker 2: into paranormal activity and insidious and the conjuring. So I
Speaker 2: suggested picking ten franchises and looking at that, Matthew made
Speaker 2: the student observation that's all well and good, but if
Speaker 2: somebody doesn't, for example, the Saw movies, and that's the
Speaker 2: whole chapter that just gonna skip. So maybe it would
Speaker 2: be best to make it a little bit more palatable
Speaker 2: to those people too, to weave the weave all the
Speaker 2: stories together, which which I think he was one hundred
Speaker 2: percent rider, and I'm happy with the way that it
Speaker 2: turned out.
Speaker 3: I'm surprised you survived writing a book like this because
Speaker 3: it just seems to continue to go down the rabbit
Speaker 3: hole every single page I turn or flip through virtually
Speaker 3: these days. But it was just amazing to have you
Speaker 3: talking about screaming. Then you kind of dip back into like, well,
Speaker 3: here's more about Wes Craven, and here's more about John Carpenter.
Speaker 3: Here's more about Slashers, and just build and build and build,
Speaker 3: and just take me through this. And you are such
Speaker 3: a good host to take me through this entire journey.
Speaker 2: The tension was I wanted it to be comprehensive, but
Speaker 2: I also didn't want to basically just be a list
Speaker 2: of movies. I do not tell the story of every
Speaker 2: horror movie during this period, but I do have a
Speaker 2: stab at telling the stories behind the most popular, the
Speaker 2: most influential, and on occasion just stories that used me
Speaker 2: to tell. Like I didn't intend to devote a section
Speaker 2: to the film Dracula two thousand, of which I had
Speaker 2: no memory whatsoever, to be honest with you, even though
Speaker 2: it was quite a popular film. But then I interviewed
Speaker 2: and interviewed the lovely and very talented Patrick Lacier, who
Speaker 2: was Weds Craven's long time editor but also directed a
Speaker 2: bunch of films, including it was the second film actually,
Speaker 2: Dracula two thousand, and he related the story of how
Speaker 2: in I guess February two thousand Bob Weinstein, and Bob
Speaker 2: Weinstein said, Okay, I want you to make a punk
Speaker 2: call Dracula the two thousand. This is Bob Weinstein, obviously
Speaker 2: the brother of Harvey Weinstein and also the head of
Speaker 2: Dimension Films. He said, I want you to would you
Speaker 2: be interested in making punk call Dracula two thousands in February,
Speaker 2: but it has to be out by December of that year,
Speaker 2: so he had nine months to do it, and even films,
Speaker 2: films are made within a nine month period, but it's
Speaker 2: usually means that at the start of that nine month
Speaker 2: period they at least have a script or some notion
Speaker 2: of what this film is going to be about. And
Speaker 2: even then it's a hell of a race. And Patrick
Speaker 2: walked me through that experience, and then I was like,
Speaker 2: I've got all this of material. It's a fascinating story.
Speaker 2: And even though you know, I think it's not a film,
Speaker 2: a lot of people remember, I kind of want to
Speaker 2: stick that in. The funny ending to that story is
Speaker 2: that Bob Weinstein was obsessed to the idea that it
Speaker 2: had to come out in two thousand because it was
Speaker 2: called Dracula two thousand. But it being two thousand is
Speaker 2: not really essential to the film. It's not like all
Speaker 2: that many people saying Dracula is alive in the year
Speaker 2: two thousand and that doesn't really happen all that much.
Speaker 2: And so in foreign territories it was actually released in
Speaker 2: two thousand and one, and in those territories it was
Speaker 2: retitled Dracula two thousand and one, which seemed like a
Speaker 2: very easy fix. To be honest with you.
Speaker 3: I was surprised at just how many people you talked
Speaker 3: to for this. When do you have any account of
Speaker 3: how many interviews you had to do for this?
Speaker 2: I interviewed about fifty people specifically for this book. I
Speaker 2: spent eighteen years as a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly magazine,
Speaker 2: and during that period, because it was a period where
Speaker 2: we really started going online, I had the opportunity to
Speaker 2: interview all sorts of people about all sorts of horror
Speaker 2: folks about their films, and so some of it was
Speaker 2: old material. The strange thing was sometimes I'd be like, Ah,
Speaker 2: I wish I'd spoken to such and such about this film,
Speaker 2: and then I would just do a search of my
Speaker 2: documents on my computer and realize that I had indeed
Speaker 2: spoken to such and such about that film. Everyone in
Speaker 2: Entertainment Weekly was speaking to a lot of people. During
Speaker 2: the two thousands, I did about fifty reviews specifically for
Speaker 2: the book, and then I have no idea, probably included
Speaker 2: quotes from fifty more people that I'd interviewed before. And then, frankly,
Speaker 2: I was in London and I went to the BFI,
Speaker 2: the British Film Institute, and they've got a wonderful library
Speaker 2: and they have two rows of band Fangoria magazines. So
Speaker 2: I spent two months at the BFI London going through
Speaker 2: every issue of Fangoria from that period. And it really
Speaker 2: I've always loved fangoria, but I have to say, boy,
Speaker 2: like they really covered horror. I mean they and continue
Speaker 2: to do. But like I would like, there are so
Speaker 2: many films that, like I say, people might not remember
Speaker 2: that they would have devoted a story to the production,
Speaker 2: then another article and a different issue maybe to the effects.
Speaker 2: And yeah, that was a glory, that was a pretty
Speaker 2: that was a pretty fun couple of months. But it
Speaker 2: took a long time to crank through seventeen years worth
Speaker 2: of what was then like it was like every single month.
Speaker 2: I like the writing process, so I like interviewing people
Speaker 2: and writing. And I think some people, if they decided
Speaker 2: to write this kind of history, would be like I'm
Speaker 2: going to get all the DVDs and I'm going to
Speaker 2: spend three months watching the DVDs. And I certainly did
Speaker 2: spend a lot of time watching the DVDs, but like
Speaker 2: to get on with it. Having said which, if people
Speaker 2: who are active horror fans during the two thousands or
Speaker 2: any kind of film fans will be aware that if
Speaker 2: you get those DVDs, like often there's two or three
Speaker 2: or four commentaries, like an Eli Ross film might have
Speaker 2: seven different commentaries and that's another Again, I'm not suggesting
Speaker 2: that's hard labor, but like the Hostile DVD are like
Speaker 2: Happened Fever DVD, I'm you know, sitting down and listening
Speaker 2: to all of that because even though I interviewed Eli, like,
Speaker 2: you never know what kind of little factoid is going
Speaker 2: to spring up during the commentary. And also those people's
Speaker 2: memories now are a lot hazier than have gotten hazy
Speaker 2: over time. So it's fantastic to get to listen to
Speaker 2: commentaries that were made when the blood on the fake
Speaker 2: corpses are still wet. Pretty much, this book is about
Speaker 2: four uder and fifty pages long, and it literally couldn't
Speaker 2: be any longer because you need to physically bind this thing,
Speaker 2: although I did. After I finished it, I realized the
Speaker 2: Barber Streuisen's autobiography was nine hundred pages, and I did
Speaker 2: almost call up my publisher and be like, wait, why
Speaker 2: did this thing have to be like and got only
Speaker 2: four hundred and fifty pages because it's been longer. So
Speaker 2: I'd interviewed like Greg Nicotero, who is this who I
Speaker 2: interviewed before, but he's mostly known I guess as a
Speaker 2: special makeup effects wizard. He co founded K and B
Speaker 2: his craigs all the way back to Evil Dead two,
Speaker 2: and then over time he's become like a second unit director.
Speaker 2: He's one of the main creative forces behind The Walking Dead,
Speaker 2: which is probably now what he is most famous for,
Speaker 2: but he's worked on pretty much like he's worked on
Speaker 2: dozens of horror movies. And so I interviewed him, and
Speaker 2: I spoke to him about the ten most prominent horror
Speaker 2: films from the era that he worked for worked on
Speaker 2: from The Mess to Jennifer's Body to Drag Me to
Speaker 2: Hell to and so I'd interview him and then I'd
Speaker 2: get up the next morning and transcribe the interview, and
Speaker 2: it's not the best, but I always think it's like
Speaker 2: when a sailor puts a net into the sea and
Speaker 2: then pulls it in and then you see what fish
Speaker 2: you've got, And that's what I mean. People A lot
Speaker 2: of people use transcribing services, but I like to transcribe
Speaker 2: myself because you're like, this is what I got. Because
Speaker 2: when you're interviewing somebody, especially if you're interviewing someone about
Speaker 2: lots of different movies, you're not always really taking in
Speaker 2: what they're saying. Necessarily, or you need to be a
Speaker 2: better interviewer than I am to do that. You're thinking,
Speaker 2: what's the next question going to be? What's the next
Speaker 2: film going to be? Because there's always a time issue,
Speaker 2: And so I would get all these great quotes safe
Speaker 2: from Greg Nicaturio and they would then I would go
Speaker 2: into the text and just add them with that really,
Speaker 2: and then so this would happen day after day with
Speaker 2: different interviewees, and I wasn't really that worried about how
Speaker 2: big the book was getting until I woke up one
Speaker 2: day and realized that it was like eighty thousand words
Speaker 2: longer than it could be, really, that it physically could be,
Speaker 2: and to those who don't know, like eighty thousand words
Speaker 2: is like two hundred pages basically, So I had to
Speaker 2: Then I was extricker because the time was grinding on,
Speaker 2: the deadline was getting close, and this thing was now
Speaker 2: like a book more than it should be, really, and
Speaker 2: so then I had to go in. And I'm pretty
Speaker 2: good at cutting my own work. I usually find that
Speaker 2: if I leave something for a week and go back
Speaker 2: to it, that I'm like, what is half of this
Speaker 2: nonsense You've written like a week ago? So that was
Speaker 2: fine in the end, but yeah, that was something. But
Speaker 2: it's good when you've all it's good when you've got
Speaker 2: too much material. And I always think that perhaps if
Speaker 2: you boil something down, as I had to do, from
Speaker 2: two hundred and fifty thousand words to one hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty thousand words, then hopefully people, even though it's not there,
Speaker 2: people can still sense that the half that was there,
Speaker 2: the sort of that you still get on the like
Speaker 2: a physical feeling of hopefully well made or at least
Speaker 2: extremely sturdy antique desk or something.
Speaker 3: Were there any movies that were new to you while
Speaker 3: you were putting this together?
Speaker 2: There were some like I've never been a fan of
Speaker 2: very extreme horror, or rather I don't really mind very
Speaker 2: extreme horror. I guess what I don't really like is
Speaker 2: films that I'm not even sure horror movies yet are
Speaker 2: very extreme. And I had never seen Lars von Trier's Antichrist,
Speaker 2: for instance, which I guess is technical horror. And I
Speaker 2: should say that I like what a lot of Las
Speaker 2: van von Trier's filmography did a wonderful I've saw a
Speaker 2: wonderful two season show set in a hospital in like
Speaker 2: the maddest hospital that ever existed called The Kingdom, and
Speaker 2: I remember going to a cinema and watching all of
Speaker 2: the second season in one day. But I've never seen
Speaker 2: Anti Christ because I think I read reviews was aware
Speaker 2: that it was a bit of a tough watch, and
Speaker 2: I watched it, and it's artistic certainly, but I was like, Oh,
Speaker 2: this is no fun and I'm glad that I hadn't
Speaker 2: seen it before. There was stuff that I felt that
Speaker 2: I probably wouldn't be writing about at length, but I
Speaker 2: felt I needed to check out to sort of make
Speaker 2: sure that I shouldn't be writing about like or to
Speaker 2: understand its position in the context of horror. And I
Speaker 2: mentioned I did mention Anti Christ and a couple of
Speaker 2: other extreme horror movies, but then did a section on
Speaker 2: The Human Centerpede, which in its own way is equally
Speaker 2: grotesque as Antichrist, but it's very much more of a
Speaker 2: traditional horror movie. And there was an odd period of
Speaker 2: time and Entertainment Weekly when I was one of my
Speaker 2: jobs was basically being the Human Centerpede correspondent because it
Speaker 2: was something of a theatrical success, but what really became
Speaker 2: popular was the idea of stitching people together and so
Speaker 2: it was referenced on thirty Rock and The Colberg Show
Speaker 2: and all of these TV shows. And I had like
Speaker 2: lunch with Tom six, the director and the cast of
Speaker 2: Human Center bed two at very nice steak restaurant in Midtown.
Speaker 2: So I had all this stuff on the Human Centipede,
Speaker 2: which I thought was of interest. And yeah, there's definitely
Speaker 2: some sort of smaller movements of the era where I'm like,
Speaker 2: these are the three or four films of importance, and
Speaker 2: let's look particularly at this one movie.
Speaker 3: Reading the book, it feels like you have seen everything,
Speaker 3: so I was surprised that there were things that you
Speaker 3: hadn't seen before.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there were one or two that I'd avoided, And
Speaker 2: I think there's just stuff that I had seen and
Speaker 2: then frankly could not remember anything about, which isn't necessarily
Speaker 2: dis from that quality. But for example, Patrick Lucier, who
Speaker 2: I was talking about earlier directing directly two thousand later
Speaker 2: directed My Bloody Valentine's three D remake of My Bloody
Speaker 2: Valentine that I definitely saw but didn't really have much
Speaker 2: memory of, and so I rewatched that was this is
Speaker 2: a lot of fun. This is a lot of fun.
Speaker 2: It's interesting that. I think when you go to the cinema,
Speaker 2: you always wanted to be the best film in the world,
Speaker 2: and then when it's not, you're like, okay, that was
Speaker 2: all right. But I think from a perspective of twenty years,
Speaker 2: it's amazing how many films that I probably didn't regard
Speaker 2: that highly at the time. I'm like, this is fun,
Speaker 2: this is just flat out fun. If this turned up today,
Speaker 2: then I would really enjoy it. What I thought what
Speaker 2: happened is I would watch a lot of horror films
Speaker 2: from the era and they just wouldn't have aged. And
Speaker 2: certainly there's some if you go back, especially to the
Speaker 2: early two thousands when it's that period of Maxim magazine
Speaker 2: being very popular, the Manjdo and all of that stuff,
Speaker 2: some language in some of the films which has an
Speaker 2: aged necessarily well in terms of slurs and this and that.
Speaker 2: But with regards apart from that, I was surprised how
Speaker 2: many of those films still stand leve. I am afraid
Speaker 2: to admit that I watched. I do not have a
Speaker 2: big steps TV setup to you would think that I
Speaker 2: have one of those theaters and big comfy armchair and
Speaker 2: a in popcorn machine but not. I just watched everything
Speaker 2: on the same old crappy computer that I'm speaking with
Speaker 2: you on them. But I would put on like The Descent,
Speaker 2: for instance, Neil Marshall's tale of sperlunkers who meet monsters
Speaker 2: in an apple Eachian cave system. And I'm really hobbling
Speaker 2: the film's chances of frightening me by watching it on
Speaker 2: my tiny little computer. Another thing scary as hell in
Speaker 2: any format, I have to say. And it's as scary
Speaker 2: now really as it was twenty years ago. And again,
Speaker 2: films were either as good as I remembered or had
Speaker 2: improved in my mind through time.
Speaker 3: Basically, it's always fascinating how the movies informed themselves versus
Speaker 3: the outside factors of you know, world politics or policy
Speaker 3: or you know, social movements, those kind of things. It's
Speaker 3: always so interesting to see how that balance comes by,
Speaker 3: and how sometimes films just completely miss when it comes
Speaker 3: to where they should have been heading and where they
Speaker 3: ended up going to. And just like this was not
Speaker 3: very successful just because of times of change, but the
Speaker 3: filmmakers didn't seem to realize that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Again and again, it's like any sort of type
Speaker 2: of industry, so many people would tell me that they
Speaker 2: had trouble getting the film finance because it wasn't similar
Speaker 2: to the film that two three days ago had just
Speaker 2: opened at the box office. I interviewed Mike or Doherty,
Speaker 2: who directed film Trick or Treat and then later went
Speaker 2: on to direct one of the wildly successful Godzilla movies,
Speaker 2: but Trick a Treat was his first. Who was his
Speaker 2: directorial debut. Who's trying to get finance for it? And
Speaker 2: for those han't seen it, it's got essentially a anthology
Speaker 2: horror movie, but the stories are woven together. But you've
Speaker 2: got were wolves and zombies and a serial killer, but
Speaker 2: it's not like a teen serial killer thing. And he
Speaker 2: was trying to sell this in two thousand and was
Speaker 2: rapeatedly told no one gives a crap about like vampires
Speaker 2: or were wolves or anything that you're talking about. All
Speaker 2: people want teen slashers. And Michael was thinking to himself,
Speaker 2: but they're not gonna want teen slashes by the time
Speaker 2: we've made this film, because that'll be in two years time,
Speaker 2: and by that point they'll have had six years of
Speaker 2: teen slashes and people will no longer want to citizens,
Speaker 2: which was absolutely proven correct. And again there are so
Speaker 2: many stories. The book starts with a story told me
Speaker 2: by Don Coscarelli, the writer director of Fantasm, created the
Speaker 2: Phantasm franchise and later went on to direct Bubba Hotel
Speaker 2: and John Dies at the end. But in the early
Speaker 2: nineties was trying to get an adaptation of a Joe
Speaker 2: Lansdale zombie Western off the ground, which you would actually think,
Speaker 2: that's the fantastic mix of stuff. And he sent it
Speaker 2: out the studios and all the he was like, even
Speaker 2: New Line, which was like the sort of house of
Speaker 2: horror at the time, send a note back saying, no
Speaker 2: one will ever want to see a zombie movie basically.
Speaker 2: So then he went back at I think I got
Speaker 2: to him across there all references to zombies and just
Speaker 2: put monster instead. But who's the same, Because, as you said,
Speaker 2: it has to be the right time. Maybe if Don
Speaker 2: had made a Zombie West in the nearly nineties, that
Speaker 2: wouldn't have worked. But what I can tell you is
Speaker 2: that ten years later, suddenly everybody's making zombie movies and
Speaker 2: zombie zombie genre is not just the most popular horror
Speaker 2: genre in the world, but it's one of the most
Speaker 2: popular genres in the world. For ten or fifteen yearsn't
Speaker 2: even up to today.
Speaker 3: It's amazing too to think of just how many of
Speaker 3: these franchises that you talk about are still going. You know,
Speaker 3: as we're talking, it's like, what two weeks after the
Speaker 3: latest Conjuring film.
Speaker 2: I think it is.
Speaker 3: It's like they just they have had legs for decades now,
Speaker 3: which is wild. I mean, even what Final Destination just
Speaker 3: got a remake I think, or maybe it's a oh.
Speaker 2: That's I mean not see in Final Destination blood Lines.
Speaker 2: That's one of the honest to god, that is my
Speaker 2: favorite theatrical experience of the whole year. It is it
Speaker 2: is absolutely what you want. If you haven't liked Final
Speaker 2: Destination films, that's fine. Wouldn't advise you go to see it. No,
Speaker 2: they absolutely do what you would want to do with
Speaker 2: that with that franchise, bearing in mind it has been
Speaker 2: away for a long time, and no, it's terrific. It's
Speaker 2: absolutely terrific. I would say I saw it off for
Speaker 2: a couple of drinks at a free press screening, but
Speaker 2: people loved it. It was a general audience press screen
Speaker 2: but it was a preview. I started writing this book
Speaker 2: about two years ago, and pretty soon it was always
Speaker 2: called Screaming and Conjuring, and then I came up with
Speaker 2: the sort of subtitle which I still have to look
Speaker 2: at the cover of the book to remind myself what
Speaker 2: it is, but it's Screaming, Conjuring, the Resurrection and Unstoppable
Speaker 2: Rise of the modern horror movie. But I did think,
Speaker 2: like in the back of my head, was like, what
Speaker 2: if it stops by the time this book comes out.
Speaker 2: And there was a period about eighteen months ago, I
Speaker 2: don't know if you were a call when there was
Speaker 2: a clutch of movies, including like an Omen prequel and
Speaker 2: the vampire movie Abigail that came out, and it was
Speaker 2: a Sydney Sweeney supernatural movie, and they all underperformed. Now
Speaker 2: because they're low budget, relatively low budget horror movies. None
Speaker 2: of them were disasters, and I'm not saying they're bad.
Speaker 2: Within about six weeks or so, three horror movies came out.
Speaker 2: None of them was big hits, and people were like,
Speaker 2: maybe this is the end of horror, and I'm like,
Speaker 2: but sir, I'm writing a book about the unstoppable rise
Speaker 2: of horror. Am I going to have to change the thing.
Speaker 2: But then of course it comes to this year, and
Speaker 2: it's Sinners, it's weapons, it's the Conjuring, Last Rite, Spinal
Speaker 2: Destination Bloodlines twenty eight years later, which I mean was
Speaker 2: me only a medium size hit, but people were very
Speaker 2: much all for it, and yeah, I couldn't. As it
Speaker 2: turns out, fortuitously, it couldn't have worked out better for me.
Speaker 2: I will say, people still either underrate or take for
Speaker 2: granted the box office success of a right. It is
Speaker 2: interesting to me that the last Conjuring movie came out
Speaker 2: and made four hundred and fifty million dollars pretty much
Speaker 2: around the world, and just went and mentioned people were like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: what do you expect. I'm like, what do you expect?
Speaker 2: That's the eleventh Conjuring movie and relatively quick succession. Many
Speaker 2: people would expect it not to make almost half a
Speaker 2: billion dollars, And now people I loved one battle after another,
Speaker 2: and I understand why people are wringing their hands over
Speaker 2: the whether it's going to be a box office head
Speaker 2: or not, of what that means for original material and
Speaker 2: so on and so forth. And I'm like, could we
Speaker 2: just spend another sentence talking about how this Conjuring movie
Speaker 2: made half a billion dollars? But I'm not saying. I'm
Speaker 2: not saying we should just make horror sequels all the time.
Speaker 2: Far from it, although that's what people are doing, but
Speaker 2: it's still taken for granted. I think one of the
Speaker 2: reasons now that people can make one battle after another
Speaker 2: is because of the money that horror makes. The two
Speaker 2: things people go and see a horror and then rejigged
Speaker 2: versions of hids IP from fifteen years ago. Essentially it
Speaker 2: seems to be the oh, what's like car of the
Speaker 2: name they keep on making, like How to Train Your
Speaker 2: Dragon and so on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the Disney Live Action remakes and that whole movement
Speaker 3: that's been going on.
Speaker 2: Who did your cover art? The cover art was done
Speaker 2: by the lovely and hugely talented Gary pull In aka
Speaker 2: Gaulish Gary. If you google him you can see a
Speaker 2: fantastic amount of fantastic artwork. He specializes in horror related
Speaker 2: sort of posters and whatnot. He's recently done the covers
Speaker 2: of a lot of Stephen King paperback reissues and it
Speaker 2: was difficult to come up with a suitable image. It
Speaker 2: wasn't difficult for me because I didn't have to do it,
Speaker 2: but I know that my publisher Matthew and Gary myself
Speaker 2: set around and had a meeting, and the problem is
Speaker 2: that it's you want something that says horror, but we
Speaker 2: didn't really want to say what kind of horror, necessarily
Speaker 2: because it's a book that covers slashes and zombies and
Speaker 2: vampires and virus movies and everything. So if you've ever
Speaker 2: been to a marketing meeting or any kind of meeting
Speaker 2: of this sort, then you know that comes a point
Speaker 2: where someone's, yeah, but we want it to be cool.
Speaker 2: Whatever it is, this soapbox, all people to know that
Speaker 2: it's got detergent in it, but cool. And if you've
Speaker 2: ever been one of those meetings, you're like, what are
Speaker 2: you talking about? What does that possibly mean? But when
Speaker 2: we were having the meeting, was Gary I heard myself say, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's horror but cool, and inwardly I shrank in shame.
Speaker 2: But I think he managed to fulfill this stupid and
Speaker 2: extremely brief wonderfully. Yeah. Yeah, what are you working on
Speaker 2: these days? I'm working on another book about a single film,
Speaker 2: but it's not It hasn't been announced and hasn't been
Speaker 2: announced to the people who made the film yet, so
Speaker 2: I'm not really sure. I'm at liberty to say too
Speaker 2: much about it, really, but I'm really enjoying I'm really
Speaker 2: enjoying researching it. It is fun writing these books where
Speaker 2: we were also embedding screaming the films within the context
Speaker 2: of what was going on like at the time as well,
Speaker 2: and how that impacted the way that the films were
Speaker 2: made and then released, And going back to Screaming and conjuring,
Speaker 2: there is a lot of stuff about nine to eleven
Speaker 2: and then just some degree the financial collapse, and then
Speaker 2: ultimately in the apologue Covid. I should know I've made
Speaker 2: it sound like a terrible book to read. These are
Speaker 2: quite lightly a touched upon, but there's no doubt that
Speaker 2: the movies at the time a specifically horror movies reflective
Speaker 2: of the times which they made because they can reference
Speaker 2: things that are going on in the current day without
Speaker 2: being necessarily a huge plot point. If people have seen Grindhouse,
Speaker 2: for instance, in the Planet Terror section, there's these soldiers
Speaker 2: come back from war and they bring a disease with
Speaker 2: them and they just mentioned that they've just killed the
Speaker 2: Samba bin Laden in a cave or whatever. I'm not
Speaker 2: making I'm not been tried about the subject matter as
Speaker 2: Robert Rodriguez said, the great thing about exploitation movies is
Speaker 2: you can rewrite the script as you go along to
Speaker 2: incorporate what's happening in the in the present day.
Speaker 3: And was very glad that you had that context around
Speaker 3: these films and saw that influence. I mean, I'm just thinking, now,
Speaker 3: you know the Megan films and Companion and these types
Speaker 3: of films, and how they're really kind of tapping into
Speaker 3: the fears over AI, and it's much easier to have
Speaker 3: a personification of AI rather than that Johnny Depp movie
Speaker 3: with the what was that called man?
Speaker 2: I couldn't remember the name of the time, but it's
Speaker 2: the directory. It's the first time, I believe the last
Speaker 2: film directed by Christopher Nolan's longtime cinematographer, Transcendence. Transcendence. There
Speaker 2: you go. I always think you shouldn't name a film.
Speaker 2: I just don't think you should name a film more
Speaker 2: anything a word that people can't spell and don't know
Speaker 2: what it means. I just think it makes people properly
Speaker 2: else people like, hey, do you want to go to movies?
Speaker 2: What's on? And they look and be like, I'm not
Speaker 2: going to say transcendence out loud. You know what I mean,
Speaker 2: We'll go and see something else that's stead my theory. Yeah,
Speaker 2: there was one theory that I read that I wanted
Speaker 2: to include in the book and then didn't. But I
Speaker 2: was reading a book about I think there's a whole
Speaker 2: book abou essays about Blumhouse, and there is a theory
Speaker 2: that I don't necessarily subscribe to, but that the wave
Speaker 2: of movies about ghosts in houses so your insidious is
Speaker 2: and your parent normal activity were partly inspired by the
Speaker 2: financial crash because they made houses and homes such a
Speaker 2: stress point and sort of the struggle to keep your
Speaker 2: house and to by extensions cinematically defeat the ghost which
Speaker 2: is hanging around in your house. It made that sort
Speaker 2: of even more of a worry for people than it
Speaker 2: was before. You can overconnect these things, and I wasn't
Speaker 2: entirely sure about that. Well, I will say when people
Speaker 2: may remember the drag Me, when draged me the house,
Speaker 2: so those of these things happen accidentally, and when Dragged
Speaker 2: Me the hell came out, which is a film which
Speaker 2: was kicked off is kicked off by the lead character
Speaker 2: not giving a loan to the antagonist essentially, who is
Speaker 2: a Ramani an older Romani lady, and so the older
Speaker 2: Romani lady loses her house and then curses the lead actress.
Speaker 2: And when that premiered, it can in I'm going to say,
Speaker 2: to thousand and eight or nine. They got a lot
Speaker 2: of questions about it was written up as like the
Speaker 2: first film of the sort of financial crash era, but
Speaker 2: in fact, Sammaraimi, who directed and co wrote the film
Speaker 2: with his brother, it was actually like a twenty year
Speaker 2: old script that they dug up. They had started working
Speaker 2: on Her twenty years previously. But then sometimes the film
Speaker 2: just meets the moment. Saul was written long before the
Speaker 2: start of the Iraq War, and yet that is a
Speaker 2: film that very very much again seemed reflective of the
Speaker 2: state of politics and diplomacy, geopolitics, and then I think
Speaker 2: was partly embraced by people because they were becoming familiar
Speaker 2: with things awfulness on the news. That's a cherry thought
Speaker 2: for you.
Speaker 3: Your enthusiasm for the material comes through in the writing,
Speaker 3: and it just makes me so excited to read about
Speaker 3: these films, even though we frankly, yeah, there are certain
Speaker 3: of these franchises where I'm just like e not really
Speaker 3: for me, like The Saw movies, But I really enjoyed
Speaker 3: reading your writing about them and going back to the
Speaker 3: housing crisis. I mean, I actually really agree with that,
Speaker 3: and especially films like I mean even you know, Viberium,
Speaker 3: or even that Poultergeist remake, where it just feels like
Speaker 3: we have a home. We have to do what we
Speaker 3: can to protect the home, not just as the family unit,
Speaker 3: but as a financial investment. We don't want this investment
Speaker 3: to be screwed up.
Speaker 2: No, I think you're right now. I've been navigating to
Speaker 2: which I put it in the book. Of course, with Bavarian,
Speaker 2: what they want to do is get out of the
Speaker 2: damn house rather than staying there. But I understand that
Speaker 2: it's still a source of stress. I'm a big fan
Speaker 2: of the Stare franchise. I think it's a miracle what
Speaker 2: they pulled off with that. But if you're making eight
Speaker 2: movies or whatever it was, seven movies in seven years,
Speaker 2: they're not every decision you're going to make is going
Speaker 2: to be correct. I tell you, the thing that I'm
Speaker 2: most fascinated about with these franchises is they got locked
Speaker 2: into this idea that there was a big hit that
Speaker 2: was franchisable, then they should make the second one the
Speaker 2: following year, like they should only allow year to pass
Speaker 2: because they wanted to they wanted to cash in. And
Speaker 2: this was particularly true with the Saw franchise. But often
Speaker 2: the people that made the first film are like, yeah,
Speaker 2: good luck with that, and we're going to go off
Speaker 2: and do something else that James One, who directed the
Speaker 2: first Saw movie, did not make a Saw two, and
Speaker 2: the director of the first Paranormal Activity movie did not
Speaker 2: make the second one. So again, going back to our
Speaker 2: story of Dracular two thousand, once again, they've got less
Speaker 2: than a year to make this movie. I find that
Speaker 2: race to do that and just incredibly interesting to research
Speaker 2: and write about it. It's almost like the second movie
Speaker 2: those franchises is almost more of a story than the first.
Speaker 2: Right now, there's so much riding on it. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: many people have so much riding on it. It was
Speaker 2: an idea with Paranormal Activity too. Jason Blummer had an
Speaker 2: idea that they should give ten different filmmakers a very
Speaker 2: small amount of money. I comeber those ten. I think
Speaker 2: they should spend a million dollars, giving ten different filmmakers
Speaker 2: one hundred grand each and just released the best one,
Speaker 2: which I would have loved that to have happened, but
Speaker 2: cool I had prevailed and wise I had or maybe
Speaker 2: less less wise heads prevailed and they did it in
Speaker 2: a more traditional fashion.
Speaker 3: It sounds like that Van Trier film, what was it
Speaker 3: The Nine Challenges or oh.
Speaker 2: That's a great movie, that is an a. I think
Speaker 2: about that film quite a lot. The horror movies that
Speaker 2: I mean, there was that sort of meme or whatever
Speaker 2: a couple of years ago that men spend I don't
Speaker 2: know what it is thirty seven points in the day
Speaker 2: think about the Roman Empire, but like, horror films are
Speaker 2: definitely my Roman Empire. I think about the Alien movies
Speaker 2: quite a lot, especially now we've had the TV show
Speaker 2: and that's what I wanted to in the bars.
Speaker 3: It's amazing. The Alien franchise has been with me for
Speaker 3: almost my entire life. You know, that came out when
Speaker 3: I was pretty young, and still with me today as
Speaker 3: a relatively old man. I'm just like, wow, I can't
Speaker 3: believe that this thing still has legs after all these years.
Speaker 2: The first Alien movie is definitely one of the reasons
Speaker 2: I'm interested in horror as it is, as was the
Speaker 2: case for so many people that I interviewed in my book.
Speaker 2: But I remember when I was about I don't know, nine,
Speaker 2: and we had a very eccentric music teacher who went
Speaker 2: to see Alien and then decided to spend the next
Speaker 2: music lesson telling us the entire plot of Alien from
Speaker 2: beginning to end, and we're like, and I'm like ten
Speaker 2: years old, and I'm like a GoGet this And then
Speaker 2: I bought the novelization and eventually somehow got they must
Speaker 2: have screened it on TV and got it on the
Speaker 2: video and would freeze frame the alien coming out of
Speaker 2: the egg and the chest burst the scene, And then
Speaker 2: was old enough to go and see Aliens in the cinema,
Speaker 2: which is one of my favorite cinematic experiences of all time.
Speaker 2: I'm just now telling what I think some of the
Speaker 2: best stories of my book. But I interviewed Thomas Jane
Speaker 2: for my book, who is just a great guy and
Speaker 2: has certainly an interview like he's eccentric, but like also
Speaker 2: a great storyteller, so that's super And he was just
Speaker 2: one of those guys. When I was choosing people to
Speaker 2: interview for the book, it was often people who'd worked
Speaker 2: on several horror films, because you fine, you do get that,
Speaker 2: because it's just easier and then it's fun and they
Speaker 2: can become a recurring character. And he had been in
Speaker 2: he was in Deeply See, which I mentioned somewhat briefly,
Speaker 2: and then DreamCatcher, which I talk about some lengths, and
Speaker 2: then The Myths, which I also talk about some lengths.
Speaker 2: But he was he just described as a kid being
Speaker 2: taken to see Alien like. I think he grew up
Speaker 2: in Chicago in one of the the big no Washington
Speaker 2: I think it was Washington, DC, in one of these
Speaker 2: sort of huge picture houses, and he went with his family.
Speaker 2: He was like, we couldn't afford a babysitters, so my
Speaker 2: parents would just drag their kids to wildly what would
Speaker 2: now be regarded as wildly unsuitable films at a young age.
Speaker 2: And he said, what do you remembers? Was this woman
Speaker 2: sitting next close to them at the cinema when the
Speaker 2: chest burst the scene happened. She was holding like like
Speaker 2: a huge carton of coke, like a vat of coke,
Speaker 2: and it just he just jumped in her seat and
Speaker 2: the coke went all over her. And he said, I
Speaker 2: just he said that he remembered her sitting there shouldn't
Speaker 2: leave to clean herself up. She just sat there covered
Speaker 2: in sticky coke for the remainder of the film because
Speaker 2: she was so transfixed by what was going on screen
Speaker 2: and a lot of those stories. As much as I
Speaker 2: love talking to people about working on War of the
Speaker 2: World or something Tom Cruise movie.
Speaker 3: Oh you don't mean the ice Cube movie.
Speaker 2: I was partly responsible. I think it's fair to say
Speaker 2: for promoting the Room with the Tommy Wizou movie. Tim
Speaker 2: and Eric, the comedians, are friends of mine, and I
Speaker 2: once spent a delightful day rafting in La with is
Speaker 2: it rafting in big rubber tires with Tim and Eric
Speaker 2: and my friends. And so the first time ever met
Speaker 2: Tim and Eric, they were sitting on these massive tires
Speaker 2: blowing them up at a gas station, which just seemed
Speaker 2: like such a Tim and Eric image, really, although they
Speaker 2: were just delightful and normal people. And then Eric was
Speaker 2: going to see the Room that night, and he invited
Speaker 2: me and my friends along, and he wouldn't tell us
Speaker 2: anything about it, and we went to the Sunset five.
Speaker 2: I think we're a bit late. When Sunset five Olliwood
Speaker 2: Boulevard wherever it is, that's a strap and went in
Speaker 2: I've never even heard of this film, but I'm knowing
Speaker 2: a hacked theater was two hundred people throwing plastic spoons screen.
Speaker 2: I like, what the hell is this? So then I
Speaker 2: convinced Entertainment Weekly, against possibly their best judgment, that they
Speaker 2: should devote like six pages to this film that was
Speaker 2: terrible and no one had ever heard of. Because of
Speaker 2: my experience Human Centipede correspondent, I then became Entertainment Weekly's
Speaker 2: The Room correspondent, and that proved to have even longer
Speaker 2: legs than the even longer legs and the Human Centerpede
Speaker 2: because ultimately they made The Disaster Artist. So that was
Speaker 2: like a full decade of talking about so bad it's
Speaker 2: good movies and in particularly The Room. So it's got
Speaker 2: a bit burned out on it, really. So I haven't
Speaker 2: gotten around to see The ice Cube starring War of
Speaker 2: the World as yet.
Speaker 3: I doubt that they're going to have a full theatrical
Speaker 3: presentation where people I don't know throw computer monitors. I
Speaker 3: don't know what they would do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe no, I don't know. I also think there
Speaker 2: is a bit of me. Maybe I'm just getting soft
Speaker 2: to my old age, but I just keep on thinking
Speaker 2: I did make this drink, oh Ben.
Speaker 3: Like though now in twenty twenty five, it feels like
Speaker 3: a whole different era. Well, Clark, thank you so much
Speaker 3: for your time it. I was so nice talking with you.
Speaker 2: Mike. It's an absent. I'm going to write another book
Speaker 2: just so that we can get to talk again. That's
Speaker 2: my promise slash threat to you.
Speaker 3: We can talk when you're not writing a book. It's
Speaker 3: really okay.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me on. I'm a
Speaker 2: huge fan of the projection booth and you're doing God's
Speaker 2: work with it, and it's such an honor to come
Speaker 2: on and talk about my own sort of humble movie.
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