INTERVIEW WITH 2001 MANIACS DIRECTOR TIM SULLIVAN

When the opportunity arose to do an interview with Tim Sullivan I responded “Great!” Of course I neglected to mention that I had absolutely no idea who Tim Sullivan was. But then my editor mentioned 2001 Maniacs. For those who don’t follow the horror film scene it’s probably best to mention that this is a highly, highly anticipated riff on Herschell Gordon Lewis’ original 2000 Maniacs. How anticipated? It had buyers lining up for it BEFORE it's first screening at the American Film Market.

God, Gore and Geek Sensibilities
An Interview with 2001 Maniacs Director Tim Sullivan
by Dave Canfield

Herschell Gordon Lewis is known as the Godfather of Gore. One of the first filmmakers to utilize ultra violent effects in his movies Lewis developed a cult following which has persisted to this day. While the content of most of Lewis’ films understandably render them all but unwatchable for many it is fair to say that his outrageous onscreen sense of humor and surprisingly effective low budget special effects inspired legions of young people to become filmmakers.

But Tim’s accomplishments go far beyond geek sensibilities. As one of the youngest members of the legendary Masters of Horror, he has developed close friendships with many of the genre’s greats. He’s also an accomplished journalist and has just finished a script with Ray Manzarek of The Doors, which he describes as a cross between Easy Rider and The Searchers. And perhaps most surprising of all are Tim’s thoughts on religious faith and horror which we discussed extensively after my phone answering system connected him to the main switchboard of Jesus People USA Evangelical Covenant Church, a full time religious commune I have been a member of for fifteen years. Worried at first that I might be some self-righteous religious type wanting to dress him down, I … or more appropriately, we, surprised each other by our mutual love and devotion for the horror genre, storytelling, and the people who’ve helped make us the gory mess we both are today.

DAVE: So when did you first bond with spooky culture?

TS: I can tell you exactly when. I was five years old, there was no cable, no video and the TV only had nine channels. I remember that because I would ask my mom what was on TV that night she would recite everything except what she didn’t want me to watch. All I had to do was keep track of how many things she mentioned. So one Saturday night mom ran down what was on and I noticed she skipped a station. So I said, “Wait a minute, what’s on Channel five?” She mumbles, "Dracula." I said “What’s that!?” She said, “You don’t wanna see that it’s too scary.” So I begged and begged and she let me watch it. Well it turned out it was playing on Creature Feature.

I was already hooked because I knew my mom didn’t want me to watch it. But finding out there was this dark cobwebby world I could disappear into every Saturday night…. I was terrified, I mean up until then it had been Sesame Street and Pinocchio. But I wrapped my little blanket around myself, and that night I was walking around saying, “Velcome!” And the very next week, the fates must have conspired, because there we were in the supermarket and there shouting out at me was this issue #82 of this magazine called Famous Monsters of Filmland, with Dark Shadows on the cover. So then I realized there was a vampire show on everyday of the week!! And in the back of this magazine were ads for Aurora Monster models and the next week Creature Feature had Bride of Frankenstein on….God bless my mother she helped flip that switch for me. After that I started going over to my grandmother’s house on Saturday Night to watch Creature Feature and paint monster models.

I think they both knew I had found my vocation, I knew at five years old what I wanted to do.

DAVE: Speaking of vocation you sounded pretty taken aback when you answered the phone.

TS: (through much laughter) I gotta be totally honest with you…. I screen my calls. And when the ID said Jesus People USA… I mean, I’ve heard of Cat People and Alligator People but Jesus People? I thought maybe I was gonna end up in a horror film. You know the whole fire and brimstone lecture…

DAVE: (also laughing) Cool, I get to tell people I scared the director of 2001 Maniacs!! Yeah, I’m underwritten by a religious community to do this kind of thing, I’ve been a fulltime writer for 13 years. We have a publishing company, a record company and we also do various social outreach programs with the homeless and at risk kids in the inner-city. I’m probably one of the only people in the world who’s underwritten by a para-church organization to watch and talk about horror movies.

TS: (still laughing) That is so great. I would love to talk about some of this stuff. I was raised Catholic and consider myself, if not religious, still very spiritual. But of course some of the stuff I’ve been associated with like Kiss, and horror movies have come under fire.

DAVE: Oh, believe me, I understand. One of the things I do when I’m not writing is speak to Youth and College Groups about culture and faith. People always ask me what my favorite movies of all time are and I usually answer The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and It’s A Wonderful Life. Does that ever stimulate conversation. Usually good.

TS: That’s hilarious. You know when I first moved to California in the early nineties I taught confirmation class for two years. Of course when I first moved to California I didn’t know anybody so it seemed like a good idea to join the church. Sure enough I’ve been here thirteen years and some of my best friends are from that experience. I became a eucharistic minister gave out communion, taught a “Bridging the Gap” class to the youth group. I took kids to Tijuana to the orphanages for short-term missions.

Quite honestly when I graduated from high school you know, all my friends had heroes like Superman mine was Father Karris from The Exorcist! I wanted to be a super priest and wear a black shirt and white collar and go around exorcising evil!! And I felt I had a calling. So I went to this local parish priest that I was good friends with, and he knew me, he knew some of the strange things I did. I used to go around to the local mortuary to get morticians wax to try and imitate some of Tom Savini’s makeups from Dawn of the Dead. And so I asked Father Mark if what I was doing was wrong, if it was evil. He laughed and said, "No, no, no. It’s healthy. We’re all fascinated with death. This is a great outlet to examine that."

And I got to a point very quickly where I realized that I was going to wind up at film school or the seminary. And when I went to Father Mark and told him that I really believed I had a calling he said “Welcome to the club; everybody has a calling! Tim quite honestly” - and this changed my life, David - “you can change more people with a movie screen than a collar because, and it’s sad, this collar is a barrier.” And he told me that I could reach people who would never think of going to a church.

And I have found that to be one of the most important things anyone has ever said to me. It changed my life. People don’t really go to movies like 2001 Maniacs for a message but I believe that underneath all the, I call it, splatstick, gory humor is a story about the futility of vengeance.

DAVE: Boy, does our culture ever need stories like that.

TS: There’s a fantastic book out by a guy called Steven Simon titled May the Force Be With You and its basic premise is that movies are the new spiritual centers. He takes all these movies and talks about the power to heal and change and the power of mythology. And this guy even has an organization called Moving Messages Media and I agree with so much of what he’s about.

But where I disagree is his assessment of the horror film. He mentions them only briefly and then only to dismiss them completely. I don’t think he understands what horror films are really about and what horror in movies is about. There’s the genre and then there’s the element of horror itself and any self respecting film scholar should be able to see the value in the kind of storytelling represented by those things. The scariest movie I’ve seen in the last ten years is The Passion of the Christ, that movie terrified me.

DAVE: You remind me a lot of Bob Burns. I mean you both got into the business by meeting the right person.

TS: Oh yeah, John Dods! He’s my Paul Blaisdell. I lived in Metuchen, New Jersey so I was about as likely to end up in Hollywood making movies, as I was to end up on the moon. But thanks my eighth grade art teacher I discovered that two towns over there was this guy named John Dods who’d gone to film school and was involved in animation and making monster movies in his basement. For me it was the equivalent of meeting Spielberg because this was the first person I’d met who was making movies. John and a gentleman named Tom Davis took me under their wing. I became like their little apprentice.

When I was sixteen they told me we were going to make a movie called The Deadly Spawn. That’s how I learned to take the train from my town to New Brunswick, New Jersey. I can still picture my mom waving as I ride away. My dad had left when I was eight and never supported any of my interests but I think this was a really important thing to my mom.

So when they started filming I was the “what do you need” guy. Bucket of blood? I’m on it! I even caught pneumonia during the shoot. The opening scene shows the deadly spawn growing in silhouette behind this tent, that was me. I was lying in this really moist, cold trench they’d dug in the ground so that I could manipulate this puppet. It was freezing, and it was in the mud. Then they decided they needed rain!! Let me tell you, never in my life have I been that ecstatic to be hosed down in the winter mud for three hours to play with a puppet. The funny thing is you can’t even see the rain in the shot because they forgot to backlight it. We were down in the trenches making The Deadly Spawn. It was made for $8,000 on weekends, over the course of six months by people who gave their skills for free.

And you know that was really good for me because I wound up meeting and being mentored by people who cared about me. I grew up pretty much on the outside, you might say alone in the sandbox. Everybody liked me but nobody was taking me up on the prom or inviting me to parties. I was the twelve year old entertaining the eight year olds in the neighborhood.

I mean who would have imagined that the PA would wind up being the selling point for the 20th Anniversary DVD of The Deadly Spawn!! It’s hilarious. One of the reviews I’ve kept really close says something like, "When the monster’s not onscreen it’s kind of dull but when the monsters is onscreen- WOW!" Boy, do we miss the days when actors actually interacted with the monster and weren’t just standing in front of a screen where something was gonna be CGI’d in later. We’d prefer watching this movie with the extras and the commentary and the love of these filmmakers on display any day over the four disc special edition of Van Helsing which just seems like another corporate product.

DAVE: That whole generation filmmakers that grew up watching Creature Feature and reading Famous Monsters has really proven itself but it makes me wonder where the next generation is going to come from. I can’t say I’m entirely impressed. Where are the Dante’s and Cronenbergs, Craven’s and Carpenter’s?

TS: They’re coming up, they’re always coming up. I think all you have to do is look at Herschell Gordon Lewis. He was told for years you’ve got jump through all these hoops to tell a story and he found a way around it. You see, he remembered the drive-ins. Why not make movies for them? His movies aren’t Citizen Kane by anybody’s standards but there’s a wonderful sense of glee about them. You can almost see him on the outskirts of the frame dancing around and laughing he was so happy to be able to make movies. That kind of purity is something I’ve always been proud to be associated with and I aspire to it. Not every movie is gonna be great but can’t they at least be alive, be fun!!

And I have to mention Forry here too. One of the great joys of my life has been my frequent visits with Forry. He’s turning 88 and we’re getting ready to throw him this huge birthday bash. I read Famous Monsters religiously I mean Forry Ackerman was like my absentee Uncle. I was never a Creep of the Week but I did answer the Mystery Photo contest once. And about ten years ago when we did Detroit Rock City I was really honored that Famous Monsters, even though it wasn’t Forry’s mag at that time, ran a special Shock Rock issue and I got to commission Basil Gogos to do four separate collectable cover paintings of the members of Kiss and they dedicated the issue to me. I mean forget about the Oscars!

DAVE: Speaking of Oscars, what can people expect when 2001 Maniacs hits the theater?

T: I wrote the film in 2000 and naively expected to have it in theaters by 2001 hence the title 2001 maniacs. Five years later…. I like the title so I kept it and made it a reference to the population of the town. It’s a ghostly revenge story about a group of Southerners from a town called Pleasant Valley (pop. 2001) who were massacred by renegade Northern soldiers. So every year, on the anniversary of their destruction the town resurrects to lure unsuspecting Northern travelers into their town to attend the Guts and Glory Jubilee where they kill them. The town can never rest until it has avenged itself down to the last man woman and child of 2001 citizens.

Herschell Gordon Lewis’ take was more of a straight horror piece I thought the best way to make it work today was to include a lot of black comedy. In our movie the townspeople always botch things up, never get enough victims and keep having to come back year after year. And of course they’re still stuck in their 200 year old Southern mindset so when black visitors come they have to pretend to gladly wait on them, and they throw their women at some guys to get them to stay only to find out the guys don’t want women! So the Mayor has to get his son to enlist a sissy detail!! So we try to poke fun at stereotypes and the way the North and South view each other. I would say it starts out as a dark comedy and just gets darker and darker.

As far as release date we just found out that we will be screening at January’s Sundance Film Festival at the Midnight Madness program. We’ll probably nab our US distributor at that point and my guess is that the film would come out in that August - September period when most horror films are released here in the states.

DAVE: Did you feel fortunate to be able to get Robert Englund for the film?

TS: It’s always good to get your first choice. Really it was Robert’s involvement that led to the film getting set up. For one thing there’s the history he brings with him. When I saw Nightmare on Elm Street I was twenty years old and it was the first time in a long time that I had been genuinely scared in a movie theater. Having been a cover to cover reader of Fangoria I knew about all the plastic and foam latex appliances behind all those scary moments but knowing how it was done in this case didn’t make it any less scary.

Freddy Krueger was Dracula for the eighties. For one thing Michael Myers and Jason didn’t speak. They were a Grim Reaper type figure that’s what made them scary. Freddy always brought that sense of cultured control. He was witty and demonic.

And working with Robert was one of the most symbiotic experiences I’ve ever had. I was working at New Line Cinema at the time and had always run into Robert at the Christmas parties. Everybody thought we were a little crazy. They’d be off singing Christmas carols and Robert and I would be off by ourselves in some corner talking about Dario Argento movies. Our friendship developed, I wound up interviewing him for a couple of magazines and then I ran into him at the Saturn Awards. That’s where I asked him if I could create the role of Mayor Buckman for him in 2001 Maniacs. I described the movie as horror/comedy, a little like Lil’ Abner on Acid and Robert loved that take on it.

Of course that was so helpful because my writing partner and I were able to write the script with Robert acting out the part of Mayor Buckman in our heads. Whenever we’d get stuck we’d just throw our best Robert impressions at each other. It brought a lot of energy to the process because we knew him well enough to imagine how he’d approach certain things. When he finally got the script he said “ Oh my God I feel like somebody just tailor made a suit for me.”

DAVE: What about casting the rest of the film. I mean, 2001 Maniacs sounds like lots of casting?!

TS: What was I thinking?! Here it’s my first movie and I wrote a script with 8 victims, 13 principal maniacs, 300 extras, chickens, dogs, cats, children, musical numbers, and a buzz saw! I should done what James Wan did with Saw; 2 guys chained to either side of a small room.

And in a low budget horror film casting is everything. A director’s job is almost done by the time you step on a set. It’s about finding the right actor, which also means finding the right personality so that you can work together. I spent so much time in the casting process. We found a lot of actors that we thought were closer to their character type, a lot of young, really enthusiastic talent. And rehearsals took place at my house I didn’t have time for lots of takes so we had to be sure these people had the energy to carry off whatever we wanted once we got on set.

DAVE: So you had John Landis doing a cameo,

TS: I am so honored to call John a friend. I was a wide-eyed 23 year old when I was hired to be a production assistant on Coming to America and the first thing I realized was what a great human being he was. It didn’t matter if you were Eddie Murphy or the coffee guy everybody got treated the same. But once he realized I was a fan of Famous Monsters of Filmland and knew Forry Ackerman we really bonded. He told me “If you ever make it to California give me a call.” And sure enough five years later I called him and he helped me get some PA jobs and other work. 17 years later I’m directing John Landis in my film, it boggles the mind.

DAVE: So how did you become associated with the Masters of Horror?

TS: Hand of God? Serendipity? I mean I’ve managed to turn almost all my childhood heroes into close friends and creative collaborators.

When I reconnected with John Landis one of the things he did was bring me into the fold. I was the only member of the Masters of Horror who hadn’t made a film. I guess that makes me an apprentice of horror. I’d done some producing, and I was on my way to make 2001 Maniacs but still, I was so honored. I can’t tell you what it was like a year ago this last October as I was sitting at one of our dinners and everyone was toasting me because I was going off the next day to make my own movie. Can you think of a better blessing for your maiden voyage of directing a horror film?

Since then they’ve been there to guide me through the ups and downs. It hasn’t been easy dealing with the financiers and the producers. They asked me to make an apple and it seems like a lot of the time what they want is an orange. But, I mean, once you sell your script…it’s like selling a house, you can’t really complain about what the new owners want to do with it. But no matter how many coats of paint someone puts on it, no matter what they add on, it’s still my foundation and I’ve taken a lot of comfort in that.

But like I said I’m in a supported place. I guess one good way to look at it is that now all those kids who were alone in the sandbox have found each other. And every one of them from Tobe Hooper, to Mick Garris, to Don Coscarelli, to Guillermo del Toro, to Rob Zombie to Bill Malone, Bill Lustig, Larry Cohen, these people…. Bryan Singer, Stuart Gordon, Wes Craven, David Cronenberg have all shown up. Joe Dante, John Carpenter. They all have similar stories. They all discovered monsters at an early age and loved it and didn’t care what people thought. Their friends were all out getting stoned or getting laid and they were at home painting Aurora Monster Models. And they all turned that passion into careers and contributed to the genre.

One of the great things about the horror film business is that everyone involved in it is such a fan of the genre. And all these different people I know, these famous directors and actors, when the 50th Anniversary of The Creature from the Black Lagoon in 3-D rolls around you know you’ll bump into each other at the theater because all these people have this glee when it comes to this stuff. You can tell when you’re watching their movies, good or bad, because they’re just those kids who saw Frankenstein for the first time and are finally getting the chance to make their own Frankenstein.

The development of the group has been pretty organic. If you look at everybody’s movies you see them doing cameos for each other and helping out, appearing at conventions together. Mick Garris was a journalist doing stories on a lot of these guys’ films and so kind of became the de facto organizer when these friendships blossomed into these meetings. He said we’re always having these random encounters let’s make them more specific. So whenever one of us has a new movie coming out we hold private screenings and come out to support each other. We have about four dinners a year. Of course the title Masters of Horror is something we use with tongue firmly planted in cheek. People are always calling different members of the group that and so it seemed funny to embrace the title that way.

DAVE: Not bad for a guy that started out on my side of the table.

TS: My film career stems from journalism. I interviewed Gene Simmons for Fangoria magazine when I was 18 years old and I parlayed that interview into a friendship, collaboration and career. I always say if you want to work with somebody interview them first!

DAVE: In that case I have a horror screenplay to sell you! But you probably have a lot of those already.

TS: I embrace horror and I think I’m good at it. But it’s not the only type of film I want to make. For every 2001 Maniacs in me there’s also a Stand By Me or Braveheart just dying to get out. But there’s so much competition in this industry, so many people out there that in order to be noticed you have to shout. And the best way to shout in the movie industry is to do something really audacious, through the roof. That’s what 2001 Maniacs is.

Since this interview Tim Sullivan has been hired to write Tobe Hoopers next film. It couldn't happen to a nicer guy or a more eager audience.