Interview with TALES OF HALLOWEEN’s Axelle Carolyn

To celebrate the October 16th release of the horror anthology Tales of Halloween, Daily Dead spoke to the filmmakers behind the movie to discuss the project, their individual contributions and more.

First up is Axelle Carolyn, the writer and director of 2013’s Soulmate, who first spearheaded the anthology and whose creepy, atmospheric segment “Grimm Grinning Ghost” stars Alex Essoe (Starry Eyes) as a young woman confronted by an urban legend in which she does not believe.

As one of the masterminds behind Tales of Halloween, can you give some background on how the project came together?

Axelle Carolyn: I’ve been friends with these guys for the best part of ten years, and had been thinking for a while that it'd be great to work on something together. There's an awesome horror community in L.A., and we all hang together to talk horror, watch horror, eat, breathe and live horror. We also celebrate Halloween six weeks a year; it's a whole season of screenings and costume parties and theme parks, so I thought it'd be awesome to celebrate our love of the holiday. So through Halloween, this is really meant as a love letter to our friends and the genre that brought us together.

This anthology differs from other recent multi-director anthologies in that it was shot during a continuous shoot with all the filmmakers on set instead of just, "Here, you go make your piece, you go make your piece and we'll stitch them all together." How did that process inform the finished film?

Axelle Carolyn: We scheduled it like a feature, over the course of a month (each film had two to three days). Because the whole idea was to work together, we started planning together from the start, bouncing ideas off each other and giving each other feedback. My job at script stage was to gather scripts, put them in rough order, pass on notes and suggestions, make sure no two shorts were alike and that they all belonged to a shared universe, and finding links between them—characters who could show up in several stories. Then when we started shooting, we'd offer each other help wherever needed and we all got to hang out on each other's set. It was awesome to see everyone's individual directing style and to cameo every once in a while (I'm in there a few times: cheering on feuding neighbors, getting mugged, getting arrested, and dead!). The process really helped give the films a sense of unity, and even though they're all different from each other, it's clear that they belong to the same world.

It was great to see Alex Essoe on screen after her extraordinary performance in Starry Eyes. Was that the film that made you want to cast her or were you already familiar with her work?

Axelle Carolyn: I attended the L.A. premiere of Starry Eyes and loved it. Alex's performance blew me away. After the screening I met Dennis [Widmyer] and Kevin [Kolsch] and they introduced me to Alex. She's fun and lovely in real life and I immediately thought I'd want to work with her. I offered her the part a week later and thankfully, she said "yes"! She's very intuitive and managed not only to make her character likable and interesting with very little to play with (just a few lines of dialogue), but also look convincingly scared despite really tough shooting conditions.

Your segment, "Grim Grinning Ghost," stands out from the others by being one of the most genuinely scary of the shorts, many of which lean more towards horror comedy. Was that a function of the story you wanted to tell, or did you start out knowing you wanted to do something traditionally scary?

Axelle Carolyn: Well, my first feature, Soulmate (check it out, it's on Netflix!), was also a ghost story, but it was an atmospheric drama, a Gothic romance—not the kind of film that makes audiences whoop and scream. So for this one I thought I'd make another ghost story, but I'd make it creepy and scary. It's pretty hard to do in six or seven minutes; you need to set up a relatable character, set up the threat, and build your scares. But seeing an audience of hardcore horror fans jump and scream is the best feeling in the world!

I love Soulmate, and revisiting it recently brought to my attention several similarities between it and “Grim Grinning Ghost” (there's even a likeness between your two leading ladies... and the dog! I'm guessing that's your dog?). Were there themes or motifs you were interested in revisiting, or did you just want to strip away everything but the scares?

Axelle Carolyn: Aw, thank you. I'm very proud of Soulmate; it's a difficult film to market because it mixes genres as it tends to appeal to a more mature audience than the average ghost story, but we made it for almost nothing and I can't believe how much we pulled off.

I don't want my work to repeat itself, but there are themes and images I'm attracted to that keep popping up in what I write and what I do. In this case I knew there would be similarities, but since it's a short film, and I was approaching it from different angles, I didn't really mind. The types of emotions you'd feel watching Soulmate are very different from what you'll hopefully feel watching “Grim Grinning Ghost.”

I agree that Alex Essoe reminds me a bit of Anna Walton, in that she's an incredibly gifted actress, able to show a fantastic range of emotions in just a look or a gesture. Both are very intuitive and their performances feel extremely natural.

As for the dog, yes, that's Anubis. She's a scream queen in her own right and I want her to be in every movie I make! She was still a puppy when we shot Soulmate, so she's very used to being on set. She loves it. She loves the attention.

Are there challenges in trying to create a brand new ghost story instead of falling back on something established like, say, "Bloody Mary?"

Axelle Carolyn: That was a huge part of the fun for me. Looking for story inspiration, I looked up Halloween legends in a few books and came across this very simple urban legend, that in some parts of the country they say that on Halloween night, if you hear footsteps behind you, you shouldn't turn around. But it didn't explain why or what would happen, so I came up with a story for the ghost of Mary Bailey. Having the great Lin Shaye tell the story and make it come to life was the icing on the cake!

What aspects of Halloween were you hoping to speak to with your segment?

Axelle Carolyn: I really wanted to cover the campfire storytelling side of things. Although it's not really part of my traditional Halloween, I know that for a lot of people, telling ghost stories before midnight is a part of the fun. So that's how the story starts. The other aspect I wanted to see covered by this anthology, of course, was the spookiness of Halloween. Everybody loves a good fright. I guess the other episodes capture the parties and the costumes and the candy, while mine is the haunted house.

The love of horror and of the horror community comes through in every frame of the movie. I can't think of many other projects that pull off the same feat. Were there films you had in mind as inspiration for Tales as a whole?

Axelle Carolyn: The anthologies that inspired us most were actually the ones directed by a single director, like Creepshow. Creepshow was also a great inspiration in terms of tone; it goes for that spooky fun, EC Comics feel that we thought best fitted Halloween. We were also, of course, aware of Mike Dougherty's wonderful Trick ’r Treat, which set the bar really high for Halloween movies, especially when it comes to spooky visuals and atmosphere, but we deliberately aimed for a different tone. Trick ’r Treat is darker, less humorous. In an ideal world, you'd watch Tales of Halloween at the start of the night, to put you in the party mood, and you'd finish with Trick ’r Treat to close the night with some witching hour chills. This way, I feel both anthologies can really coexist, and I for one can't wait for Trick ’r Treat 2.

What do you think makes a great horror anthology movie?

Axelle Carolyn: We watched lots of anthology movies preparing this one, as you can imagine, and the conclusion I came to is that it's important for each segment of an anthology to feel distinct and bring something new, yet at the same time have a sense of cohesion throughout.

What's your all-time favorite segment from any horror anthology?

Axelle Carolyn: I’ll have to go with “The Drop of Water” from Black Sabbath. It's wonderfully creepy, really well-paced, and perhaps most of all, I'm completely in love with its gorgeous technicolor cinematography. Come to think of it, it was probably a big influence on my choice of story for Tales of Halloween.

Tales of Halloween will be released in theaters and on VOD on October 16 from Epic Pictures Productions.