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.
Writer/director Paul Solet first made a name for himself on the horror scene with his short film “Grace,” which he later adapted into an excellent feature starring Jordan Ladd. His contribution to Tales of Halloween, a pseudo-futuristic punk rock Spaghetti Western called “The Weak and the Wicked,” reunites a few cast members from his most recent feature, Dark Summer, and also showcases a different side of Solet.
Your segment, “The Weak and the Wicked,” is very much an homage to Sergio Leone. Did the story you came up with lend itself to that aesthetic or did you set out to make a Spaghetti Western-inspired piece and design the story to match that?
Paul Solet: When Axelle [Carolyn] and Mike [Mendez] told me about the project and said I could do anything I wanted as long as it was Halloween-themed, I realized this was a chance for me to make a Spaghetti Western-style piece. I’ve just always been in awe of Leone and it’s pretty rare that you get to pitch something operatic and hyper-stylized like that in a feature setting, so I knew this was my chance! The Walter Hill/Warriors homage of it all came into it as the piece evolved.
Can you talk about the casting at all? A few actors from your Dark Summer cast show up. Was this made at the same time or just after? Or did you just want to go back and work with them again?
Paul Solet: This was after Dark Summer, yes. I just absolutely had such an amazing time with those guys on that movie. Grace [Phipps] and Keir [Gilchrist] are two of the best actors I’ve ever worked with. I was so blown away by their work and their maturity and their intelligence and character; they are just both really remarkable human beings. I want to work with them [again] for many years to come, and this just happened to be my first chance. I actually wrote the piece with them in mind. They really bent over backwards to accommodate the schedule and make it out, and I was so grateful to have them. And to have Booboo Stewart and Noah Segan rounding out the outlaws was just terrific.
One of the things I love about Tales of Halloween is that so many of the segments comment on various aspects of the holiday. Your segment's connections to the holiday aren't as on-the-nose; it's something that feels like it's happening in another part of town, which is really cool and opens the film up even more. Was there a specific aspect or quality of Halloween that you had in mind when creating your segment?
Paul Solet: Yeah, it’s the only segment that isn’t in the suburbs—it’s way on the wrong side of the tracks. The thing I was interested in was going back further and building some ancient pagan All Hallow’s Eve mythology. I had just done a polish on a script that got me thinking a lot about that stuff and it was just fascinating to me, so it must have been fresh on my mind.
There's a visual at the very end of your segment that will stick with me forever. When a character is splashed with blood, I swear he doesn't close his eyes. I've never seen that in a movie before. Was that something you consciously directed or is that something the actor came up with?
Paul Solet: Haha, thank you! The truth is, we shot these so fast that we only had one take for this and many other shots, so I can take no credit for that whatsoever. Keir is just a fucking champion. I have done terrible things to him on film, and he is never one to flinch! Nerves of fucking steel, my friend!
What do you think makes a great horror anthology?
Paul Solet: There are all the usual obvious factors like craft and story and theme, but what separates a great one from one that is forgettable is the energy behind it. In the case of Tales of Halloween, the fact that everyone was helping everyone else and hanging on set to root for each other—it just felt like a month-long filmmaking party—and that really comes across. No one was grim or overly-serious about it, we all just went out and had a good time and did as much as we could in the two days we had to shoot them.
What's your all-time favorite segment from any horror anthology?
Paul Solet: That is such a hard question, but I’m going to have to go with [Takashi] Miike's “Box” from Three... Extremes
Tales of Halloween will be released in theaters and on VOD on October 16 from Epic Pictures Productions.
Patrick lives in Chicago, where he has been writing about film since 2004. A member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Online Film Critics Society, Patrick's writing also appears on About.com, DVDVerdict.com and fthismovie.net, the site he runs and hosts a weekly podcast.
He has been an obsessive fan of horror and genre films his entire life, watching, re-watching and studying everything from the Universal Monsters of the '30s and '40s to the modern explosion of indie horror. Some of his favorites include Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931), Dawn of the Dead (1978), John Carpenter's The Thing and The Funhouse. He is a lover of Tobe Hooper and his favorite Halloween film is part 4. He knows how you feel about that. He has a great wife and two cool kids, who he hopes to raise as horror nerds.
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