Interview with TALES OF HALLOWEEN’s Mike Mendez

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.

Mike Mendez is best known as the director of films like The Convent, The Gravedancers, Big Ass Spider! and, most recently, the horror comedy Lavalantula for Syfy. He’s both a producer and a director on Tales of Halloween, contributing the ’80s slasher-inspired “Friday the 31st.”

This project started with you and Axelle Carolyn, right?

Mike Mendez: It’s Axelle’s concept and she’s the one who got the ball rolling. She told a few of us about it, and I brought in Epic Pictures and got it financed. From that point on, it’s been Axelle’s and my burden to bear, for better or worse. A very fun burden to bear.

Was it a case of, “Hey, we’re all friends, we’re all filmmakers, why don’t we all make something together?”

Mike Mendez: It really was. There have been a lot of horror anthologies as of late; movies like V/H/S and The ABCs of Death have brought the anthology back in style. We sort of felt like, “Why don’t we do one and do our own thing?” Really, it was just the fact that everyone was willing to do it. That was the final factor. You know it’s going to be difficult because you’re working with friends, but at the same it’s like, well, they’re your friends and everybody’s cool, so even if there are rough spots we’ll get through it. And I’m happy to say we did.

Was the decision made early on to not shoot it in the style where everyone goes off and makes his or her own thing, but instead to do it as one continuous shoot with everyone rotating in and out?

Mike Mendez: Yeah, we talked to a lot of filmmakers who had worked on other anthologies and we looked at every anthology, and we wanted to just find a different way. And being that unity was what the whole spirit of the project was—unity and friendship and community—we felt that if we did the whole thing together, shot it together and developed it together, and really made it a group effort from the get-go and shot it in one block using the same equipment and the same camera and the same lenses, that we would find more of a uniformity than another anthology might.

How do you figure out how it all gets spaced out, time-wise? Does everyone get the same two-day schedule?

Mike Mendez: Pretty much. There were a few exceptions that had do with some stories being slightly larger than others, but that was the challenge. You have two days to do it. And let me tell you as someone who went through it, it’s very difficult. When you do a feature—and I’m used to doing low-budget features, which don’t have a lot of days—but even if you’re doing something in 15 or 18 days, if you fall behind you still have 13 or 15 other days to catch up. But if you only have two days, you are down to the bone. If you don’t get it, it’s not in the movie. It’s a challenge. In some ways, that’s another thing that brought us closer together—we all had to go through it. It’s a trial by fire.

So are there any changes made on the day? Not because of time, but because someone throws out a new suggestion or idea on set?

Mike Mendez: The collaboration part is kind of lessened as you go. That collaboration happens more in the beginning, when you’re kind of kicking around ideas or writing your script. We’d share the scripts and feedback was encouraged. But once the script was approved, it was a balance. I mean, you want community and you want togetherness, but at the same time…

You don’t want 11 people directing the same movie.

Mike Mendez: Absolutely. You want individuality. You want individual voices. You want to let people do their thing.

Was Halloween always a part of the movie? Or was it more a case of, “We want to make an anthology, what should the hook be? How about Halloween?”

Mike Mendez: I think it’s more the latter. As horror fanatics, we all love Halloween, so we thought, “Well, that’s easy. We can do that.” That seemed like a logical step.

Your segment, “Friday the 31st,” seems to draw from a number of different influences. Did you want to include a little of all the things you love?

Mike Mendez: I tell people it’s a look inside my subconscious. It’s all the things I love exploding on the screen at once. But really the history of my short is that it was actually the opening of a film I wanted to do and I could never get the film made because people thought it was too weird. So I was kind of like, “Goddammit, no, I really believe in this.” I had been given the gift, this rare opportunity, of pure creative filmmaker freedom. And I just wasn’t going to squander that. I was going to put in every weird obsession I have onscreen all at once.

Did you know from the beginning that you wanted to achieve a certain effect through stop motion?

Mike Mendez: The seed of the idea came from seeing a 1970s movie called The Day Time Ended, and there’s a little stop motion [creature] in that. That really was the seed of where the idea came from. So it was always in my mind and I’ve wanted to make it for something like 15 years, and it always in my mind had to be done that way. It just had to be.

As the movie is coming together in the editing room, how did you decide the order of all the shorts?

Mike Mendez: We had an order in mind, and then for whatever reason—when you put them together, they just don’t feel right—we had to change it. In a very rough sense, the basic order was always in mind: Neil [Marshall]’s always ended it, the others toward the end always played there. It was just figuring out how to start it. Dave Parker’s episode, “Sweet Tooth,” felt like it encompassed the right spirit of the entire film. So we knew if we started from there, then how does that affect everything else? So we’d kind of mix and match.

And was there any talk or any attempt at including a wraparound story?

Mike Mendez: There were a few attempts, to be honest. We shot more stuff with Adrienne Barbeau. It was her at the radio station, but at least for me (I was involved with assembling it when it was all together), it felt more like a TV show. It just gave it a television quality, going back to the radio station, and then having a caller, and then going to a story. It didn’t feel right. I love Adrienne and in some ways I wish there was more of her, but it just didn’t quite work for everybody.

I love the Adrienne Barbeau stuff because it lets us know as horror fans that we are in the presence of people who love horror the way we do. It tells us we are in such good hands right off the bat.

Mike Mendez: That’s the thing that’s kind of funny about the movie—and it seems to be working out so far, so I hope it continues—is that we never really thought about the audience that isn’t horror fans. At least for me, it honestly never even occurred to me. I don’t know why. We knew who the audience for this movie was, and it was hardcore horror fans like ourselves. We never really thought outside that bubble. So I’m super happy to hear that people feel that way and just get it.

What do you think makes a great horror anthology?

Mike Mendez: The ones that really work, in my opinion, are the classics like Creepshow and, more recently, Mike Dougherty’s Trick ’r Treat, which we’re all big fans of. Those work really great because they’re more unified visions. Now we’re in a phase where we’re having a different type of anthology, which is the multi-director anthology. That has a lot of wonderful possibilities, but there are a lot of issues that can come with it and one of them is uniformity—they feel so different that they take you out of the general flow. But if you can hopefully find a certain rhythm to it that all plays together and gels and you can create this tapestry that’s one unique “world,” I think that’s really wonderful and kind of rare.

Also, not having weak links. That was a really important mission for us on our film. We really tried to hold a standard, because we’re only as strong as our weakest link.

What’s your favorite segment from any horror anthology?

Mike Mendez: My gut reaction… and it’s funny, because I’ve even had people that worked on Tales of Halloween that hate this segment, is “They’re Creeping Up on You” from Creepshow. I love that one.

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