PopHorror Let's Get Scared
One of my favorite things about the Halloween season is haunted houses. There are so many; it’s hard to pick just one. There’s nothing like getting the shit scared out of you and being chased by a chainsaw to make it really feel like fall, even when it’s 100 degrees here in Phoenix. So it’s no surprise that one of my favorite films of 2019 is Haunt, a tale set in an extreme haunt. I was lucky enough to speak to the duo who wrote and directed the film, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, and we talked about haunted houses, growing up in the Midwest, the upcoming sequel to A Quiet Place, and, of course, horror movies.
PopHorror: Super excited for Haunt! How did you come up with the idea for the film, and how did you know you wanted to direct it together?
Bryan Woods: Well, Scott and I have known each other since we were 11, and we’ve been making movies together ever since then. One of the things that we used to do was on every Halloween, we would go haunted housing. We grew up in the Midwest, in Iowa, and there was no shortage of various haunted house each October. It was really cool, because you’d basically drive to the middle of nowhere, and there would be a warehouse or an abandoned church building that people would build haunted houses inside, and it was always something we were nostalgic for, but also really terrified because who are these people that are putting these haunted houses up? We’re so vulnerable when we go into these situations, and it just really got our imaginations going. Like, what would happen if everything went south? What’s the scariest version you can imagine going into one of these things? And that’s kind of where Haunt was born.
PopHorror: I have to say, I grew up in the Midwest as well, in Ohio, and the haunted houses out there… You drive out into the middle of nowhere, and then, all of a sudden, you’re in the middle of a cornfield that is haunted, and you’re being chased by someone with a chainsaw. I live in Phoenix now, and there’s nothing here that compares to the stuff that I would find when I lived back in Ohio.
Scott Beck: Totally know what you’re talking about! It’s interesting that you said that you grew up in Ohio. We basically shot the movie in northern Kentucky, across the border from Cincinnati. We had a research process while we were there of actually going to haunted houses in the area and taking our cast there, just re-familiarizing ourselves with what it’s like to be in the Midwest at these haunted house attractions.
PopHorror: I love that! It makes me even more excited. You mentioned that you guys met when you were 11, and looking through your IMDb, I see that you both have been writing and working on projects together for at least 20 years. How did you guys meet?
Scott Beck: We met at a lunch table in sixth grade. We were just sitting at the same table, and through conversation, we realized that both of us were making stop-motion movies with our action figures. So we decided to hang out. That just progressed into us making short films in middle school and these ambitious feature films in high school, which we think of as our film school years, where we were trying to recreate Paul Thomas Anderson or Martin Scorsese and make these ambitious, sweeping character dramas. Then we discovered that they weren’t any good, but our love for the genre was always in the background. I think it percolated, even more, when we discovered what type of stories we really loved telling.
PopHorror: That’s awesome! That’s a great friendship. What is it about one of your styles that compliments the other? What makes it so easy for you guys to create together?
Bryan Woods: That’s a great question, and that’s not something that we ever think about. Now that I’m thinking about it, it could ruin our whole filmmaking career (laughs), but more than anything, we’ve just been friends for so long. Scott and I, we see the same movies. We have similar tastes. We both grew up with that Midwest Iowa nice attitude, and all I can say is, it’s just been such a pleasure having somebody to collaborate with, bounce your ideas off of. When we started out, we would write movies and make movies independently of each other. There was just something about us coming together that made it work better because we always challenge each other and push each other in different directions. It’s never good enough, and that kind of competition of ideas is really helpful.
Scott Beck: I think beyond that, it’s also free of ego. The filmmaking process is incredibly collaborative anyway, so you want to keep your antennas up and listen to whatever is a good idea. That’s very much how Bryan and I treat our own internal process of writing and directing together, where it’s not like, “I have an idea,” or “Bryan has an idea.” They’re just ideas, and we’re not precious about them until we hone in on something that we really love together.
PopHorror: Back to Haunt. In preparation for that, have you ever attended an extreme haunted house?
Scott Beck: Very much of our childhood was going to the middle of nowhere to these haunted houses that were literally built in warehouses where there was nothing. While we haven’t done what I would say is an extreme… we haven’t been waterboarded or anything. The extremeness of our experiences felt like they were pushing a boundary. I don’t know if Bryan and I are brave enough to go past that.
Bryan Woods: You’ll find when you watch the movie, a part of the fun of making this movie was putting our ideal haunted house on screen. Like what we always thought would be scary, because so often, especially when we start talking about things like Halloween Horror Nights and some of the more mainstream haunted houses, they’re all kind of the same. Usually, an assault on your senses. It’s a lot of loud music, noises and people popping out and screaming at you. For us, our personal fears are much more subdued and quiet and lonely. So our haunted house is hopefully a unique experience. When people watch the movie, hopefully it feels like a haunted house like they’ve never quite been to before.
PopHorror: I’m hoping for it to make me feel like the Halloween season is here. I’m just like, “Please make it feel like fall!” because it’s so hot here.
Scott Beck: I hope it does that for you. I love that feeling, especially now that it’s September. Halloween does feel like the season is here You can embrace it for two months and create a list of your favorite horror movies that you want to watch. That’s the season that we totally embrace, and I would absolutely have the forefront of designing this movie from the get-go – from the first scene – making sure you feel those fall leaves falling in the frame, and that it just hits all those benchmarks of what fans of the season love. The real-life of Halloween.
PopHorror: I also want to say congratulations on the success of A Quiet Place [read the PopHorror review here]. I know that you guys wrote the screenplay, and now there’s a sequel coming. You guys built an almost tangible tension in the theater. How do you recreate that tension for an audience that has already experienced it and somewhat expects when watching your upcoming sequel?
Scott Beck: Good question. That’s why we’re not really sequel guys! That’s a good question. For us, A Quiet Place was always about taking a really big swing. We wanted it to feel like we were dropping a bomb off in a movie theater, in terms of it being a disruptive, explosive experience, and the hope was that it felt somewhat unique.
Bryan Woods: On a larger scale, everything that we approach as filmmakers – whether it’s as writers or directors – is figuring out what we, as audience members, have come to expect from the genre. Meaning, if something feels conventional, push it further in terms of when the scare actually drops or how you ratchet up the tension. That was at the forefront of our minds when writing A Quiet Place, certainly at the forefront of our minds when writing Haunt. This other project that we’re working on right now is an adaptation of Stephen King’s The Boogeyman for Twentieth Century Fox, and that very much falls in the same state as A Quiet Place, where it’s about a family, so it’s very character-centric, but it’s also about the Boogeyman, leading into situations that may feel cut from your own life and your family life, and making it feel domestic and relatable. But then you turn up the temperature there within the horror context, and hopefully, all of a sudden, you look back, and you’re in a much higher stakes environment. So, for us, that’s always where we try to find the tension.
PopHorror: I cannot wait to see that! If you could collaborate with anyone, living or dead, who would it be?
Bryan Woods: Dead I would have to say Alfred Hitchcock, because we’re such Hitchcock fans.
Scott Beck: It’s funny that Bryan said that, because I was actually going to say Anthony Perkins from an acting standpoint. He was an actor beyond his time in terms of the naturalism of the performances that he delivered. He was so idiosyncratic. But Alfred Hitchcock, certainly.
Bryan Woods: I have to say we’ve been so blessed. We’ve worked with a few of our heroes. Eli Roth, who produced Haunt, was such a huge inspiration for us growing up, because he’s such an amazing ambassador for the horror genre, and he just gets people so excited.
Scott Beck: We’re working with Sam Raimi in something that’s unannounced right now. Again, a huge incredible horror ambassador, but also just the nicest guy in the world. That’s something that we just really appreciate because the film business does not always cater to happy personalities.
PopHorror: What is your favorite scary movie?
Scott Beck: Favorite scary movie… it changes all the time. What is it right now that terrifies me? I have to be boring and say, Alien, because, for the first 15 minutes, you’re just wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. That feels relatable in life. You’re always wondering when that horrific thing is going to happen to you.
Bryan Woods: I think one of my favorite scary movies is… I guess I’ll go with Rosemary’s Baby right now, because there’s something natural and eerie about it. That movie just gets under my skin and makes me deeply uncomfortable. I find the ending very disturbing in a nuanced, realistic way.
We want to send a huge thank you to Scott Beck and Bryan Woods for speaking to us. Check back soon to read our upcoming review of Haunt. Keep it tuned to PopHorror for all of your horror news, reviews and interviews!
