Hey folks, Harry here.... If you get a chance to see AMERICAN NIGHTMARE... and you have a chance on IFC (Independent Film Channel) or at various Film Festivals, then you are probably aware of quite an interesting documentary that interviews and discusses the root of nightmares and visions of Horror Filmmakers.... and why they are not the 'modern' degenerators of the human male psyche spawning masses of blood thirsty monsters with butcher knives and axes slaughtering adults by the thousands a day. It's quite a good documentary... and this Adam Simon has his shit together in regards to Horror films and the reflection of reality they serve in a theater near you and me....
Adam Simon Interview – Horror Films Save America!
Adam Simon is the director of the recent documentary the American Nightmare, as well as non-docs Brain Dead (a personal fave mindfuck flick of mine) and Carnosaur. I sat down for a chat with him during the Toronto International Film Festival, after we had escaped from the snooty lounge at the Intercontinental. Finally arriving at a coffee shop, Adam had a bagel and coffee; I stuck to some cranberry-infused concoction.
Sirius: How did you end up getting involved with this project?
Simon: Jonathan Sehring, who is the exceedingly cool man at the Independent Film Channel and executive produced my film on Sam Fuller (The Typewriter, The Rifle and the Movie Camera), both he and I just jokingly talked a lot about horror movies because he runs a supposedly serious, high art-type movie channel, but he loves all movies, as do I. And he’d wanted to do a film on the American horror film for a while, and then it was just that the timing worked out- I was free to do it, and I was able to say "I will do it." He’d wanted me to do it earlier but I hadn’t been able to do it, then I didn’t want to do another documentary, even though I loved the topic. Finally I said, "Well, OK, if I can do it exactly the way I want to do it." Not at all a conventional history, not at all a making of, not at all a puff piece on horror movies or anything like that. Basically I made a list of crazed and outrageous demands, assuming that they’d then leave me alone and go away, and instead they said yes. And thus the film.
Sirius: Isn’t that always the way?
(Here we are interrupted by the arrival of the bagel.)
Sirius: How did the various analyses come about? Was this a case of you talking to the academic folk and building the film around that, or did you already have a specific idea in mind?
Simon: A combination of the two. On the one hand, I myself am cursed with being a little academically-minded, which is not always a handy thing in Hollywood, more of a handicap in fact. I’d actually read Adam Lowenstein’s dissertation- a friend of his that I knew had sent it to me, knowing that I was interested in horror films and the ideas behind them. Carol Clover’s book I had read, Men Women and Chainsaws, which is such a cool book, so insightful. And Tom Gunning is a god to me. A chubby god, but he’s a god. He’s a brilliant, brilliant man that not a lot of people have heard of because he hasn’t written many books, just a lot of essays that are very influential. He’s sort of quietly been this really influential guy for a long time, really changed a lot about people’s understanding of the history of film. I’ve known him for years. But I had a really specific thesis. It wasn’t particularly original, I didn’t make it up. Other people have noticed it, that there was this relationship between these particular horror movies and the events of their time. For me, the film’s genesis was a combination of two things. I have this theory about… three things! Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! There were three things, at least for the moment- an idea about these films and the times they were made in, and how they were related; secondly, a desire to look at, in an indirect way, the very question of why we need horror movies, and by we I mean those of us as individuals who watch them and like them and make them, and then society as a whole. They’re hard to explain- it’s easy to explain comedies. It’s easy to explain love stories, or art which is basically wish fulfillment. It’s awfully hard to explain… even Aristotle had trouble with it, explaining tragedy, because basically the horror film is a form of tragedy, and the question is why? Why go have a miserable experience? Why do we want that? That has always been an interesting question to me. And finally there was a personal component, because the project connected to a part of my childhood. This film covers ten years, the ten years in which I went from being six to sixteen, in which I myself got fully caught up in watching horror movies and in which the desire to become a filmmaker was born. It became in a funny way kind of an autobiography. There’s a part of the film… to me it’s important, and some of your readers might get some sort of insight from this, but anyway you’ll notice at the end of the film there’s a dedication to my father, who died while I was finishing the film- in fact the film got delayed for several months because of that, because I went to be with him for the last two months of his life- and the film is really imbued with his dying. The film begins and ends in a cemetery and is also about the death of a lot of things, including him, but also the death of a lot of the dreams associated with that period. My father was a very, very political man, he was very involved with the left in the U.S. going back to the 1940s, and had been very involved in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement as had my mother, who is still living. So it was also about this child being raised by these crazed Trotskyists, being dragged off to demonstrations, and at the same time dragging myself off to horror movies, maybe to try and understand some of the insanity I was otherwise seeing. So I hope it’s a good film that, in its completely incoherent way, embodies all those things.
Sirius: Actually that does make sense. From the way you selected which films and in what order you were talking about them there was a progression from Night of the Living Dead, which isn’t a hopeful film by any means but does have messages in it which are more overtly political, as you yourself said in American Nightmare, through to Hallowe’en, which is, well…
Simon: The counter-revolution.
Sirius: Exactly.
Simon: I don’t want to slag Carpenter in the least because he’s a cool guy and he’s made some fantastic films, especially the Thing. I’ll gratuitously plug the Thing here, which is the most under-rated film of all time.
Sirius: The Thing cannot have enough said about it.
Simon: Absolutely. I think I may end up doing an artificial sequel to this, maybe next year, on science films, in which I’ll do a lot with the Thing, because it’s such a stunning movie. So Carpenter’s cool. He’s great, he’s made interesting films, he’s a really talented filmmaker. But there is sense with Hallowe’en that the film ended something. I don’t think John intended that, and of course it was a huge success. But like all changes at pivotal moments in history, when you kill something you give birth to something else. What it gave birth to I’m not as connected to emotionally. It gave birth to the slasher film. Now there is a generation which grew up with those films, and Carol’s book for example, Men Women and Chainsaws, is very much about those films and made me think of them as being more interesting than I had previously thought. They never did it for me, though. They seemed to me to reduce a whole world of imagination to something very, very narrow. So yes, (Nightmare) is about… I don’t want to make it sound too depressing, but in a sense it’s about the death of an era, of a short-lived period when anything seemed possible.
Sirius: But in a lot of ways that also reflects just the state of the film industry in general. I mean, for a lot of people the ‘70s were considered the last great period of American filmmaking.
Simon: Until now! What I want to say, especially to people that read this, what they need to know is that I’m not just another early middle-aged guy saying, "Oh yeah, the late ‘60s and early ‘70s were great and everything has sucked since then." I’m not saying that. What I am saying is that we’ve come full circle, and we are coming back to a moment where this kind of thing is possible again. It’s not a coincidence that there’s a younger generation now that’s actually really interested in that period, for who those films are like the horror films of the ‘30s and ‘40s were to me as a kid, and are being inspired by those films, and that there’s maybe a kind of reawakening of young people politically too, so that you get things like Seattle.
Sirius: Actually, I’ve been thinking for the last couple of days that now would be the perfect time for a Soylent Green remake.
Simon: (laughing) Any time’s a good time for a Soylent Green remake! But it’s a good time for people, young people, to be reminded of how insane these films were, and also the times and how busy they were, just how radical the shit that was happening was, how insane it was to turn on the TV and every single day see body bags. How insane it was to have every interesting political leader gunned down right in front of you within a year! Americans today would just go out of their minds if suddenly –wham! wham! wham!
Sirius: Mind you, there are no political leaders today that anybody cares about.
Simon: That’s right. So obviously it worked- they shot ‘em and got rid of them all. And how crazy it was to have these protests going on so constantly in which the cops and the National Guard were shooting and pummeling students, where white sheriffs and shop owners were beating passively resisting black protesters. So it’s a sneaky way of bringing all that really important history back via these horror movies, because the horror movies are such a cool window onto that.
Sirius: As you said yourself at the Q&A, once you make that connection in your head, as with Night of the Living Dead for example, there’s just no way to avoid seeing it. It’s so obvious once the connection is made.
Simon: I think that’s the nature of things. You have to work hard to make a movie and not have it reflect its times. But the thing is, that’s generally precisely the problem with Hollywood, that it works very hard to divorce everything it makes from reality. That’s Hollywood’s job- it is the Dream Factory, in general. That’s why this is the American Nightmare, not the American Dream, because movies are dreams, and generally, good dreams. And that’s nice, that’s what people need most of the time. But they need nightmares too. Your brain needs nightmares, otherwise it wouldn’t give them to you. And the culture needs nightmares, otherwise people like me wouldn’t make them. People complain about it, and they worry about it. And they worry that, "Oh my God, these movies are making kids grab guns and shoot people!" and all kinds of nonsense. But maybe it’s not. Maybe if we didn’t have horror movies way more kids would be going nuts and shooting people.
Sirius: I’m going to lead off with that. That’s’ going to be the big banner headline- "Horror Films Save America!"
Simon: Exactly!
Sirius: One thing I did want to ask you, about this film and other parallels in horror, not just in films but in literature too, is that this film is very nearly a contemporary portrait. For the most part it takes mainstream society so long to catch up to horror. Just now we’re getting films like Gods and Monsters, and Shadow of the Vampire, that treat the old ‘30s monsters with that reverence…
Simon: Right, so maybe in 30 years we’ll get something like that about…
Sirius: Michael Myers!
Simon: Yeah, it’s certainly true. Something that’s fascinating to me is how one generation touches another. Those guys that made those movies in the ‘30s and ‘40s, they made movies that then were seen by people who were kids at the time, but even more so by people who were kids when they came back via TV. Those kids then made a different kind of horror movie, because they took what they saw and the life that they led, and put the two together and made a new kind of horror movie, which are the movies I’m talking about. The next generation- me, guys like Sam Raimi, younger guys who are now, say, 35 to 42-
Sirius: Oh my Goddess!
Simon: -watched those movies and made their own. And now we have the generation who grew up watching everything from Evil Dead to the Scream movies…
Sirius: I just had the most amazing thought about Blair Witch. Here you have a film where the protagonists are menaced by these unseen forces that they have no control over, they can’t relate to them, or deal with them or communicate with them, nothing, and that so sums up the feeling of the ‘Seattle Generation’, those kids out protesting.
Simon: That’s so right. I think people have so missed the boat in understanding Blair Witch. I think it was a terrific film.
Sirius: Oh yeah!
Sirius: A lot of people… I mean, obviously it did extremely well, but there was this backlash against it…
Sirius: Well, the hype was just so insane, that once the wave crested, that was it. Nothing could live up to that.
Simon: I think you’re right, though, that it’s a clue. It’s a clue that people didn’t pay attention to, because ‘grown-ups’, as it were, in general are thinking, "My God, things are better than ever. I own an SUV and a big house." And there’s a great sense supposedly of prosperity and plentitude. But clearly there’s something uneasy underneath that, especially among young people. Thus, the intense attraction to a film like Blair Witch, a film that works with that. And it shows that it’s not necessarily overtly bad or difficult times that this happens in. Traditionally you think, "Oh, it’s the 1930s, the Depression; the ‘50s, the Bomb; and the late ‘60s and ‘70s, the war." Clearly it’s a more internal thing that creates this demand in each successive generation.
Sirius: Speaking of the ‘60s, that opening montage in Nightmare was fabulous.
Simon: Thank you!
Sirius: How long did it take you just to put together the newsreel footage?
Simon: Well, finding it wasn’t hard, it was getting permission to use it that was difficult.
Sirius: Just because of the context in which it would be used?
Simon: In some cases. Some stuff, for example, the execution of the North Vietnamese guy by the policeman (the famous shot-in-the-head image), NBC owns that. They’re likely just nervous about these things being cheapened or overused.
Sirius: Well, that one’s on t-shirts. I’m not sure how much more you could cheapen it.
Simon: Yeah, but that’s just photos. You can get the photo, but the actual filmed images you can’t. And I can guarantee you those t-shirts weren’t made with their permission. In a movie you can’t do that. Much as I would love to be able to say, "Let’s just use it!" you can’t.
Sirius: Well, you could, but then no TV, no theatrical…
Simon: My producers might not like that. That was the first thing I conceived of, was that opening montage. That was the image I had in my head. But I’ve tried to do that… it’s kind of the same thing I did with the Sam Fuller film, where I started with an image in my mind that represented the whole movie. In this case it was just this insane montage of all these most violent moments.
Sirius: The great thing about it, though, is that by the end of it you’re losing track of what came from a horror film and what was real life.
Simon: Exactly. I just mixed them up so that you can’t tell.
(Adam’s phone rings. His PR ‘handler’ is looking for him.)
Simon: …so we should head back? OK. (hanging up the phone) Now we’re in trouble!
Sirius: Damn. We didn’t get to talk about Tom (Savini).
Simon: We can talk as we walk.
Sirius: Sure.
(We leave the coffee shop and spill out onto Bloor St.)
Sirius: I’ve talked to a few people that were at the screening, and we all agreed that was the most fascinating part of the film. And you made the point at the Q&A, that Tom is maybe not THE most influential person in film, but…
Simon: There is a huge influence there, absolutely. That’s my favorite part of the film, and also in a way the part I’m most proud of. And I’m proud of Tom for opening up to it, and talking about it as openly and bravely as he did. And there was this excitement as we were doing it… obviously Tom was aware already of a relationship between his experiences in Vietnam and his work, but there was this excitement because you could see him coming to some new understandings as he was talking about it, he was making a new kind of connection.
(An ambulance wails by.)
Simon (continuing): You cannot overstate his importance. Bottom line is he changed the way people die on-screen. Nobody will ever again die in that grand, romantic way they used to. He took the romanticism out of it and brought the reality to it. As I said in the Q&A, even in movies like Wild Bunch or Bonnie and Clyde, which were thought to be the movies that kind of broke through those barriers, they’re still fairly romanticized. They’re slow motion, almost like ballet. Not in Tom’s work!
Sirius: But that, too, has almost come full circle with the Hong Kong, John Woo style of filmmaking…
Here we reach the hotel, and Adam is pounced on immediately in the lobby by the charming lass from the PR company, causing the interview to end like the future transmission in Prince of Darkness, fading into static.
