PopHorror Let's Get Scared
I don’t think we talk about horror authors enough. There are plenty of things spotlighting filmmakers and directors, actors, even screenwriters, but horror authors are rarely mentioned. I’m a big reader and would love to hear more from these writers who can bring on the nightmares. This is one of the reasons I’m super excited about the new TV series by Philip Gelatt (The Spine of Night), First Word on Horror. This docuseries profiles several popular horror authors as they discuss their writing, relationship with horror, and tidbits about their lives while reading some of their work.
To celebrate the release of the show, I chatted with director Philip about how the series came about, author selection, horror movies, and more!
PopHorror: I really loved the First Word on Horror, and I am such a big reader that I can’t wait to see more. I feel like we don’t give enough credit to horror authors and people don’t talk about them as much as they do actors and filmmakers and stuff, so I really love the focus on writers. That’s really awesome to me. Can you tell us a little bit about the series and how you came to direct it?
Philip Gelatt: Yeah, so the series is, as you say, very much a celebration of… I would say it’s a celebration of horror writers, but also just writers in general, like writers as human beings, writers’ lives, what it means to be a writer, how one writes. There’s a lot of that in there too. And the series started in my mind and I’ve always loved writers and writing and horror writing, et cetera, probably for my whole life. So a couple of years ago, one of the authors in our series, – you haven’t seen his episode, he’s the one with the eye patch – his name is Laird Barron. He’s a friend of mine. I’m also a fan of his work. But he got very sick and almost died. He recovered, and I selfishly thought to myself, oh, somebody should sit Laird down for an interview because I knew he’d had a crazy life. Somebody should do that; it might as well be me because why not? So, I dragged Laird out of his infirmary to sit down for an interview with no real thought as to what we were going to do with it. I just thought it was worthwhile to do it because he’s an interesting guy and thoughtful and has had a real interesting life. So, we did that, and then my producing partner on it was like, “Oh, this is great, but maybe we should do more of these and turn it into a series. Let’s figure out what we’re going to do with this.” And by that he meant let’s do more. From there, very quickly, the idea for this series was born basically, which is like, we’re going to go do a similar style interview that we did with Laird. We’re going to have every author read one of their short stories, and then we’re going to intercut between the two to create this documentary piece that’s both about the work and the life and everything in between.
PopHorror: Well, I can’t wait to see that episode. I have to tell you, Stephen Graham Jones, I could listen to him speak for hours. There’s something very soothing about his voice and talking about all these horrible stories of horror, and it still is very soothing. So I really like that. Can you tell me about the author selection? How did you approach them?
Philip Gelatt: A number of them I knew already personally. Laird, I knew, obviously. Paul Tremblay, I’ve known for a while. I’ve met him through Laird. And Stephen Graham Jones, I knew a little bit, not as well as the other two, but enough to send him an email and say, “Hey, we’re doing this thing, would you want to do it?” And then the other two, Elizabeth Hand came to me. I’d read some of her work, but Paul Tremblay said, “Oh, you should really get Liz on camera, because she’s had an interesting life and she’s slightly older than the other one, so she’s got a slightly different perspective on things.” So that just made sense. And then Mariana Enriquez, I was just in love with her writing. She’d been recommended to me. I read her novel, Our Share of Night, which is – I mean this in a good sense – a real punch in the face of a novel. I don’t know if you’ve read it, but it’s fantastic. And I was like, “Oh, if we can get her, we have to get her.” She lives in Argentina. It’s a little bit of a geographical difficulty, but coincidentally, she was coming to New York to do press for a short story collection, and she was gracious enough to come sit with us. So a little bit they were chosen via who I knew I thought we could get to. But then beneath that, there was actually quite a conscious effort to try to get people from different geographical locations, people of different backgrounds, people of different socioeconomic histories. We’re trying to create a holistic picture of the genre and the type of people who write it and love it.
PopHorror: I love that. I’m sorry, what was the title of the book that you said was a punch to the face?
Philip Gelatt: It’s called Our Share of Night.
PopHorror: Okay. I’m going to look it up.
Philip Gelatt: Yeah, don’t be scared. It’s 700 pages, but it’s 700 great pages.
PopHorror: Hey, I read on a Kindle most of the time, so that is not-
Philip Gelatt: Oh, so you’ll never even know!
PopHorror: Was there anyone that you really wanted to get but weren’t able to lock them down?
Philip Gelatt: Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of authors that I want to get and didn’t try because I knew we were capping it at five for now, that’s a different category. The only author that we tried to get and couldn’t get is Thomas Ligotti. I don’t know if you know Ligotti’s work, but he’s… How to describe him? He’s the most nihilistic, fatalistic, anti-natalist. He’s got a real rep as a misanthropist. He’s quite old and ailing. And so by the same logic as Laird, I was like, “Somebody should get Thomas Ligotti on camera before he dies.” I wasn’t able to do it. I think he’s still alive, but I couldn’t get to him. I’m a Ligotti fan, but I would say that part of the instinct in the show is what I was saying before. I’m a fan of all these authors, but even if I wasn’t, I would still want them to… I want all of the types of horror on there, whether I’m a huge fan of them or not. Ligotti is the one that got away so far.
PopHorror: What I like about this is that it’s going to open up people who don’t normally read to maybe say, “Hey, I really liked hearing this person talk. I’m going to check out what they’ve written.” And that’s going to bring more people to experience these horror books and just books in general. I love that this is going to open people up to maybe start reading, but also people like me, it’s going to open me up to new authors and new people and new types of horror, and I’m always looking for that. I really love that you came up with this idea. This is so great to me.
Philip Gelatt: That’s awesome!
PopHorror: Not only are you working on this with horror writers, but you also make horror movies yourself. What draws you to the horror genre, and why do you feel that so many people resonate with it?
Philip Gelatt: This is a great question. I mean, this question is like a subtext of the whole series, honestly. These are the questions that the authors in the series are answering themself. I mean, I didn’t always love horror. As a little kid, I was terrified of it. And then in my teenage years, I got into it. And I think having had a relationship, having been in a relationship with horror for many, many years, I think that relationship has changed. I think probably when I was a teenage boy, it was very much a punky, this is the gross stuff that nobody else likes kind of thing. At this point though, I mean, I still like that stuff. I’m a pretty equal opportunity horror consumer, but I think now I like it because it’s a genre that is, to my mind, the closest to the human subconscious in a certain sense. You can do things in horror; you can acquire emotional tonalities that other genres don’t often let you play in. It is the genre of nightmares, which is also a way to say it’s the genre of dreams in a certain sense, good and bad in my opinion. That also means it’s creatively freer than other genres. I think you can get away with a lot in the horror genre that other genres might not tolerate without turning into horror themselves, if that makes sense. Anyway, so now that appeals to me. But humanity in general, I don’t know. I mean, I think Stephen makes a point in his episode about this evolutionary case that for a long time, millions of years ago, we all lived on the Savannah, and every day was full of actual legitimate horrors. There are, as they say, teeth in the darkness always trying to eat us or something like that. That feels intellectually true to me. I mean, I don’t know evolutionary psychology well enough to tell you if it’s actually true, but it feels true. So I think there’s a little bit of that, but I also think people respond to it. There’s so many varieties of horror and there’s so many different ways that people respond to it. If you’re a teenager and you go to see a Freddy movie, the appeal there isn’t some evolutionary itch to scratch. It’s something else entirely. So I don’t know. But thinking about this question, I could think about horror forever. I think it’s fascinating.
PopHorror: It sparks a lot of emotions in us, I think, and it stays with me more than if I were watching a comedy. I don’t leave a comedy movie and go tell all my friends about it. I’m just like, “Oh yeah, it was good. It was funny. You should go see it.” But I leave a horror movie and I’m like, “Okay, this happened. This happened. This performance was great. The gore… You need to go see it.” I like that it starts those conversations and gets your emotions going, and it lets us experience what we’re afraid of – like those nightmares – from the comfort of our own home without having to do it in real life.
Philip Gelatt: Yep, always a blessing.
PopHorror: Yes! And I have just one last question for you today. What is your favorite scary movie?
Philip Gelatt: This is obviously an impossible question because there are so many. Can I cheat and give you a couple, or does it have to be one?
PopHorror: Absolutely.
Philip Gelatt: Okay. So, for a long time, I would’ve said Alien, and Alien is still very, very much up there for me. I think there’s so much that’s beautiful about Alien. It’s perfection. It does body horror, it does paranoia. It’s an immaculate, amazing thing. Lesser seen that I would recommend or that I love are all of the films of a Japanese filmmaker named Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who made the original… Remember there’s that terrible movie with Veronica Mars in it called Pulse? He made the original version of that in Japan called Kairo, and a movie called Cure. And I just think he’s the greatest living filmmaker. He doesn’t only do horror, but horror’s in everything he does, and he’s absolutely fantastic. So, Kiyoshi Kurosawa is the filmmaker, just go see everything he does. He was like J-horror before J-horror became huge everywhere. He’s just the best.
Thank you to Philip for taking the time to chat with us. First Word on Horror is exclusively on Substack.
