‘The Camp Host’ Director And Stars On Their Van-Life Slasher
If you spend any time online, you’ve probably watched a few videos about van life, or people who travel the country living out of their vans. They show off their set-up, how much space they save, how they shower, and so much more. Personally, I could never because I’ve seen too many horror movies and I love my shower. But writer/director Henry Darrow McComas taps into a different type of horror regarding van life in his new film The Camp Host. This isn’t about ghosts or cursed land, but about a woman who has a very strict set of rules…
Dread Central spoke with McComas and the film’s stars Rachel Colwell, Dillon Casey, and Brooke Johnson about freezing cold stunts, Smokey Bear with a knife, and finding the perfect three-legged dog.
Dread Central: So Henry, I want to start with you. Can you tell readers very briefly in your own words what the camp host is all about?
Henry Darrow McComas: The Camp Host is a post-pandemic tale about a young married couple that decide they need to escape the boundaries of their home. So they get a camper van and they start to travel America and they land on a campsite where they’re also rekindling their relationship and rediscovering each other. And it’s supposed to be great times. They’re there with their amazing dog, Mika. Then they find a quirky little lady who runs the campground named the Camp Host, and a series of microaggressions and weirdness starts to happen. And then it gets super weird when that lady starts killing everyone at the camp who doesn’t follow the leave-no-trace rules, which are to put out your fire, dispose of your trash, and so on and so forth.
DC: A real hero. I feel like Smokey Bear would really love the camp.
HDM: Exactly. Brooke is essentially Smokey Bear with a knife. So yeah, that’s it. Exactly.
DC: Hell yeah. That’s awesome. You also wrote this, Henry, so what was the inspiration for this quirky yet scary idea?
HDM: The kernel probably comes from my wife and I, not the youngest married couple being in lockdown with each other. And if you remember, I don’t know why I say if we remember, we all remember those were hard times and we were with each other 24/7. It’s a gift to be around the person you love the most 24/7, but also when you don’t have a lot to do and you start to get cabin fever, you need to get out.
Things got low for me, I stopped writing and Natalie had a great idea of getting the camper van. And she put me in the camper van and took me out to campgrounds across America. So when you’re watching this movie, every scare and every kill is kind of inspired by stuff that we actually saw in real life out there in the campground.
DC: This is why I hate camping. But that’s just me personally.
HDM: So I like to look at The Camp Host as a relationship movie in three ways. It’s a relationship about a couple, it’s a relationship about humans and how we interact with each other, and it’s a relationship between humanity and the natural world. So I figured if we could get that core into an 80-style slasher, we’d have something magical.
DC: So Brooke, I want to hear from you. What was your first reaction to reading the script and knowing what kind of character you were going to play? I love horror, but we don’t have a lot of female killers, and I love that you get to play a weird killer in this. So what was that like for you?
Brooke Johnson: When I did the audition, I only had eight pages, so I didn’t know what the script was going to be. I could tell it was well written and I could tell it had a sense of humor to it, but I didn’t know what the whole script was going to be like. So when I got the offer, I was just over the moon because it was so beautifully written. Sometimes we get scripts and there are spelling mistakes or there are grammar mistakes, and right away when you see that, you go, okay, somebody didn’t take any care with this. But you could tell [The Camp Host] was meticulously cared for and loved.
I was so excited about it because it was obviously a character that I could really sink my teeth into. And I’ve never played a villain before, so it kind of felt like carte blanche, especially because of the way Henry directs.
You would ask Henry a question about this scene or that scene or maybe a character thing and he would respond with, well, what do you think? So it just gives you complete autonomy in a way to make any choice you want. And I think one of the joys for me was finding a way to root the character and justify everything she does so that it all made sense to me as a human being. And I didn’t have a problem with that. I was able to justify a positive reason for everything that happens, everything that I actually do as The Camp Host. It was just a joy
HDM: Fun fact, Brooke is still killing people to this day. [Laughs]
DC: What’s it called when you adopt the trait of your character? What is that method of acting? [Laughs]
BJ: I’m renting a 125-year-old farmhouse right now, and it hasn’t been lived in for a while. So every hour except for now, I’m making repairs to make it habitable. That means opening up bits of walls and floors and finding things that you don’t necessarily want to find and then covering them up again. So it feels like I’m in my own horror movie.
Dillon Casey: It’s going to be like the movie House. You’re going to knock something down and find a portal to another dimension.
DC: Then the white cat just jumps out. [Laughs] But Rachel and Dillon, I love the chemistry between the two of you. Rachel, I especially love your character. I’m curious to hear from you about embodying this character, especially with the tension you have with the Camp Host.
Rachel Colwell: Brooke was talking about sort of the careful care and love that the script had. When I first read it, I went through and read the details of the art of the microaggression that Henry so beautifully nails in this script.
I actually had a phone call with him shortly thereafter where I said, who told you this? You could only get this within the community. This is somebody who really understands on a cellular level what it’s like to experience those kinds of unsettling microaggressions that you do as a Native woman just regularly. And I’d never seen it portrayed that way in a script before or since. So there wasn’t a lot to even have to imagine.
Everything she was doing was so unsettling in such a specific, dog-whistling way that the average reader wouldn’t pick up on or see why these things are so unsettling and offensive. Even in her mannerisms, and the way she speaks about the land. That was just always simmering. I mean, what’s so beautiful about the script is that there are so many colliding perspectives and there are so many people written so well as their own fully formed humans.
DC: There’s that first moment when you interact with The Camp Host and she grabs your ear. Henry, why did you want to choose to dig into microaggressions, particularly against Indigenous and Native people? What was the impetus for that for you with the script?
HDM: That’s an interesting question and there are multiple answers to it. But when my wife and I were traveling, there may or may not have been a campo host or two that shared similar traits to our title character. They were all of the same demographic, and it was all this kind of land ownership thing going on. That screamed very loudly to me about America’s bigger problem.
I also grew up in Alaska and northern Wisconsin and I love writing about my friends that I grew up with. I always just want to create fully human characters. The only way I can do that is [by writing] people that I interact with on a daily basis.
DC: Dillon, what about you? What was your experience being a part of this film and coming in and being a part of this weird kind of triangle of bad vibes?
DC: Triangle of bad vibes? Well, I mean I just have memories of good vibes. [Laughs] No, it was a lot of fun. My agent called me and she’s like, I got this script and I didn’t have time to read it because you know what? I was at a squash tournament in Waterloo, Canada, which is a small little town outside of Toronto. I’m a decent squash player, not great, but I’m decent. [Laughs]
Anyway, I didn’t have time to read it. So my wife, who’s an actress, read it while I was driving everyone home and she’s reading it and she’s telling me all the stuff that my character has to do, and I’m thinking, I’m going, I have to do what?? I have to get in the water in November?? No, I’m not doing this. Then she goes, actually, it’s pretty good. And then she gets to this one famous scene, an infamous scene at this point, and goes, oh yeah, this is really good, you’re going to want to do this. And I’m thinking of all the stuff that I would have to do in November, and then I got home and I read the script and I was like, oh shit, I have to do this. This is amazing.
I hope Henry takes this as a compliment, but for me, the sign of a catchy song is it sounds like something you’ve heard before, and I feel like I’ve heard [The Camp Host before]. And I read that script and it’s not something I’ve seen before, but it’s something I’ve felt before. I grew up loving movies like Evil Dead and Aliens, and of course the Terminator movies.
The shoot was so much fun, and when you’re doing it for a good story, you actually like doing it. I was like, put more mud on me, put more blood on me. Let’s do this. Rachel was so much fun to work with. Brooke was incredible. I once saw just a frame of Brooke walking around in costume thinking and I thought, oh man, she’s going to be scary. She’s just perfect. And Henry, right off the bat, we just started talking about horror movies. It was a tough couple of weeks, but I only have good memories of it.
DC: It sounds like summer camp a little bit.
HDM: Yeah, I mean maybe winter camp or fall camp. Just to give you a little bit of the background on the script, it was written for July. So when Dillon and Rachel go to the swimming hole, they strip down and go into the glistening water and they spout water into the air and they swim and it’s beautiful and warm and just super romantic. And then when we got the call that it was happening and it was happening in November, in Ontario, I had to start rewriting the script.
But honestly, I think it is a great example of how lower-budget productions and things like that can help amplify your story because this is the only opportunity we can go to this shutdown camping ground and now all your summer stuff is turning into the fall. How do you make that work? It ups your stakes. The water Dillon is going to have to get into is now freezing. It’s too cold for them when they first see it. So when the Camp Host is on his trail later, now he’s putting himself in a potentially more dangerous situation. And then it was fun using the location and rewriting a little bit to make sure all of that works.
DC: There are also a lot of late nights, so it’s even colder.
HDM: Yeah, there were night shoots. I want to set this up so maybe they can talk about the stunts a little bit, but Brooke had a stunt double. But, she was running barefoot in the middle of the night in the cold Ontario weather by herself. And she showed up to do that at 3:00 AM I think it was. A lot of people were super scared to get into the water because it was freezing. I’m not going to say it was Dillon, but it was Dillon.
DC: I wasn’t scared, man, whatcha talking about?
HDM: But by the time Rachel got into the water, we couldn’t pull her out. She was like, let’s go again.
BJ: I just want to say Rachel was great in the drowning scene. When we were actually in studio doing the final drowning stuff and I swear my brain had frozen. There were icicles under my eyes and my whole head was an ice cube and Rachel was there taking care of me. She was holding me up as if she wasn’t seemingly affected at all by this. She was just the mother who was taking care of me.
And I do also remember the squibbs. I had four squibbs for when I get shot in the water and they’re kind of almost too close to my hands. So every time we did a basic rehearsal, they’d say, keep your hands free, keep your hands free. When we finally got down to shooting it, I had a radio mic in my pocket and I’m going off getting shot and then falling off camera and having to keep my hands away, but also hold up the radio mic so that it didn’t get wet.
HDM: Because she was actually in the river and she was not allowed to fall in that shot. We had to do a cutaway because if she fell, she’d fall with electrical equipment on.
BJ: Yeah. So there are lots of little challenges, which are really fun. I mean, not every actor likes that, but I think the three of us all really enjoyed having a variety of different things we had to keep in mind. So then you feel like you’re a superhero when you actually do it in one take or do a good job. So it was fun.
DC: I want to hear about Mika, our three-legged dog. Whose dog was that? Or how did you find Mika?
HDM: Mika is inspired by my real three-legged dog, Mika. I remember the production company reached out and they were like, we’re not going to be able to find a three-legged dog. But our producers, Tyler and Ryan, went out and lo and behold found a trained three-legged dog.
That dog was Cake. And Cake was wonderful and also in the process of being trained for the movie as we were shooting the movie and did an amazing job. But lo and behold, shout out to Rachel who had a lot of Cake scenes and also a lot of scenes with a child actor.
DC: Rachel, now you get Animal Wrangler under your belt
RC: Coolest shoot I’ve ever been on in my life. Thanks guys. I want to make a quick comment about the stunt thing.
DC: Oh yeah, absolutely.
RC: On this shoot, I really found that it’s so infrequent in our careers when you’re actually viscerally reacting to the elements. So something about the water and the cold and the blood and the mud. All of the times when we are soaking wet and shaking like rats, we really are soaking wet and shaking like rats. There’s something kind of odd and satisfying about doing that. And I realized that so often in television, it’s almost surgical. You have to land exactly on a mark so you’re in focus and say the line exactly and barely move your head and just find real stillness. The Camp Host was just honestly reacting to the elements in every situation
So I realized that things that look not fun on screen are actually really fun to do. And things that look fun on screen are not usually fun to do. Enter the campfire scene. It’s very strange, but that’s just how it worked out.
DC: Well, that’s the beauty of practical effects. It’s always better when you’re reacting to something rather than having to act like it’s in front of you.
DC: For me, I had to learn how to meditate and retreat inside because there’s a lot of waiting on a film set. We were shooting everything outside and I was covered in mud and they had to keep me wet and covered in blood and I had to lie in the mud and wait while everybody figured out all the shots around me. Then 20 minutes go by, and I’m just lying there thinking to myself, don’t flip out. Retreat inside yourself.
RC: And for me, the part of the film that I really connect to is the relationship and the chemistry between Ed and Sadie. And I feel like I have to give all the credit to Dillon for that. Even watching the film back, some of those emotional, heartbreaking moments where they’re fighting and that sort of stuff, I don’t know if I could replicate it without Dillon. He just really is so available and so supportive.
The Camp Host is streaming now on Tubi.
Categorized:Interviews
