Interview with TALES OF HALLOWEEN’s Darren Lynn Bousman

To celebrate the recent release of the horror anthology Tales of Halloween (now available on iTunes and all VOD platforms), Daily Dead spoke to the filmmakers behind the movie to discuss the project, their individual contributions and more.

Darren Lynn Bousman exploded onto the horror scene in 2005, taking over the Saw franchise with Saw II and turning the series into a household name at the helm of the first three sequels. He has since balanced studio projects with fiercely independent, more personal cult films like Repo! The Genetic Opera and The Devil’s Carnival. His contribution to Tales of Halloween, “The Night Billy Raised Hell,” stars Barry Bostwick as Satan pulling a series of dark pranks on Halloween night. It’s the lightest thing Bousman has made yet, and also the funniest.

While there has been comedy in some of the other films you’ve made, “The Night Billy Raised Hell” feels like the most overtly comic thing you’ve ever done.

Darren Lynn Bousman: A lot of people don’t know this about me, but I started in theater. That was the very first thing I did. After theater I got involved in improv and I was in a bunch of improv comedy troupes. One of my original goals in coming to Los Angeles was that I wanted to be a comedy writer. At that time, I had aspirations of wanting to be on Saturday Night Live as a staff writer. It’s funny—a lot of people don’t know this—but one of my very first jobs was as a comedy booking agent. I would go to nightclubs and I would watch comedy acts and try to find comedic acts for my agent. So, for maybe a year straight that was my job—I’d go to different comedy stores and watch people I thought were funny and I’d bring them in to my agent. Comedy has always been something I’m fascinated with.

I feel like there are a lot of similarities between structuring a scare and structuring a joke. It’s all about timing in the editing. 

Darren Lynn Bousman: Yeah, it’s timing, set-up and payoff. Absolutely. I don’t know which is harder. In horror, it’s easy to gross somebody out. It’s easy to make someone squeamish. But to get someone to actually giggle or smile or laugh, that’s a harder thing in my opinion. That’s why I’m constantly trying to challenge myself. If you go back to Repo! or Devil’s Carnival, it’s campy as hell. I mean, it’s all kinds of camp. That camp just makes me happy.

As I’ve gotten older my sensibilities have changed. Being a father now has really changed me, where I’m looking for more escapism. I used to want to escape into dark, macabre movies. Now I kind of want to escape into something more comedic and fun.

How did the casting of Barry Bostwick as the Devil come to you?

Darren Lynn Bousman: I’ve had a bunch of run-ins with Barry over the last year or two. First, I was a producer on one of Spooky Dan [Walker]’s movies called Slay Belles. It started with that. After that, I cast him in The Devil’s Carnival 2. The guy is a goddamn national treasure. We just clicked. There are certain actors you just click with, and Barry is one of them. I just said, “You’re awesome and I want to put you in everything I do.” We’re actually already talking about a new collaboration with the same writer, Clint Sears, who wrote “The Night Billy Raised Hell.”

Yours is the only segment in the film that’s not also written by the director. How did Clint Sears get to be involved?

Darren Lynn Bousman: [Tales of Halloween] came at a time when I was slammed. I did two movies last year—Abattoir and Devil’s Carnival [2]. I was literally home ten days from the time I was filming Abattoir until I was filming my segment. I did not have time. On top of that, my wife was eight and a half months pregnant and was going to give birth any day. I did not have any time to write my segment, and I had just sold a script earlier that year with Clint. So I said, “Clint, we’ve got to write something. It’s got to be crazy, it’s got to be zany, it’s got to be over the top.” Clint’s a friend of mine from middle school. We’ve known each other for 20 years. He’s someone I trust implicitly, so it was a very easy thing to go to him and say, “Hey, please help me out with this.”

There’s a thread that runs through the movie—and I’m guessing it’s unintentional, since everyone wrote their pieces separatel—that deals with fear of children. As someone who is now a parent, was that something you wanted to work into “The Night Billy Raised Hell”?

Darren Lynn Bousman: For me, my whole life has shifted. Everything has shifted having my son, and I look at kids differently now. I also think different things scare different people. Time constantly changes, so one year I might be scared by serial killers, the next year I’m scared by ghosts, the next year I’m scared by something else. Now it’s a fear of children—not that a child is going to come and stab me like they do in Adam Gierasch’s [segment]. I’m scared of screwing up. I’m scared of fucking up. I wanted to take that fear and expound it into something more grotesque. All good horror film is about whatever’s going on in your life at the time. Ryan Schifrin, who wrote “The Ransom of Rusty Rex,” just had a kid the same year we did.

I also think kids are terrifying in the way that they’re so innocent and cute, yet they’re still capable of evil… or “what if?” they’re capable of evil. That’s an interesting topic.

How did the Adrienne Curry cameo come about?

Darren Lynn Bousman: I wanted the characters to carjack somebody funny. It had to be somebody our fans would know; it would have to be somebody who was in on the joke. Originally we had a few ideas, either Slash or David Hasselhoff. But I wanted a girl; I wanted to put somebody sexy in there. We found out that one of our friends was good friends with Adrienne Curry, and she was such a great sport. She loves to make fun of herself and have fun at her own expense. She was fantastic.

What makes a great horror anthology? 

Darren Lynn Bousman: A couple of things. You’ve got to try to do something new. You can’t regurgitate the same things you’ve seen a thousand times over. There needs to be some control. In this case, we all had creative control to do whatever we wanted, but that being said, we still had Axelle (Carolyn) and Mike Mendez and Epic Pictures looking over us to make sure we didn’t go so far off that it wouldn’t fit in. A lot of times you watch these anthologies and there are two great segments and two really bad ones. Part of that is because people do these anthologies and have the freedom to go off and make a movie and aren’t relegated to be under the thumb of somebody. We didn’t have that.

That said, we did have constant eyes on our project to make sure we weren’t straying so far off. I think that’s important.

What’s your favorite segment from any horror anthology?

Darren Lynn Bousman: There are two, actually. One, I think it was Creepshow 2—“The Raft,” where the people went swimming out to the raft and there was that oil slick that pulled them through. That one was great.

The other, and it’s not a horror anthology per se, it was a Tales from the Darkside TV show episode, which was Tom Savini’s episode about a monster in a closet. What I love about them is that they help me discover new filmmakers that I’m not aware of. I watch anthologies and I’m like, “Oh, shit, I’ve got to look at this director. Who’s this? Tom Savini?” And then I go and research Tom Savini. Or I look at something in a Creepshow or a Tales from the Darkside and I say, “Who’s this? George Romero? What’s George Romero done?” That’s what’s great about these: they’re bite-size introductions into different genres of horror and different filmmakers of the horror genre.

Tales of Halloween is now playing in theaters and on VOD from Epic Pictures Productions.