Exclusive Interview: Peter Block Talks THE SHED, FRIGHT NIGHT & Confirms Big News Coming on PUMPKINHEAD Remake
Josh Millican
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Peter Block’s IMDB page reads like a Greatest Horror Movies of the 21st Century list; the prolific producer has been involved in some of the biggest and best-received genre films of the past two decades. His most recent film is The Shed, a chiller that flips vampire tropes on their head while incorporating timely and important social commentary. Check out the trailer for The Shed embedded at the top of the article and read the synopsis below. Our exclusive interview follows.
Synopsis:
Stan lives with his abusive grandfather and tries to protect his best friend from high school bullies. When he discovers a murderous creature has taken refuge inside his tool shed, he tries to battle the demon alone until his bullied friend discovers the creature and has a far more sinister plan.
Dread Central: You’ve produced a ton of horror movies over the years, including some of my personal favorites. What attracts you to the horror genre?
Peter Block: It’s quite interesting. I’ve worked on quite a few but more importantly, the things I’m proudest about are not necessarily the ones I produced but the ones I found. I started out kind of in the acquisitions business and when a lot of people were ignoring the horror genre generally, and things I found more interesting specifically, I had the greatest sandbox in the world. I could just buy them and market them myself.
So getting to find these cool little films, whether they were English speaking, like May or Hard Candy, or foreign language stuff like High Tension, filmmakers I’m not sure anybody would have found if they didn’t get a break, like the Spirit Brothers. That was fun for me. I was always very interested in films that were off the beaten path so horror was interesting. I was always a fan; the films I grew up with and reading [Stephen] King and [Clive] Barker, but when I started in the film business I was working for a company that did mostly art house films and we had to increase the number of films we could handle each month, and I said to the guy, we just have to do more horror films because it’s not cast dependent.
When somebody goes into the rental store like my parents who will go every two or three months and rent one movie, they’ll go in every week and rent three. So that was how we grew the video business. When I was at Lionsgate, I kind of used the exact same approach. I was running video and TV stuff at the time and when we were trying to branch into commercial films, and basically talked about the publicity benefits of films like House of 1000 Corpses, Open Water, Saw, and Cabin Fever as being the driving force that opened those films, it worked out really well.
DC: Fantastic. As someone who’s been in this game for a while, can you talk a little bit about how the industry has evolved over the last decade-plus, especially how it pertains to horror movies?
PB: Yeah it’s funny. Horror is always that thing that everyone wants to take advantage of but nobody really wants to tout. It’s changed a little bit obviously recently but in the eighties, they considered it those schlocky movies. Even the studios didn’t want to touch the slasher films and that’s where it allowed independent cinema to come from. No one would dabble in the horror thing, they would always play it safe.
By the way, some of my favorite horror movies came out of the studio so I wouldn’t say without exception but to a large extent. Just as horror started to get a nice resurgence in the nineties, everybody wanted to kind of make it PG, and start to go where nothing was objectionable and for me it just left a huge hole for hard R films. Not that I’m drawn to those specifically, actually I’m probably not, but there was an opening there. What people failed to understand was the horror audience wasn’t new; the horror audience hadn’t gone anywhere, they just didn’t always necessarily invite them to the party. But they were always having a party on their own.
What I like most about the horror genre is people love to talk about it. I go to the movies as a social activity and you find you can agree on a movie to love, it may not be for the same reason, or even is somebody didn’t like the movie and you did, there’s probably some common ground in scenes you didn’t like. So I find that it kind of lends itself to comradery and social activities that other types of movies don’t have. Plus I think, for a guy who likes horror films also, the ability to translate a foreign film to a horror audience is essential because if you get your sound and your lighting right, you don’t have to necessarily have to understand exactly what’s going on for the benefit of that movie. So I think it translates very nicely and allows people to explore new types of films and filmmakers. I also think the horror audience is also willing to indulge itself in a movie they didn’t like, even a bad movie has great moments, and sometimes a bad movie, there’s nothing better than a movie that’s really, really bad, you want to watch it again it’s so bad and there’s a fun part, I think the general mainstream audience doesn’t appreciate the entertainment value as much as a horror audience does.
DC: Very well put. So let’s talk about The Shed: What attracted you to that film?
PB: Well it’s interesting. I get submitted a lot of things and [director] Frank [Sabatella] submitted me The Shed back in 2012 or 2013. I just remember when I read it, I didn’t know him at all but thought, “A vampire in a shed, that’s interesting! I can see artwork…” The old nineties horror guy in me was like out in full force but I kind of just put it in a drawer and didn’t think much about it. I had other films I was working on and other businesses I was doing.
About two years ago I guess, I was thinking about my favorite movie at the time. So I was thinking about that and watching a news program about a kid who was bullied and went home to his dad’s closet, got a gun and went back to school and I just had this epiphany. And I just said, “What if he didn’t have a gun? What if he had a vampire in the shed?” And I immediately had to go back to my old files to figure out, “What was that guy’s name?” so I called up Frank and said, “How would you like to work on that script a little bit?” and then we really put that element in there, the whole ‘dollar’ twist. And we kind of paired it down to a bunch of locations and things, and I just got happier and happier with it as we went along. I always like being entertained while there is some additional subtext to it and working with Frank, as a writer, I got to appreciate how he would be as a director, so it made the decision to go out and make the movie a lot easier. Sometimes you just write for writing’s sake just to see the creative outlet and sometimes you’re writing to see if you’re going to make the movie, and this one I kind of felt well right and it worked out great.
DC: Fantastic. You know, The Shed reminded me a lot of Tom Holland’s Fright Night. Like that film you have a protagonist, and his girlfriend, and his best friend caught up in the terror, not to mention the high school setting, the themes of sex and bullying… Was that film an inspiration to you and Frank?
PB: One hundred percent it was an inspiration to Frank. I even think in the initial letter he wrote to me. He said, “This is my valentine to Fright Night”. He loved that movie and I love it to so it was easy to kind of see what he was after. And it got me thinking, back in 2012, I’m like, I like the Fright Night aspect, but let’s inject a little Twelve O’clock High into it (and I realized how old I was talking about Twelve O’clock High). It kind of evolved a little bit, but without a doubt, Fright Night and Near Dark were films we talked about through the writing and shooting process.
DC: Fantastic. I’ve seen The Shed so I can attest that it’s a great film but I’d like to hear from you: What makes this film extraordinary and what sets it apart from the pack?
PB: I think what sets it apart from the pack is it’s just fun. It’s entertaining, I think it’s fun, I think there are moments to laugh but I wouldn’t call it a horror/comedy. There are moments to joke but I’m not going to say it’s the scariest movie out there either. But sometimes an audience just wants to be entertained.
You look at a mainstream audience and a movie like Peanut Butter Falcon that does twenty-five million dollars and you go, “Why?” And sometimes you just want to relax, enjoy and have a smile, and I think that’s what The Shed is. It’s not overly dreadful; it uses elements that people can relate to as outsiders trying to either get along together as Stan and Dommer do or take advantage when they feel they have to break outside of that, as Roxy tries to do. At the same time, we put it in the context of a pretty sure of itself horror film; we both use the tropes and shine a light on the tropes at the same time. Obviously, the little conversation before they are going to go upstairs, it’s all about what usually happens in a horror film, but at the same time, we have fun when Roxy wants to get nostalgic and wants to look at photos when we know she should be looking in the closet. So we were trying to let everyone know that hey, especially in this day and age, it doesn’t have to be uber-serious, just be fun.
I think this film works really well on that level, but what I think is best about it, truthfully, is the casting unknown kids who are all great. You just don’t know who’s your hero and who’s your villain. We consciously said, “We’re not going to have actors in here just for the sake of filling up some screen space. We want to give everyone something good to do so not only do they have motivation throughout the film, it’s constantly changing”. We hope we had something to say about anti-bullying and people can kind of say “Oh, there was a leap, a reason for it and they weren’t just looking for the buck, they had something to say”. So hopefully that all comes through and you found some of that, that can be your experience as well.
DC: I saw in your IMDB page that you’re producing the upcoming Pumpkinhead remake. It’s been a while since we’ve gotten any news about that project and I know our readers would love to know what’s up.
PB: There is new news, but I’m not at liberty to share it at this time. But I’ll be more than happy to when were able to and I hope it will be in the not so distant future.
