I'll never forget seeing Saw for the first time. I was a brand new baby critic feeling completely out of place in the Lake Street Screening Room wondering how I had wound up there with the likes of Roger Ebert and Jonathan Rosenbaum. Then the movie started. I knew precious little about Saw at that point. But right about the time several critics around me laughed at the site of the Dread Pirate Roberts sawing off his own leg I knew I had found a home. The chance to talk with the James Wan and Leigh Whannell, director and writer of that film was like coming full circle. I'm a huge fan of the original Saw film, Dead Silence and found a lot of things to like about Insidious as well. I found the pair to be forthcoming, and still pretty wide-eyed about the position they find themselves in.
Overtly spiritual horror has had a resurgence lately, I'm thinking possession films like The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Requiem, The Possession of David O'Reilly, The Last Exorcism, The Rite. Why do another one?
JW: Insidious uses that element but it plays more like a haunted house movie. It isn't until well into the story that the film reveals it's true central conceit which has to do with this young boys talent. That wasn't just a plotting device, for Leigh and I it was a thematic thing, it was primary.
Was it strange doing an all out horror film? Saw and Dead Silence were, I wouldn't want to label them as comedies, but they were so over the top you could laugh or scream. It was sort of up to you. Insidious seems like a film that tries some comic relief here and there but mostly it just wants to scare the hell out of people.
LW: Certainly this boys talent we're talking about leads to an awful lot of horror. Thematically we're dealing with what happens when we die. I've been haunted by that my whole life. I'm an agnostic so I don't have that faith structure to fall back on. Is this boys talent a curse?
We spend so much time in denial about death.
LW: Yeah. If you had this ability you wouldn't be able to do that as easily. I'm a believe it when I see it person when it comes to God and ghosts and the Devil. But whenever I think I've settled into complete non-belief something happens to force open that part of my heart and my mind again. I become aware of the universe as this huge place where I don't have clear cut answers. I can't just say, "Well we're born, we die, and then we become worm food." I've met too many people who've had experiences that I can't explain etc.
Yes, I've always come t the conclusion that my need to know love and to be able to define good and evil in absolute terms leads me to that same need to stay open. I'm a religious person in that I'm a Christian, but I certainly don't have all the answers, or even all the answers I would like to have about those things.
JW: Yes one of the things we deal with in the film is this idea of the loss of innocence. Everyone deals with this. There's a sadism that seems to visit our lives that is very personal and inescapable. It's almost like pedophilia. When it happens to us we can't get away and knowledge about certain things changes us and the way we look at the world forever. That's how evil seems to work in the world.
Life itself seems to slowly eat away at our ability to believe in anything. You guys seem interested in creating moments that have iconic power that is fueled by this kind of stuff.
JW: Trying to create anything that anyone will remember in this white noise we live in almost requires you be willing to do that. Images like these shout but hopefully that means they become distinct to be remembered, to stand out against that noise. When you tap into your own fears and anxieties you're hopefully starting out ahead of the game. Hopefully people find at least some moments that stay with them or that they find true, or so articulate that they become touchstones. I think that's true of all kinds of film.
Is that why I catch so much Hammer Film and Bava in your movies?
JW: Dead Silence was Bava and Hammer for sure.
LW: There was some Hammer in this as well. I mean gimme two bucks and a piece of string and I'll make you scream. It's one of the funnest things about making horror movies. The tricks all still work, a bump in the night still works.
JW: A person unexpectedly in the background of a shot of someone drinking a glass is far scarier than something direct like yet another guy with a knife. If you can make the audience believe you can scare them. But the best way to do that is with subtlety. For everything I show there has to be something I haven't shown you, something for you to imagine. If I do choose to show the audience something it better be something thy;ve never seen before.
LW: Sturm and drang is the enemy of fear.
JW: Can you think of a really expensive special effects driven horror film that scared you to your core? The days of The Exorcist and The Shining seem over.
Is it scary as horror film maker to see the multiplex losing ground to the home theater?
LW: I'll tell you what's scary, people checking their messages and texting during movies, making phone calls. As soon as I see that little glowing light.... was at Inception opening day and the some guy next to me answers his phone and says, "Yeah, I'm at a movie."
JW: I'd hate to see us lose the communal experience of film in our society but there's no denying how great it is to watch films at home in Hi-Def, good sound, when you want etc. It has to do with control. Still the process of how film distribution is changing seems...kind of... INSIDIOUS!!!
LW: MWAH-HAHAHAHAHAHA! Sorry....couldn't resist.
But that is the nature of evil isn't it. To promise us something and give us something else? To make it so that we're always having to wonder, be on our guard, unable to trust.
LW: You have to be able to get people where they live when it comes to that stuff. Evil isn't something that just goes on about it's own business. It actively and insidiously looks for ways to undermine goodness. In Saw when the little girl says, "Mommy, there's someone in my room?" That is insidious, it's wrong, what it is it doesn't belong in this little girls room. It's far creepier than grossing the audience out with special effects.
JW: That really is the hardest thing we ever try to do. It's like David Lynch. The man is the master of creepy. You throw on a film and without doing anything at all he has you feeling all uneasy.
What's next? Are you sticking with horror and genre?
LW: We'd love to do a sci-fi film or a comedy. We always tell everybody we're not just horror film fans we're film fans.