Interviews
[Sundance ’12] Interview: ‘John Dies at the End’ Director Don Coscarelli!
The long awaited new Don Coscarelli movie John Dies at the End (review) premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in the Park City at Midnight category.
In the adaptation from the director of Phantasm and Bubba Ho-Tep, “It’s a drug that promises an out-of-body experience with each hit. On the street they call it Soy Sauce, and users drift across time and dimensions. But some who come back are no longer human. Suddenly a silent otherworldly invasion is underway, and mankind needs a hero. What it gets instead is John and David, a pair of college dropouts who can barely hold down jobs. Can these two stop the oncoming horror in time to save humanity? No. No, they can’t.”
This film had a little help from Hollywood A-lister Paul Giamatti, who produced and plays a role in the film. He wanted to work with Coscarelli on Bubba Nosferatu, the aborted Bubba Ho-Tep sequel, so offered his services when Coscarelli read the David Wong book John Dies at the End. 
“Yeah, he wisely just said, ‘Let’s forget it. It’s too difficult. There’s too many tricky things.’” Giamatti said of ‘Nosferatu’. “He said, ‘I think I have another idea. I read this book and I’m working on a script on it and I’ll get it to you when I’m done’ and it was this movie. He sent me that and I thought it was fantastic and he seemed to think it would be easier to do than ‘Bubba Nosferatu.’”
Giamatti and Coscarelli laughed at the foolish thought that ‘John Dies’ could be an easier film. The complex story includes monsters, time travel, alternate dimensions and a drug called Soy Sauce. It is also a horror comedy, always a tricky tone.
“It’s got a lot of really strange stuff going on,” Coscarelli said. “Wwe were talking earlier about finding the right tone was probably the most absolutely difficult and frightening part of making the movie because we wanted to maintain the humor that’s in the book, but at the same time we never really wanted to go too camp so you wanted to have there be genuine threat from the characters, that they were terrified or whatever. Watching the movie last night, I think some of the most satisfying scenes to me were the way that Chase Williamson who played Dave, his bafflement as the story unfolds, he’s trying to figure out what’s going on as things just get weirder and weirder and weirder. He reacts very seriously to a lot but he does have some deadpan moments that I find really funny. He’s a really nice guy and good actors. You need to find actors like I was noticing last night that Glynn Turman who played the detective in the movie, he played it really dead ahead and he was very serious. Yet he’s got some of the funniest moments. It’s a very challenging part of making the thing.”
David Wong is the hero of the story. It is a pseudonym he uses to make himself harder to find. Williamson read the book as soon as he got the script. “I read the script and I was just like, ‘This is real?’” Williamson remembered. “It was everything I ever wanted in my life to be able to play pretend in the confines of. It was awesome because I’ve done theater my whole life and I’ve been a huge horror fan and I’ve never been able to merge acting and genre stuff because there aren’t a whole lot of horror theater pieces. Being able to do it was like oh God, super fun.”
Rob Mayes plays the title character, John, who may or may not die in the end as promised. He also became a fan of the Wong novel. “I literally got it on my iPad the day that I heard that it was a book and it has become one of my favorites,” Mayes said.
Wong’s book is filled with many outlandish monsters that Coscarelli got to put on screen. Even though they are original creations, they recall old school monsters because Coscarelli filmed them the old fashioned way.
“Coming from old school, there’s nothing like a good rubber monster,” Coscarelli said. “There’s nothing more exciting than watching a quality actor battling with a rubber prosthetic either. I’ll tell you that Johnny Depp/Tim Burton movie ‘Ed Wood’, it may be the greatest scene in movie history with Martin Landau battling that fake octopus. That’s where I come from. When I started making movies there was no digital. You had to do it with tape and paperclips. It’s always the natural way. I know too the more you can do it practically, the actors have something they can really relate to. Yeah, the power in digital is fantastic. The trick is to not overuse it. So we did a lot of a mixed collage of effects. Like the meat moving across the floor, we decided to do it all practical just with fishing line and pull the stuff and go in with digital and take out the fishing line.”
One of the film’s most memorable creatures is a meat monster who Dave and John bust early in the film. That was a guy in a suit. “It was awesome,” Williamson said. “They had to lube him up all the time. I had sausage wrapped around my neck for a while. I like the moustache bat a lot.”
The moment that brings down the house is when the meat monster takes a cell phone call. “The fellow who played the meat monster, he’s never been in a movie before,” Coscarelli said. “I don’t know if that was direction or if he did that on his own. You know, whenever anybody takes a cell phone call, they kind of turn away from the other people. It’s funny the audience response to that. It wasn’t meant to be a joke but they just love it.”
Mayes had a hard time choosing a favorite ‘John Dies’ monster. “My favorite monster in the film, can we consider perhaps Largeman a monster?” Mayes asked. “I do. Daniel Roebuck’s character who’s like, ‘We’re so happy you are here.’ He’s terrifying. Meat Monster’s super, super cool. You know actually, one of my favorite parts now that I’m thinking back to it is Angus Scrimm, when he’s like, ‘Your mother writes on a wall with her own sh**.’ That was terrifying for me.”
One of our favorite monster actors, Doug Jones, actually appears in the movie without makeup or prosthetics on. “The thing was, he was such a strange character from the book,” Coscarelli said. “In the book they had described him as wearing all kinds of funny clothes and women’s clothes. I just couldn’t see that working and I thought, ‘I need to get a really unique actor.’ One of the guys who was working on the movie, we’d talked to a couple of different people. We even talked to Jeffrey Combs but he was unavailable, because I always like his work. Then somebody said, ‘What about the guy who played Abe Sapien?’ We were just like, ‘Oh, yes!’ I met Doug and he is the absolute nicest gentleman in the world. There’s big love as he likes to say. He’s a mime and if you see him, watch how he acts, when he’s talking about that thread.”
When Dave gets injected with Soy Sauce, the supernatural world to which he’s already accustomed spirals totally out of control. Coscarelli found Wong a kindred spirit in the kind of material he wrote.
“In senses of unreality, really having it be strange and getting to stranger places,” Coscarelli said. “Yeah, absolutely but you can also see that there are similarities. I think one of the most interesting comments I got was from the book’s author, David Wong, actually it was from his wife telling me how he had grown up with ‘Phantasm’ and he actually sees ‘John Dies’ as being a parallel story. I don’t exactly get it myself but he really sees them being parallel stories. Maybe that’s why I was reading his book and going, ‘Oh, this reminds me of ‘Phantasm’ a little.’ But stranger and cooler and better in some respect.”
For the actors it was like making a different movie every day. “The funniest thing is I’d come home from work, and my roommates would be like, ‘So, how was work today? What did you shoot?’” Mayes said. “I was like, ‘Yeah, the flying moustache. Then we had to beat up Korrok. Then this girl is blown up into snakes.’ He’s like, ‘I cannot wait to see this movie because it sounds like a different movie every single day. It was crazy because it was like we’d do this scene, now we’re going to do this scene, oh my God, I totally forgot about that scene. And this scene, where does this scene fit? So making the movie you feel completely discombobulated, I did at least. I wouldn’t have been able to get through it without Don’s help but I think part of that kind of lends itself to the film. As an audience member you kind of feel as though you’re under the soy sauce effects. You’ve kind of ingested this whether you want to or not. You’re going for the trip. That’s how I felt when I was filming.”
Aside from his role as producer, Giamatti really wanted to be in a Don Coscarelli movie too. He played the role of Arnie, a man who comes to Dave for some supernatural help. It’s a small role but the only one Giamatti felt he could play. The role of magician Marconi was already taken by Clancy Brown.
“I don’t really think I would’ve been right for Marconi and I really didn’t care,” Giamatti said. “I was like this is great and I just want to be in it. I thought this’ll be fun, sure. I think he got a far better guy, the right guy for Marconi.”
Finding the leads took a lot of auditions to land on the right combination of young actors. “We both had to come in and read a bunch of times and had to kind of work for it and hope for the best,” Williamson said. “I was in 3 or 4 times I think, not counting when [Mayes] was there because I got cast before they started casting John. So I came back for the callbacks and read with some people. Before that I’d been in three or four times.”
If day to day filming was confusing, imagine auditioning with a single scene out of context. “The way that the whole process evolved was so cool because I didn’t have a script,” Mayes said. “I had one scene that didn’t make any sense to me, the scene where I was in the truck and I get electrocuted by the dog and I come back to life. I was like, ‘I don’t know what’s going on. Let’s just go for it.’ I go in the room and they’re like, ‘Do you have any questions?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah! What the f*** is going on, man? I don’t know what’s going on.’ Just do it. So we did it and it was like whatever. Then I get the script and I read the script and I’m like oh my God. Then I meet this kid and then Don. Then I hear that Paul Giamatti’s producing it and in the movie and Clancy Brown. I was stoked from day one. When I read the script I was like, ‘Whatever this is it’s going to be great.’ Then finding out these little surprises along the way.”
Coscarelli and Giamatti still hope to do a ‘Bubba’ movie together. Giamatti wants to play Col. Parker but they have to find a new Elvis.
“‘Bubba Nosferatu’ has challenges in that you need Elvis to play both young and old,” Coscarelli said. “It’s a tricky actor to play that. You’d need to find a guy in his late 30s who could play Elvis at 42 and also at like 75 which is a real challenge. When Bruce Campbell declined to participate it really threw us into disarray and we just couldn’t solve that.”
Of all the places to find a coven of witches, the attic above a Christian youth camp is probably the last place you’d think to look. But that’s just what we find in Camp, a surrealist nightmare of feminist empowerment from Canadian filmmaker Avalon Fast.
Emily (Zola Grimmer) is still reckoning with her involvement in a horrific tragedy when she accidentally contributes to the death of her best friend, Charlie (Giselle Morison). Unable to move on, the traumatized teen takes a job at a rural summer camp, hoping to forget her own sorrows by looking after at-risk kids. She quickly connects with a counselor named Clara (Alice Wordsworth) and finds comfort in her close-knit group of female friends. But a mysterious whisper from deep in the woods warns that they may be leading her down a darker path.
Fast burst onto the scene in 2022 with Honeycomb, a psychological horror film that follows a burgeoning matriarchy. Known for their focus on “Girl Horror” stories, the talented young filmmaker tackles similar themes in Camp as Emily leaves the modern world behind to embrace a dark vision of self-discovery through magic.
Ahead of the film’s U.S. release on June 26, Bloody Disgusting sat down with Fast to chat about the nebulous nature of good vs. evil and the intoxicating power of female-driven horror.
Bloody Disgusting: What inspired this unique story? Did you go to religious summer camps when you were young?
Avalon Fast: I did. I went to lots of different summer camps, but all of them were primarily Bible camps. The memory I have of camp is kind of strange. I was very homesick as a kid, and I didn’t necessarily enjoy all my time there. I definitely remember meeting some interesting girls at camp and having that presence of religion hovering around the whole experience.
BD: I really love the film’s gorgeous natural setting. Camp is the kind of surrealist nightmare that you don’t just watch. You feel it too. How did you approach creating this world?
AF: Well, a huge part of it was working with my cinematographer Eily Sprungman, who’s a very close friend. We spent years prepping, shot listing, storyboarding, and mood boarding. She’d had a similar experience to mine. We grew up around the same place, and so we understood each other’s visions from the get-go. But there are so many other pieces that came together. The costuming, the art, and the animated sequences were done by Sofiya Iurkevych. One of our producers, Taylor Nodrick, was obsessed with shooting on Super 8 film. I’ve always wanted to as well, so all the memory sequences were shot on Super 8. It was just a lot of people with an understanding and a vision for what this project was. I’m really happy with the way it turned out.
To the extent that you’re comfortable sharing, what’s your relationship to witchcraft, and what does Camp have to say about modern witches?
Well, that’s the question of Camp. It’s not that I don’t resonate with any of these things, but I specifically wanted Camp to be a little bit ambiguous around what witchcraft looks like. Is this witchcraft? Are these girls witches? Emily explicitly asks if that’s what’s happening here, and the answer isn’t yes. The film isn’t going to answer that question for you. My relationship to magic and witchcraft? It’s tough. I feel like there’s so much magic, connection, and spirituality that comes from these friendships, the closeness of these women, and what’s happening around them. A lot of what Camp is trying to say or show is just that magic can come out of friendship.
I loved watching these female friendships develop. And you’re right. No one ever says the word “coven,” but you can feel that connection, and you can see a change in Emily as those relationships grow. I’m also really fascinated with the way Camp plays with the idea of good and evil. At one point, Clara says, “Maybe God drew us to the devil,” which stopped me in my tracks. How do you view witchcraft or the magic these girls are experiencing in regard to good and evil?
That was such a huge part of the script’s construction. The story is really trying to keep a balance between those two things. I like asking people if they think these girls are good or bad, because I feel like a lot of people come out of the film thinking one or the other. They’ll say things like “thank God Emily found her people” or “God, I really wish she’d gone home.” I just don’t think there’s ever an answer. I wanted to explore the idea of going down the wrong path, especially coming out of grief. What makes you a bad person, and does healing mean you’re looking to become a better person? I don’t have an answer, but I do feel like that’s a huge part of what Camp is asking. What is good? What is bad? Why did God bring me to the devil?
Yes, because this is all happening at “God camp” in Emily’s words. So how can both of those things exist at the same time? Along those lines, I’m also fascinated by the voice Emily hears in the woods. Without spoiling too much, what is this voice asking, and what is required in return?
Emily comes to camp with a shout into the void, asking can anyone hear me? Does anyone want to? And it’s answered so clearly by these girls, specifically responding only with love, care, support, and trust. It’s like her prayers were answered. It doesn’t mean that everything is going to be alright, but Emily is looking for peace. She’s looking for a moment where she feels pure good. And I think, even at its surface level, she does get that experience.
Personally, I don’t really think people are good or bad. I think we all exist somewhere in the middle. Camp centers traditionally villainized characters, but that’s where Emily seems to find her peace, however you choose to define it.
I also wanted to show the experience of having decided that you are a bad person, you’ve made mistakes, and you feel cursed. Then when you meet other people who have done things that you would consider worse, you can actually feel good in their presence. You feel like less of a bad person. I think that’s a huge part of the story as well. Emily’s finding her version of other fucked up people, and she feels less fucked up around them. I’ve found that in my own life. It’s a cool thing. I don’t think it’s bad.
I don’t think it’s bad either. It’s finding your home, your people. We meet Emily in the aftermath of unthinkable trauma. Is this a story about mental health and healing?
Witnessing it myself. witnessing other people experience tragedy and then move through grief, you hear a lot of talk about healing or coming out the other side. There’s so much conversation around what that looks like, with self-care and showing up for yourself. I always felt really averse to it. It annoyed me. I think the beginning of the film speaks to that. The therapeutic version of what getting help looks like is obviously very different from what Camp is showing. And again, I don’t have an answer for what you’re supposed to do. But I think that’s another question I was asking: how do you heal? Do you heal at all? Is that the end goal, or are we just trying to get better? It’s something I experienced in my own grief. And the answer, for me, at least now, is just that I’m not looking to get better. So I felt like I hadn’t. I found it hard to find people to have those conversations with. And I think that’s what I ultimately wanted to make a film about.
I love that unanswered question. In my own experience, I’ve had to reframe what healing actually looks like. There’s not really an endpoint. It’s just finding a way to keep going. There’s also an element of sacrifice in this story, particularly regarding another counselor named Jo (Sophie Bawks-Smith). What role does she play in Emily’s journey?
For me, Jo is this human embodiment of Charlie, Emily’s friend. As Jo, she had a life at this camp before meeting Emily, and then was kind of taken over by Charlie’s spirit. I think a lot of people view Emily’s final choice as horrendous and tragic. In a way it is, but for me, if Jo becomes her angel, it’s almost like a self-sacrifice. Jo knows that by sacrificing herself, she’ll be giving Emily power to move forward. In the original script, the girls were supposed to bring out another counselor, JB (Aidan Laudersmith), and burn his body. But I just thought, there’s no way sacrificing this guy could give the girls enough power. There’s just no way, right? Logically, that just didn’t line up for me.
I’m glad you mentioned JB, because he has his own tragic arc. How do men factor into the world of Camp?
The way men factor into my world is so bizarre. I have such little respect for them in my films, which is something I’ve been called on. I think I have to challenge myself in the future to make a movie about a boy because, these boys … It’s not that the men in my films aren’t redeemable, but there’s no depth to these characters. They’re just treated with such disrespect. I don’t know why I do that, actually. That’s something for me to look into. It was the same with Honeycomb. They’re just such peripheral characters. I’ve had people ask about Kayne (Henri Gillespi), the scary guy at the fire, what happens to him? I just think, I don’t know. I don’t care. That’s not the point of the story.
Well, I can say after a lifetime of watching women on the periphery of the story, the course correction feels nice. In a similar vein, I’m in love with your homepage, avalonfast.com. There’s an image of girls on a film set and then a still from Honeycomb in which a blood-covered girl is screaming at the sky. And in the middle, it just says Girl Horror. It’s a really powerful statement that gives me chills. How do you define Girl Horror, and what draws you to these types of stories?
I was obsessed with the term when I started making my movies. It was something I’d come up with to kind of brand myself and describe what I was doing. Then I went through a period where I felt like it was a bit gender exclusive and didn’t interest me as much. But now I’ve come full circle on the term. I think it’s a bit of a commentary on youth and the horror of growing up female. But I think everybody can relate to that experience. I don’t want it to feel like this exclusive thing, that I make movies exclusively for girls, because I don’t think I do. I’m interested in exploring what Girl Horror means. Originally, it was just a title, something I came up with, and now it’s become something that resonates with people. You said it gave you chills. That’s cool for me to hear because there’s obviously some depth there.
Are you working on anything new?
Yes. I am actually making a movie about a boy. That’s the next thing.
That’s exciting! The more I think about feminism, the more I end up coming back to men and boys, because they have a place in the world of Girl Horror too.
Absolutely. It’s all just part of being human.
You must be logged in to post a comment.