Q&A with Saturday Morning Mystery Director Spencer Parsons

We're back with another Q&A feature, this time talking with Saturday Morning Mystery director Spencer Parsons, who tells us about growing up with Scooby-Doo, balancing horror and comedy, and his time on the set of the movie:

With this movie being Scooby-Doo influenced, can you tell me about your experience with Scooby-Doo as a child? What’s one of your favorite episodes?

Spencer Parsons: Oh yeah, when I was little, it was huge to me. My little brother and I would stay over at my grandmother’s house and wake up early to watch it with my older cousins while snarfing down sugary breakfast cereals my mom never let us have. By the time Jason of Star Command came on, I’d be flying high on Count Chocula, trying to get pony rides from the cocker spaniel. So I’d call it formative.

But Scooby and any of the ripoff mystery cartoons were my favorites because of the ghosts and monsters. I think I’m hardly alone when I say that it was probably my first brush with the horror genre, and I know it sent me to the library looking for books about hauntings and UFOs and cryptids. And then a little later my older cousins would get a kick out of showing me horror flicks. They sat me down for The Manitou (1978) on the Million Dollar Movie once, and my grandmother was furious because it kept me up all night. But I loved being scared and I wish movies could get to me that way now. Of course as an adult, the scariest thing about The Manitou is Tony Curtis’s pants.

Back then, I was disappointed that the ghosts on Scooby-Doo never turned out to be real, but now I love it for debunking superstition and selling a little bit of oversimplified scientific empiricism to the kiddies. My favorite episode is one from like the first season, I think, where they deliver the ridiculous solution to the mystery and it’s so convoluted that Scooby’s head starts going around and around, wringing his own neck. That gag is pretty hip and meta for a 70s kid’s show that didn’t involve Jim Henson. Genuinely impressive, actually. I really hate exposition and explanations in movies, but I knew we’d have to have some of that in this flick, and I really wanted our solution to the mystery to have that same effect as Scooby’s head going around. So come to think of it, that episode was actually a huge influence.

So how important was it for you to deliver a movie that was more horror than Scooby-Doo-like comedy?

Spencer Parsons: The single most important thing to me. Even though this is technically my first horror film, and I guess you could say I’ve done more comedic work in the past—if not quite all-out comedy—I’ve wanted to make horror films for a really long time. So I had all this pent-up energy for it, and I wasn’t that interested in leaning on the comedy stuff that we all thought I might be better at. I really wanted to seize the opportunity to do straight-up horror, and we all figured that would distinguish this movie from the other Scooby ripoffs and homages.

So the premise didn’t exactly get in the way, but I admit at first I kind of hated the cartoon aspect, even though the whole pitch when (producers) Jason Wehling and Jonny Mars brought me on, was that it would be hard-R violent and gory with really dirty, ‘80s-style sex and nudity. I knew they didn’t want to do a Scary Movie-type spoof either (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but I worried that was the territory where the movie would land if I didn’t really go for the horror in a serious way. And I’d do it badly because I don’t really respond to that kind of spoofy style, so how would I possibly deliver on that for those who do?

But I came around when I realized we could pull a really big tonal shift by starting out with a story kind of inspired by a cartoon, and then by actually taking the potentially dangerous implications of it seriously, veer into full-on horror. Not into Haute Tension territory of course, but at least farther into the horror than our audience might expect. And that would be the punchline, if you will.

So it got exciting, because I prefer movies with a volatile sense of tone, and in this case, the spoof element would give license to go pretty far. But instead of recreating specific bits and gags from other movies, we could pattern the looks and moods of different parts of the movie after different horror filmmakers. You know, a little Tobe Hooper here, a little Ken Russell there, a dab of Argento, and yeah a little Hanna-Barbera. So as we kept working on it, I realized what a cool idea Jason and Jonny had, and I think in large part, they approached me to direct in the first place because they knew I’d really want to screw around with the tone, and style, so the movie would keep the audience guessing.

How much did the story/script change when you came on board? Was there anything that you really pushed to change or focus on when you came in to direct the movie?

Spencer Parsons: Well it was a pretty ideal experience as a director, because when they came to me with the idea, it was still, you know, an idea. Jason and Jonny had gotten this opportunity to make a movie so long as they could pull it together really quickly, but there wasn’t a screenplay just lying around that could be shot or even adapted to the situation. That meant we could tailor it to certain interests I have, and choose some things to do that we figured I would be good at.

But luckily, they totally supported my desire to go crazy where we could, really change things up. It’s set in the ‘90s, basically so we don’t have to deal with everyone having cell phones, but that also got us thinking about hardcore and grunge from that time, that “loud-quiet-loud” aesthetic. And the idea of making a movie that could feel like, say, a Pavement record, where you’re really put through a lot of different, nerve-jangly stuff, sometimes just within the space of one song, that was really something we were all into. And in a way, putting together the film really collaboratively in the way we did was a bit like a band jamming together on a bunch of songs to make an album.

Mixing comedy with horror is very difficult to pull off. Can you tell me about your approach to the material and balancing horror with comedy?

Spencer Parsons: Well, there is a great tradition of mixing comedy and horror that you can lean on for inspiration, but it’s definitely tricky. In terms of comedy, I guess we were particularly thinking of movies like Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) or Basket Case (1982) or Motel Hell (1980), which are funny but also genuinely creepy and can get pretty nasty. Actually the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) is to me one of the funniest movies ever made--you know, "Look what your brother did to the door!"--and in many ways, the tone of that one was my far horizon. Of course that’s not a movie that proceeds from a place that's essentially comical, so Texas Chainsaw 2(1982) is maybe closer to where we land. But you know even though that one's more openly comedy, it's also a lot gorier than the original. And I guess we follow suit.

But the big mantra I foisted on everybody on set was, "no jokes." Because I knew we just couldn't get real horror if we didn't take the story and characters seriously. And because we used a lot of improvisation, we could also end up with a lot of unfunny shit if we were all reaching for jokes. Any standup or comedy writer can tell you about the really tough business of joke construction, so in the kind of fast and loose, improvisational situation we were in, we needed to focus on the bigger picture of how the story would zig and zag, and how much information we could give the audience along the way to keep things surprising.

And we needed everybody to stay really grounded. Not real for real's sake because God knows this isn't realism, but focused on believing the situation on its own terms. I generally find that’s better for both comedy and horror anyway.

You mention improvisation. Did anything major make it on screen from cast improvisation or feedback? How did you work with the actors?

Spencer Parsons: Yeah, basically 90% of the dialogue was invented by the cast, and they definitely each did a lot to develop their own characters, which was maybe easier because they had the cartoon character templates as a point of departure. We used improv a lot, but I don’t want to give the wrong idea, because after a rehearsal and maybe the first couple takes, we’d lock in the elements that really seemed to work best and that kept things moving, so it would become scripted. And the screenwriters were always on set to help shape that. I guess there were a couple scenes done at the end of 20 hour days when everyone was so tired that nobody could remember what they had done or said before, and every take was completely different. That gave a certain punch-drunk quality that was exciting, but also made those scenes really hard to edit.

But there were definitely times when the cast would just surprise us by hauling off and slapping somebody or coughing up a bit of entirely new backstory for the first time during a take. Some of that didn’t work and got cut, but some of it made it in. And I like it, because it gets at how when people are thrown into bad situations, all this surprising interpersonal crap just gets squeezed out under adversity.

In my experience of life, only sometimes do people go around subtly hinting at inner conflicts just about to surface, and they almost never offer perfectly-timed backstories, the way they tend to do most of the time in movies. Instead, people reveal surprising and shocking things about themselves under duress or trauma or when they’re really drunk or drugged. And that can be an interesting dramatic problem or source for comedy or suspense. Again, we weren’t doing realism, but this was an opportunity to focus on that quality of human behavior in a way that I think we might not have if we’d had the time to write it more traditionally, where you tend to make it all work more rationally.

But as a genre, horror is really good at dealing with people’s irrationality and the drama that creates. That’s one of the things I love about the old grindhouse and drive-in pictures. Partly because of the conditions they were made under, they’re a lot rougher and less rationalized in their characterizations, and sometimes they’re surprising in how much more artful and observant they can be about human behavior. That’s a big reason I don’t really watch those films for the whole “so bad it’s good” vibe. Sure there might be a lot of elements that are just laughably bad or inept, but you can also find stuff in them that’s truer to life or more aesthetically charged than anything in a heap of art films and Oscar winners. This was a good opportunity to deliberately explore that (or just embrace it), and in a way, the experience of making the movie on such a short schedule, making up dialogue and behavior on the fly, was so intense and disorienting for the actors that it actually created that kind of fraught experience for them off camera as well as on.

So how long did you have to shoot, and where did filming take place?

Spencer Parsons: We shot it in just 10 1/2 days. That is definitely the fastest I've ever shot anything. Indie movie schedules are tight, but my previous feature really felt lavish compared to this. It taught me some new tricks for sure. And it allowed us to get some really great technicians to work on the film who couldn’t have afforded more time to work for points or deferments instead of pay up front. Weirdly, it helped us get a better, more seasoned crew.

One thing that was really wild was having multiple units shooting at the same time. We'd be shooting a scene downstairs with a couple actors while upstairs another unit would be getting shots with another actor for a chase sequence, and then there'd be another unit with the big jib arm getting establishing shots outside.

Of course it helped that we shot mostly in the big mansion location. That had its own challenges since we needed it to feel really isolated, but it’s pretty central in Austin (TX), right across the street from a major shopping center with a big grocery store and a 24hour gym. So it wasn't exactly quiet, and we had to be careful about shots that include the sky because that orange-y sodium vapor light would give away how close we were to downtown.

Were you happy with how that turned out?

Spencer Parsons: Yeah, it’s pretty cool because it’s not exactly the kind of movie I’d do if left to my own devices. But it’s really freeing and fun to do something I wouldn’t have come up with, and that maybe nobody involved would or could have done without everyone else. When I was able to just watch it as an audience for the first time, when we were in the final stages of sound mixing, it hit me as a pretty strange, jagged experience. It was weirder than I’d realized when I was just in it. That was surprising even to me, which made me really proud of it, and proud of everyone’s work on it, because at that point, I’m the last person who should be surprised. I figure some people will find that too out-of-control and really hate it, but you know, fuck ‘em, because for the people who like it, it’s a more singular experience. And when you’re one of the little guys, that’s the most important thing you can even try to offer.

With Saturday Morning Mystery hitting theaters, VOD, and DVD, are you already moving forward on your next project? What can you tell our readers about it?

Spencer Parsons: I’m currently working on a film loosely inspired by a pretty nightmarish crime from a few years ago, with amnesia and body mutilation and a really psychotic femme fatale. I guess it lands about where Noir meets up with horror, and I’m calling it Bite Radius.

I’m also prepping to do a section of an anthology flick called You Scream I Scream, with some great folks like Eduardo Sanchez and Huck Botko and Jack Perez attached to direct segments. It’s a script Aaron Leggett and I cooked up about a workplace invasion that I’m really excited to do. And there’ll be some segments by great directors like Kris Swanberg and Frank Ross and Stephen Cone, who haven’t done horror before, but I think they’re gonna tear it up. Stephen just finished a kickass feature called Black Box that’s kind of inspired by VC Andrews (Flowers in the Attic) novels, and it’s just hitting the festival circuit. People should check it out.

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Saturday Morning Mystery was directed by Spencer Parsons and stars Josephine Decker, Paul Gordon, Jonny Mars, Ashley Spillers and Adam Tate. The movie is now available on VOD and DVD.

"Four professional ghost hunters, who travel in a vintage van accompanied by their canine companion (sound familiar?), get far more than they bargained for when they investigate an abandoned schoolhouse with a mysterious past."