The long awaited found-footage horror anthology V/H/S is available on VOD today (and
coming to theaters on October 5th) from Magnet. Directed, written, and produced
by some of the top names in indie horror, the film has been a hit at Sundance,
SXSW, and every other fest it's played (see our review here). Way back at
Sundance, we had a chance to sit down in the cold with many of the filmmakers
involved in the film back at the very beginning of their journey. Published now for the first time is our talk with
directors David Bruckner and Glenn McQuaid, writer/producer Simon Barrett, producers Brad Miska and Roxanne Benjamin, and actress (and filmmaker in her own right) Sophia Takal.
TWITCH: Can you talk
a bit about planning for the anthology format? Was the number of shorts always
planned? Any rules and regulations for the filmmakers?
ROXANNE BENJAMIN :
We kind of just wanted everybody to have fun with it. It was, like, take this
idea of found footage, POV, whatever, and make it something new and original.
Shoot on stuff that would make it interesting.
BRAD MISKA: It
was originally going to be three segments and the wrap-around. We were just
having fun, and it was just kind of like, "Well, what about these guys,
and what about these guys, and what about these guys? Yeah, fuck it. Let's just
do them all." And then, all of a sudden, everyone was making a segment,
and we were like, "Well maybe one will suck. It'll be terrible and we can
cut it."
ROXANNE: But then
they weren't.
BRAD: And then
they weren't. We were, like, "Holy crap. This is too long."
ROXANNE: But then
we were, like, "Screw it. We'll just make it longer."
BRAD: But there
was a rule that there had to be a reason that there's a camera.
Ahh, like the sex
tape in the wrap around? Was the failed sex tape idea always in there?
SIMON BARRETT:
That was done in the very beginning. That was actually my first idea that it
would be taped over a failed sex tape. Right away I knew I wanted to do
something that felt really different and authentic. I didn't want it to be like
a bunch of smart, X-Files people tracking down the tapes. I wanted it to be a
bunch of total jackasses going around and assaulting women, and then somebody
hires them. There was originally a lot more to that sex tape. Like she leaves
and then he starts masturbating in front of the camera. That was one of my
first ideas, and that comes from the fact that we ended up shooting on a camera
that I got for my 14th birthday, which means that I did, you know, its primary
use... The only reason I still had it was because it was the only way I could
watch my old sex tapes.
GLENN MCQUAID: For
me, I was not familiar with found footage. I'd seen a few things, but I think
it's an excellent format and an excellent platform just to get it out and just
work. Just by virtue of it being shot on
an iPhone or Skype or whatever; the fact that you can just really go do it, and
it's not gonna cost an arm and a leg is tremendously liberating. I mean, my
last project was a period piece. So much went into costume and just finding the
right stone wall to shoot against. This was a different ball game. It was a
great experience.
DAVID BRUCKNER:
And I also think everybody kind of gets this weird challenge if you're a filmmaker
of, "Alright, so I want to do something. I want to do a found footage
piece. It's a little meta. I want to have a little bit of fun with the fact
that I'm doing a found footage piece." I'm not gonna ask a smart audience
to pretend that it's real. They know it's BS. They know we're just playing with
this medium and here it is. But despite that awareness, when we do that cool
found footage thing, it's gonna be the realest, most severe thing you've ever
seen for a moment before we wink at you in the next beat. And that's just kind
of the challenge is, if you're gonna play with a genre, even if you're gonna
play with that sense of awareness, you still wanna pull it off the best as you
possibly can.
Not being the biggest
horror nut, one of the hallmarks of the movie for me was how fun the it is to
watch. It's the same with a movie like You're
Next or The Innkeepers. The goal
seems to be for the audience to have fun more than it is to be genuinely
scared.
SIMON: I think we
kind of wanted to make a post Paranormal
Activity found footage movie. I feel like lot of found footage is still
kind of doing the same thing that The
Last Broadcast and Cannibal Holocaust
and Blair Witch did. That's fine, but
it isn't very fun. With You're Next,
Adam [Wingard] and I specifically looked at home invasion movies and were like,
"We love this idea, but these movies are always trying to be so hardcore
and intense and disturbing. What if we had fun with the idea and took it in a
more comedic direction?" And that was, I think, everyone's idea with
V/H/S.
BRAD: Well we're
past that as fans, too. I think as an audience people are past the Texas Chainsaw, Hostel, even Paranormal Activity. While people go to
see it because they like to be scared and have fun, it takes a little bit of
the fun away the way they walk out of the theater. The found footage thing is that
it should be fun. Horror movies should be fun. You should walk out and feel
good even if it was brutal, but it's not feeling gross like you have to go take
a shower.
GLENN: The first
time I saw found footage people were telling me, "It's real, it's real."
I think people have gotten bored with that kind of promotion for this. As the
project goes on, it just loosens up. And certainly, when the credits come up at
the end, you're really let in on it. It really is a nice piece of entertainment
over anything else.
BRAD: From day
one, we were never trying to trick people. At the beginning, we had these
conversations about how great we felt walking out of movies like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, so
we even joked about using the "Play With Me" song from Extreme where
they're running around the mall, we wanted to end with that kind of like a big
"fuck you" to found footage movies in a fun way where it would end
and everyone walks out of the movie feeling great - like they just had a crazy
experience.
SIMON: We're
trying to play it kind of for laughs and kind of acknowledging, look, we're not
serious. This wasn't real. None of this was real. This girl that was being
assaulted is our 22-year-old friend. She's a waitress in Brooklyn.
Speaking of girls
being assaulted, there are some interesting portrayals of women and acts toward
women throughout.
BRAD: Sophia, do
you want to talk about your scene with [Joe] Swanberg where he...
SOPHIA TAKAL: Oh,
where he's trying to get me to make out with him? It was really terrible. That
was just true. That was just real. We wouldn't even want to make a sex tape at
all. We have all this assaulting women and weird stuff going on in V/H/S, but
in a lot of the sections, the dudes are assholes, and Joe really went there and
played an asshole. If you look at it on the surface, it seems like all these
women are fucking dudes up, and it's really awful, but the guys are kind of
asking for it.
SIMON: There's
like multiple, failed attempts at sex tapes in V/H/S. Ours was taped over a
failed sex tape. His is one, giant, massive, failure of a sex tape.
DAVID: I actually
like to argue that it's a successful attempt at a sex tape. If you think about
the ending, it's actually successful. He actually gets exactly what he asks
for.
BRAD: He's going
to be getting a lot of sex.
DAVID: Someone in
the audience, at one point, said, "What's up with all the female
hating?" I found myself thinking, all the directors are male. I think it's
more self-hatred. We're absolutely poking fun at our own idiosyncrasies and
maybe our own hidden desires that come with all this new technology and the
ways that it affects our lives. I think there're actually many very, very, very
powerful moments for female characters throughout the piece. I had two guys I
cast bail on me. I couldn't get men in the room to read for this stuff. They
were so spooked by the script, and I had a huge line of girls that wanted to do
it. We had a huge female presence on our crew. Our DP is female. Our producer
was female. Our stunt coordinator is female. Our makeup and effects are all female.
Girls got behind this way more than boys. Boys, it scares them.
SOPHIA: Yours is
exciting to be a girl and watch that.
ROXANNE: I agree.
You've talked about
found footage and the decision for that format, but talk for a bit about the
decision to nostalgia route with videotape and VHS.
SIMON: So the
modern eye, the average viewer, the average teenage horror viewer sees analog
video, and it has this anachronistic feel that Super 8 film or 16mm grainy film
has to our eyes. It feels automatically archaic in some way. So we knew we
wanted a really old video look, which, I think, now has this kind of organic,
earthy feel to it. At the time, it just looked shitty, because people were
shooting on video and trying to make it look like film, and it just looked
terrible. Now it doesn't look terrible. Now it looks interesting. Films that
are shot on the Red and lit poorly look terrible. Now it has this kind of cool,
retro feel. There's this company in New York that makes this new kind of
Polaroid film that works with old Polaroid cameras, and I just ordered a ton of
it. When I first got that camera, I was like, "This motherfucking thing
can't take a good photo to save its fucking life." And now I love it. Now
my phone takes better pictures than the first digital camera I bought for $400.
But those phone
pictures will be so quaint in a few years, too - the visceral response to them.
SIMON: Yeah, it's
kind of culturally like this whole Hipstomatic and Instagram thing. I agree
with everyone who thinks they look stupid and look like shit, and I also agree
with everyone who thinks it's awesome and looks cool. And this kind of comes back, in an
interesting way, because one of those miniature, culture movements that I've
had to bear witness to on Twitter that has surprised me lately is the
resurgence of VHS amongst film collectors. Ti [West]'s film, House of the Devil, was released on VHS,
and that was a huge hit. Now all these little films are getting these VHS
releases. To me, VHS just sucks. You have to rewind it. It's full screen. It's awful. But some people love it. People
love their VHS tapes, because that's what they grew up with. This is an
interesting thing that William Gibson, I'm sure, would be more articulate about
is the idea that old technology has an emotion attached to it for our culture.
That we have nostalgia for technological innovations that become irrelevant...
I'm done.
[Simon gets up and pretends to walk away as everyone laughs]
BRAD: But what
all that is, is when we grew up, you couldn't always get things when you wanted
them. It's about immediacy. Now you can get anything whenever you want it.
GLENN: You think
immediacy cheapens content?
BRAD: Yeah. And
it also makes it more difficult to sell stuff, because you can get anything whenever
you want it, so there's only so much time in a day that you could be taking
stuff in.
ROXANNE: And
everything becomes irrelevant.
BRAD: So people
watch things for 15 minutes and move on quickly.
SIMON: The
success of the Mondo posters speaks to that, as well, because a lot of those
posters are only successful because of the arbitrarily enforced limitations on
their availability.
GLENN: I think
it's a hunter-gatherer thing, as well, because the first movies I saw were pre-VHS.
I saw all these horror movies on BBC2 before we ever had a VHS player. This was
the early '70s. You had to hunt down and really covet shit.
SOPHIA: For Green, we're doing DVD through Factory
25, and they do a whole art object, trying to make the DVD and the case
something very special, and each thing is unique. Each one has a special thing
that's related to Green, or whatever movie, so that everyone gets something
special
SIMON: Yeah, Factory
25 are similarly doing the kind of Mondo thing where they package DVDs with
vinyl and trying to make it a collector's object. They released some of Joe's movies with like a
vinyl 7" of the soundtrack. They released Frownland with a vinyl 12". I will say that my vinyl
soundtrack of Frownland is, indeed,
one of my beloved objects.
So how about
something like that for V/H/S?
ROXANNE: And only
20 of them. That'd be so cool.
BRAD: And who is
gonna seriously go around and make copies of that? And, if they can, they can
only make one copy every two hours.
[LAUGHS]
ROXANNE:
Clamshell!
SIMON: Yeah maybe
we can do it through Mondo.
Our thanks to the V/H/S team. Check out the film available on VOD now
and coming to theaters October 5th, 2012.