We all know the truth about anthology films, especially horror anthology collections—we’re lucky if even half of the shorts are in any way enjoyable. Usually the way it breaks down is: one-third is good-to-great; one-third is okay; and one-third is garbage—and that goes for anthologies with four or four chapters or ones with 26. In the case of the recently released TALES OF HALLOWEEN, there are 10 segments from 11 different directors (one of the shorts is done by a directing pair), and with no exaggeration, nearly every one of the pieces works. In fact, in giving an honest assessment of the 90-minute scarefest, there was only one segment I thought completely bombed. The others were either scary as hell, funny, gory, or a healthy combination of all three.
Among the participating filmmakers are Darren Lynn Bousman (three SAW movies and REPO: THE GENETIC OPERA); Neil Marshall (THE DESCENT); Lucky McKee (MAY, THE WOMAN); Adam Gierasch (FRACTURED); Paul Solet (GRACE); and many more. Spearheading the project were two other contributing directors, Axelle Carolyn (SOULMATE) and Mike Mendez (BIG ASS SPIDER!, and Syfy’s recent LAVALANTULA), who essentially contacted their filmmaking pals and folks they tend to spend their Halloweens with anyway, and collectively got these shorts made using many of the same crew members for different segments, allowing actors in one short to pop up (as the same character) in another short, and just generally make it possible to make 10 short films on a limited budget in a fairly short amount of time.
The result is one of the best anthology pieces I’ve seen in ages, and if it’s playing near you, check it out with a receptive crowd. Or gather a group at your house and watch it on VOD. However you consume this particular bit of icky fun, make sure it’s with an audience. I sat down with Mendez and Carolyn in August during the Bruce Campbell Horror Film Festival in Chicago, where TALES OF HALLOWEEN made its U.S. premiere to talk about the movie from inception to the unveiling of it before an audience. We were hard pressed to find an available empty room in the convention center of Wizard World, where the Film Festival was taking place, so we just found a quiet corner in a hallway and plopped down on the floor. It was actually kind of fun. Please enjoy my talk with directors-producers Mike Mendez and Axelle Carolyn…
Capone: If you are able to do this again and make a second volume, would you want to try to get the same people?
Mike Mendez: Good question. It’s probably too early.
Axelle Carolyn: It’s a big debate already.
MM: Yeah, because in some ways, these guys got the opportunity. It’d be nice to find fresh blood. But at the same time…
AC: …we have a lot of friends who haven’t been part of it yet.
MM: Yeah. At the same time, it might be fun to get the band back together and do it again. It really depends. For me, it’s going to depend on what the demand for it is. If there’s someone that says, “This would make a great Netflix series for next Halloween,” then we might be able to get more directors. But it’s really going to depend on who wants it and how it goes out there.
Capone: At what point did you realize this was a thing? “We’re not just talking about this anymore, we’re actually moving forward.”
AC: Oh, very quickly.
MM: Pretty quickly.
AC: Well, sort of. It’s an idea that had been bouncing around for a couple of years.“We should do an anthology. Hey guys, wouldn’t it be fun to do an anthology?” But I wasn’t living in L.A. yet. Then I moved, and you know sometimes when you move, you feel like the friendships you have will change a little bit. But, no, it was like we’re definitely still having a lot of fun talking about horror movies all the time. “We really need to do something together.” The idea of using Halloween as the centerpiece came up in March sometime.
I mentioned it to Neil [Marshall, to whom Carolyn is married], I mentioned it to Mike, and they were both like, “Yeah, that sounds pretty cool.” Then I mentioned it to Adam Gierasch, and he was like, “Oh my god. This is the coolest idea. We’ve got to do this.” And Adam never talks like that, but he did that one time. So it was like, we’ve got to take this seriously. I mentioned it again to Mike, and Mike was like, “Let’s bring the guys from Epic Pictures, because he had a really great experience with them on BIG ASS SPIDER!
MM: I had a wonderful experience, and I’ve always really liked them, so it was like setting one group of friends up with another group of friends. To me, it was never a question of shopping around. It never seemed like anything where we wanted got shop around. It just seemed like a logical fit. And I knew that these guys were great, and I really liked working with them. So it would be a good fit for everybody to do the project we wanted to do. And they were wonderful to agree to it, and go for it straight off the bat.
AC: The party that I mentioned the idea to Adam at was on a Saturday or Sunday. Then you talked to Ryan Schifrin on the Wednesday. We met all together on the next Saturday, and it was like “We’re all doing this.” So, yeah, it was really freakishly quick.
MM: Then I was like, “Man, we better write a script.”
Capone: Did anybody come to the table with an idea already? Did some people have things written?
MM: Some people had scripts or ideas they always wanted to do. I definitely knew what I wanted to do pretty quickly. But it really was a mixed bag, much like the nature of an anthology. Some people came quickly, some people totally came at the last second. “Dude, where’s your story?” Then they came in with something really cool.
AC: It was interesting, because we would meet on a regular basis either at the cafe that we all hang out at, or in my backyard, or having barbecue, and just talk about stories. I would come up with something and be like, “I have this crazy idea about this robot that goes on a rampage.” And I’d see blank stares around me and I’d be like, “Okay, I’m not doing that.” So you’d know from pitching to other people…
MM: I don’t remember that pitch
AC: It was my animatronic one. No one loved it. You nerds didn’t like it. Whatever.
MM: [laughs] No, no. I don’t remember not liking that one. I thought that was cool.
AC: It just seemed like a crazy idea. But you can see straight away if you pay attention; a few of us had that. Neil pitched a story, and I can’t remember what it was, but it was like a, “Yeah, that’s cool. Okay,” and then we all knew he had to find something else. That’s a great thing is having a sounding board straight away. That was the cool thing about this.
MM: It definitely wasn’t everyone’s first instinct, that’s what you can do. We made it like, there’s freedom, but there are certain parameters that you have to stick to.
Capone: What were the parameters or restrictions, other than budget?
AC: No found-footage.
MM: No found-footage. All obviously had to be the same night, the same Halloween. I know we all aim to make a scary movie, but I think the thing was that Halloween is fun, and that fed the thing. So we wanted each part to be something that fit into the same universe. And so if you had something that was a little too out there, that didn’t quite fit into the town, that was out. What else?
AC: It was about capturing the spirit of Halloween. It really was about not trying to make some random story that took place on Halloween night, but actually making something that somehow incapsulates what Halloween is for you. And that is why you will find something that is very gory or very fun. You will find others that are just for laughs; I tried to make something creepy. All those elements are part of what a good Halloween night should be, and it really was less trying to make a scary horror movie and more “What is a Halloween night for us?” This is it.
MM: And on a technical level, it was the same camera, it was all the ARRI ALEXA, it was all 2:35. We wanted the look to be somewhat uniform. We had several DPs. We had one DP named Jan-Michael Losada, who shot Axelle’s, who shot Ryan Schifrin’s, who did like three of them. There was a certain uniformity look-wise. We felt if we had the same lens package, the same lighting package, the same camera, that that would help insure that it would all fit in one world.
AC: Also, we went through post-production together. It wasn’t something where we just gave a budget to a lot of people, and they all went in different directions. We were on set everyday. We knew what was going own. We knew this unity in the process as well. It was budgeted as one feature. In a way, that somehow means the quality will be consistent in a technical aspect, and that afterwards we have to see people doing sound and we have the same people doing color correction, so that there will be a unity.
MM: And there was a bit of quality control. There were some awkward moments when you were like, “I don’t know about that script.” Sometimes making it with your friends is difficult, but at the same time, they’re really cool, awesome people, and that’s why they’re your friends. So everyone was eventually amenable to it and eventually got into the spirit of it, and we really encouraged comments and criticism. What was really great is most people took it really well. It seemed like the more experienced people are used to notes, so there wasn’t a lot of resistance. If you heard the same note three times, maybe it’s something you might want to consider. Again, it wasn’t out of a dictatorship; it was out of community. We’re doing this together; we’re only as strong as our weakest link; please don’t fuck this up for us [laughs].
AC: It was a tough job. We compiled all the scripts. Mike would read it, Neil would read it, people would read it and send notes. People would go through me and go, “I got the same notes from everybody and I agree with this. So I’ll pass this on to the filmmaker.” And then the filmmaker would then address or not address and make choices according to that. It was an interesting process. It was both really fun and not always easy. I could see it in mine. I would pass it on to Mike, and Mike would be like, “What about…?” and then I’d incorporate part of that. And Dave Parker was like, “How about…?” And that made its way into the film also. It really helped.
MM: I hope that this is true, but if you would ask every filmmaker individually, I would think they would say the process helped make the short better. I hope that’s true. That’s how we feel about it, certainly.
Capone: I think lack of quality control from other participating filmmakers in other anthologies is part of the reason some of those didn’t turn out that great.
MM: That’s the thing. We asked ourselves, what is working about other anthologies? What is not working about other anthologies? And how can we make ours not necessarily better, but just different and have its own identity?
Capone: Were people shooting simultaneously?
MM: One after the other.
Capone: It really feels like you took over a whole town.
AC: We kind of did. There’s a little neighborhood that heavily suffered from TALES OF HALLOWEEN.
MM: It was a little town called Eagle Rock. Yeah, they’re probably not happy about all our night shooting.
AC: They were super cool, though.
MM: They were. It’s a little suburb that I grew up in called Eagle Rock, and that’s where we got all the main locations. It wasn’t all there, but 90 percent was there.
AC: There was a lot of stuff that was shot in our houses, too. There’s some exteriors of some of our houses. It was fun, because it made it feel like we had our Halloween party at Adam Gierasch’s house that year, and then two weeks later, we’re back there, and he still has the decorations hanging, and we’re filming something.
MM: It feels like we’ve celebrated Halloween for almost a year straight.
Capone: How did you decide the order? It doesn’t sound like it was predetermined.
AC: Yeah. In the script, we had good ideas as to how to organize everything. But then there’s always, you have an idea what the short film is going to be, and then once it’s made, you have a different short film. Sometimes it’s not necessarily what you thought. For whatever reasons, it seemed like that order didn’t necessarily work ideally. So we started shifting things around. It was a long process.
MM: It was about finding the right tone.
Capone: What were you looking for?
MM: Comedy versus horror.
AC: That was part of it. Other things were trying to make sure things were not repeated. There are some that have elements of SWEET TOOTH, which starts with an urban legend. GRIMM GRINNING GHOST starts with an urban legend. So we knew these two could not be together. Little things like that. Not having all the trick-or-treater segments next to each other. So there was a little bit of that. There was also a little bit of, “We want to introduce this character into the background before we actually see that.” But then there were others that were pretty obviously, like Neil’s episode, BAD SEED, was always meant to be the last one. It was a great closing episode.
Capone: Most of these directors have also done short films; some have only done short films. How is it different doing a stand-alone horror film versus something like this?
MM: I’ll say this, and this is something that I think was a very unifying thing for everybody: It’s really hard. And I do a lot of short-schedule movies—15 days, 18 days.
Capone: It’s hard doing a regular short?
MM: It’s hard doing a stand-alone short. I’m used to working on short schedules, but even when you have 15 days, 18 days, if you don’t get something, there’s always the safety net of “Maybe I can get that in the morning tomorrow. Or when we’re done with everything else, maybe I can light a corner of a set and get that piece that I’m missing. But when you have two days, there is zero room for error. If something goes wrong, you are fucked. So the pressure was something that we all shared.
And this is just my personal take, because sometimes you get asked, “What is the October Society?” And for me, what unifies us at the October Society is we all went through this together, and we all have a mad respect no matter what, no matter if it’s my favorite short or it’s my third-favorite short, I equally respect everybody, because we went through it, and I know how hard it was, and it’s way more stressful than my average shoot.
AC: If it had been my first film making experience, there’s no way on earth I would want to be a filmmaker. No way! The second day was so hard, going against the clock. Neil, who has worked on the Highlands of Scotland, who made “Game of Thrones” with the crazy battles—four features, countless TV episodes—he said this is the toughest thing he’s ever shot.
MM: It’s really stressful. And again, a lot of us have been doing this a while. It really was like “Holy shit. This is a new level of stress.”
AC: Because we’re all ambitious. Everybody’s ambitious. You want it to be something special.
MM: Because you don’t want it to suck, too. You want it to be the best it possibly can.
Capone: You don’t want to be the one that’s at the bottom of everyone’s list.
MM: That’s the thing. If you’re like, “Oh man, a special effect didn’t work, so my short’s not going to work.” That’s not an excuse. You still have to show these things.
AC: I was terrified, because my episode is basically a woman walking down the street, and I thought, “Holy shit, if this does not have the style it needs to have, it’s going to be a woman walking down the street.” There’s not a great script behind it that backs you up. It’s all about the execution. And you have two days to do this. The walking sequence was done in three hours. This is terrifying. You’re up against the clock, and if you don’t get it, you’re going to be the episode that everybody laughs about. It’s terrifying.
MM: And mine was all special effects, and that’s really time consuming, so it was like, how do I do it? I literally used every trick I knew to save time.
Capone: Yours is funny, because your alien is deliberately cheesy looking.
MM: Sure, sure. It’s stop motion. He’s made of clay.
Capone: It looks like a 10-year-old made it. It’s great. It’s exactly right, because it throws the tone completely haywire.
MM: I was going for Gumby. Funny enough, the early, early inspiration, the seed of that short, is I was working with Dave Parker at Full Moon Studios, which I think technically still exists, and we were looking through some of their old films, and there was one, THE DAY TIME ENDED, I think it’s called, and it was a really obscure movie. And there was a stop motion alien done by David Allen that was obnoxiously cute. And it was graceful and waved at everything. I was like, “Wouldn’t it be great if that was the villain of the movie? If a little asshole like that was the bad guy?”
AC: It’s like MAC AND ME.
MM: It was never a question. That’s going to be stop-motion animation. Sure, it could be done cheaper and maybe even better, but it has to be stop-motion animation.
Capone: When you were assembling your casts, was that an easy thing because people can squeeze it in between other jobs?
AC: There’s that. Yeah.
Capone: I realize the thing in horror is to cast people who have been in other horror films. You have a few people like that in here. But how do you balance that and just getting like great actors. Neil’s short has really great acting going on in it.
MM: But wanting familiar faces?
AC: And some familiar faces are great actors. Seeing Lin Shaye work was like, “Wow!” She’s so cool.
MM: There’s certain people like Adrienne Barbeau, Lin Shaye, Barry Bostwick that you just know were going to be good. There’s an amazing community in Los Angeles that I feel was so special—so special that it was worth making a movie about. It was just like, “Who do you know?” And some of the other filmmakers might not have the best contacts, but it was like, “Hey, can you ask so and so if they’d be able to help in my short?” And we’d all extend ourselves. Like Greg Grunberg and Clare Kramer, who were the stars in BIG ASS SPIDER!, reprised their roles in Dave Parker’s film.
Capone: That was exciting to see that.
MM: Yeah, totally. And Dave was kind enough to make them the same characters, but it was like well “Hey, I know these guys. They would be fun in the movie.” So I asked them to do the favor. So you know, we would just sort of help each other like that. Like Cerina [Vincent] was saying, Kristina Klebe reached out. Neil wanted her, Kristina reached out.
AC: I didn’t know that.
MM: I didn’t know that either.
AC: I remember we got in touch on Facebook.
MM: But yeah, it was really that six degrees of separation. I guess if we kept going we could have gotten Kevin Bacon in there somewhere [laughs].
Capone: The film is a metaphor for the L.A. horror scene. There’s a lot of cross pollination and people popping in and helping out. That’s what it reminds me of.
MM: We hope so. The thing is, we don’t know. I don’t know how often that’s done. I don’t know if the comedic community gets together to put on a comedy show. That’s why it was unique and really what made it really special is, no one’s really done this. It’s not like, “Man this is going to be the most profitable film.” No, let’s make a love letter to Halloween together. That was really awesome. It’s still the spirit that we were trying to get going.
AC: What we were trying to get going also was we started out casting maybe the most recognizable faces, because we were thinking, if we can tell people, people we know a little bit less, maybe, if we can approach someone like Cerina, who I had never met her. Neil hadn’t met her, either. But it was like, if we can tell her we have Kristina Klebe, if we can tell her we have Lin Shaye, it starts being that thing where you don’t want to be the one that’s left out.
MM: That was funny.
AC: It’s all about community.
MM: That’s the thing. I always felt guilty, “Oh my god, we’re not paying these people anything, and they’re coming out on their own time.” I always felt bad. Then you’d hear—because we did all these EPKs—in the interviews afterwards how thrilled they were to be there, like Alex Essoe, who stars in Axelle’s, to be surrounded by Stewart Gordon, Mick Garris, Barbara Campton, Lisa Marie, and Lin Shaye. She was just stoked. And Pat Healy said the same thing. I was like “Pat Healy’s doing well and everybody loved CHEAP THRILLS, and he’s doing us a favor out here.” But no, he was like, “I love horror. I love these guys. I love the enthusiasm.” So that was really surprising. We thought it was just us being enamored by the enthusiasm, but it was catching. People really wanted to help. And yeah, of course there were people that probably were just out of our price range that were like, “Yeah, I’ll help you for this much.” But that was really the minority.
AC: But they weren’t people we knew.
MM: Yeah, exactly.
[Producer Patrick Ewald mentions that there was one director who they really wanted to do a cameo.]
AC: Oh yes, yes. We had tired to get John Carpenter to do a cameo in Neil’s episode. It was the funniest idea. It was awesome. All he had to do was open the door and say, “Get off my lawn.” And that was it. He didn’t want to do it.
MM: [laughs] That would have been great. That would have been awesome.
AC: And that would have been great, because Neil’s episode is an homage to Carpenter, so having Carpenter go, “Get the fuck out” would have been very funny.
MM: Yeah, totally. We would have loved to have him in there.
Capone: Alright. That seems like a good place to stop. Thank you both so much.
