‘V/H/S/Halloween’ Directors On Their Wickedly Demented Found Footage Anthology
October is here, which means we’ve been blessed by a new entry in the iconic found footage anthology series, V/H/S. This year, the theme is Halloween and six new directors (Bryan Ferguson, Anna Zlokovic, Casper Kelly, Paco Plaza, Micheline Pitt-Norman & R.H. Norman, Alex Ross Perry) are tackling found footage chaos themed around the high, holy holiday. The result is V/H/S/Halloween, a disgustingly entertaining romp that’ll have you wishing you were still young enough to trick or treat.
After the film’s world premiere at Fantastic Fest, we sat down with all the film’s directors to talk about Halloween, crime scene recreations, and the power of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Plus, we discover a very interesting Easter Egg linked to The Three Stooges.
Dread Central: What is everyone’s relationship to Halloween? When you hear the word Halloween, what kind of personal memory pops up? What was your favorite Halloween costume growing up?
Casper Kelly: Oh, my God. Just some made-up green superhero that my mom helped me make. [Laughs]
Bryan Ferguson: Ninja Turtles were like the main thing for me as a kid, and I really wanted to be Michelangelo.
R.H. Norman: Hell yeah.
BF: Oh, yeah. I was like, I’m gonna gonna go to school, dressed like that, and my dad made me a fucking Shredder outfit. I had to dress like Shredder. I was the villain. I didn’t want to be the villain; I wanted to be Michelangelo!
DC: That’s so rude!
BF: My humiliation makes my parents laugh. Happy Halloween. My dad’s a bit of a dick. [Laughs]
Anna Zlokovic: I wasn’t really allowed to have a lot of candy in the house because my parents were very health-focused. So because of that, give me a huge garbage bag and I’m gonna fill it with candy! And I came home with, like, the largest bag of candy that I’d eat in two days.
DC: Did your parents do the thing where they sat and looked through every piece of candy?
AZ: No??
DC: Did anyone else’s parents do that?
CK: Yes!
DC: My mom would not let me eat a piece of candy until she sat and went through every single thing and made sure there weren’t razor blades in it!
AZ: Whoa. That’s wild, dude!
DC: She never found a single fucking razor blade. Anyway, Micheline, what about you?
Micheline Pitt: I wanted to be like a really honest answer. It probably won’t be a bit of a downer, but I had a really shitty childhood, and Halloween was like the only time of the year I could escape and become someone else and have all my favorite things happening for just one night. It was the one day I looked forward to every year.
RHN: Yeah. I want to correct the record and say that Leonardo’s the best Ninja Turtle. The burden of leadership!
[Chaos breaks out]
BF: Bullshit!
CK: But why??
RHN: The burden of leadership. It’s important! The burdenership. [Laughs]
Halloween for me is romantic. Micheline and I got engaged on Halloween. I was expecting it to be all spooky and Sleepy Hollow. But I didn’t realize it’s like the corniest thing you could possibly do. So I had this ring in my pocket and I had this elaborate plan where we’d take this pirate ship out to a lighthouse. I was talking to you [Micheline] about what we were going to do, and she was like, “Oh, I don’t get on boats.”
MP: I get motion sickness!
RHN: So then I was like, where am I going to propose to her? I was just looking around, and there’s nothing but tourists everywhere. I ended up proposing to her in the dark, and she laughed at me.
MP: I couldn’t even see him or the ring. It was pitch black outside of our Airbnb!
RHN: I couldn’t find a romantic spot!
MP: And I started laughing at him before he could even talk.
RHN: So we got engaged on Halloween, and that’s the most important thing to me.
DC: Hi, Alex! Any Halloween memories as a kid?
Alex Ross Perry: I don’t have like a funny answer. The thing I loved was the decorations we had. We only had two kinds of decorations at my house: the ones from that era, where it’s just a piece of cardboard, and then the plastic bags full of leaves that looked like pumpkins, which was an incentive for my parents to make me rake the lawn so that I could fill them up.
It was very, very magical. The day itself, but I just always liked autumn growing up on the East Coast, and Halloween was like the apex of it. I lived in a cul-de-sac, and my whole street was one of those Halloween streets where it was chaos, hundreds of kids. It was a spectacle.
Now I’m experiencing it through a child’s eyes with my five-year-old. Other than Christmas, it’s the most exciting day of the year for a kid, I’m realizing. And it’s confusing for her because we started putting stuff up already. So she woke up on September 14 and was like, “It’s Halloween now, right?”
DC: Yes, it is!
ARP: We have six weeks of this, of like every day, and you know, we have her Halloween books out from the basement. So we’re trying to create this month-and-a-half-long spectacle for her. And we started like slowly acquiring pumpkins already. For a kid, you realize, it’s this and Christmas.
DC: Paco, what about you?
Paco Plaza: There was no Halloween in Spain.
DC: Okay, I was curious!
PP: It was only a great movie by John Carpenter for us. We got to know the holidays through movies and TV shows. It’s part of pop culture. Now it’s true that younger people celebrate Halloween, and they have parties. It’s just an excuse to feel like a stripper for a day.
DC: How did your experience with Halloween then shape how you approached the V/H/S/Halloween? Your segment is so interesting, and how it goes back and forth, past and present. So, how did your experience with Halloween and not Halloween then color your approach?
PP: I knew I needed to use, you know, very young actors to believe that they were really getting in costumes and makeup to party and, you know, mess with some paranormal stuff. So for me, Halloween, what made sense to me was to tell a story about a group of teenage kids just messing around.
Alberto Marini, who wrote a script with me, was trying to find the excuse about why is someone recording this, which is always very important for me. We came up with this idea of doing this police reconstruction that is, I don’t know if they do this in America, but in Spain, it’s very useful. If there is a murder or something, you go with the police to recreate it. You can watch them on YouTube, it’s really entertaining.
DC: Wow, that’s wild?? That’s a rabbit hole. I’m going to go down later. So you can just watch them online??
PP: Yeah, there are a lot of them. It’s beautiful. You see that real killers saying, “Yeah, I struck there,” and the cops are taking notes, like, “Can you please lie down to show where the body was?” It’s hilarious.
DC: Casper, I don’t know how to transition from that! Your segment is so different. I would love to know about all the packaging and the production design involved in yours. How involved were you with that, and also figuring out these different labels for all these candies? There’s something about the specificity of that design that is so cool.
CK: Oh, thank you. The idea was that aliens or AI were trying to imitate a candy, but they didn’t know how. Like, it just is wrong. And then a little Easter egg is the producer, Josh Goldbloom, I found out his great uncle is Larry from the Three Stooges.
Everyone: WHAT??
CK: Josh said if his hair wasn’t shaved, he would have Larry’s hair. So I put in a Larry Fine candy bar as a little nod to him.
ARP: This was like me finding out that Josh’s dad shot kid prints.
Everyone: WHAT??
ARP: When I submitted my treatment, Josh was like, “You know, my dad shot these in an electronics store in Philadelphia.”
DC: Wow. So, Anna, I love how you did maternal freaky bitches. I’m sorry to put it that way! I wanted to hear why you took the idea of motherhood and said, ‘I’m gonna make you all really regret wanting to see more motherhood on screen.’
AZ: Motherhood kind of freaks me out, and I feel like I’ve been a mom since I was, like, seven. I think women are just put in that position a lot. It makes me feel gross to be put in that position. So I was like, “How do I put that on screen?” This is the most grotesque representation I can think of. You have six tits that are lactating all the time. You’re forced by some supernatural fucking thing to fucking take care of everyone. I’m already getting mad thinking about it.
CK: You know, you were saying earlier that the scariest movie experience was Eraserhead about fatherhood. And here you did the female Eraserhead!
MP: You should probably talk about this with your therapist.
AZ: Oh, she already knows. She was like, “This is clearly about parentification.” She hasn’t seen it yet. [Laughs]
DC: Brian, before we wrap up, how much of a blast did you have thinking of all the various ways to kill people via soda can?
BF: I found it really ridiculously easy. [Laughs]
DC: Do you have a favorite one that you got to execute, though?
BF: Well, no, because they’re all really difficult to put off. I mean, the best one is the little boy explosion because we got to see it all, and so did the little boy. I think he’s probably scarred for life. [Laughs]
DC: You only have one take for that, right?
BF: Well, we were supposed to get it before one take, but we fucked up the first one we had to get it in the second take.
DC: No!
BF: Yeah, yeah, and it was the last shot of the day. But we got it!
V/H/S/Halloween is now streaming on Shudder.
Categorized: Interviews
