Editorials

‘The Bye Bye Man’ Director Stacy Title’s Horror Influences

Published

7 years ago

January 12, 2017

We want to thank The Bye Bye Man director Stacy Title for acting as a guest editor this week on Bloody Disgusting. She’s shared her favorite boogeyman, offered commentary on the film’s trailer, and even shared her picks for best genre movie of 2016 (and most anticipated of 2017).

For her final piece Title shares with us her horror influences, which range from Kubrick to DePalma and even Hitchcock, with an additional bit by writer Jonathan Penner, who is also Title’s husband.

“My Horror Influences”, Stacy Title

I watch movies all the time. Hundreds a year so volume and repetition have shaped my aesthetic. Dreadful and brilliant, I kiss the movies, my favorite art form. As a young girl, my father was a commercial producer; I watched Ridley and Tony Scott work and Michael Cimino too, up close. They directed commercials for my father at a NYC commercial production company called MPO. High end, very high budget, replete with the toys of heady budgets and watching that excess probably ruined me for my future independent film road. At seven I was a precocious but quiet little mouse on these sets. I remember them all clearly, all talented but Cimino was insecure and secretive, Ridley a fascinating force of personality and Tony in the trenches, he did everyone’s job and well. Watching them as a kid took the magic and mystery out of filmmaking but that was actually great. That coupled with compulsive movie viewing: riding my Schwinn with pink handle fringe to the three movie theaters in Plainview, New York each weekend created an obsession that never changed. I had a cold, hard eye for filmmaking and I was able to absorb great work even then, back in the day.

My favorites and greatest genre influences: Kubrick, Cronenberg, Polanski, Von Trier, DePalma and the grandmaster Hitchcock stand above all in my ‘horror’ psyche. There’s an emotionally and brilliance to these filmmakers and their work, that transcends even horror. For me, horror works only when it has palpable emotion. Their work lives in character, authenticity and emotional claustrophobia. In Carrie when she gets her period, in Rosemary’s Baby when Charles Grodin sells out Mia Farrow, ‘cause she’s a dumb woman. Their anxiety and betrayal are complete. In Von Trier’s The Kingdom, an epic seven-hour perfection made for television, the series wades along the supernatural with a hero, a hypochondriac bag lady who knows it all and more than anyone else.

All these filmmakers are phenomenal visualists, the class of the world. Putting forth iconic image after iconic image. I can feel the world of The Shining always, find myself wandering the halls and maze of this full vision over and over, riding with Danny or being stalked by ‘all work and no play’ Jack. In Dead Ringers, Cronenberg’s excruciating gynecological tools take my breath away– even right now as I write this. In Rebecca, which is my favorite movie, Mrs. Danvers is always completely still but more threatening than anything, anywhere in all film. She hovers over ‘she’ who has no name, the second Mrs. de Winter. How is possible that Danvers is scary just standing there? Almost no one else could be. But Judith Anderson sends her hatred, her mania and potential homicide via Hitchcock who shoots it medium and perfectly backlit, delivering the implied deadly threat of Rebecca, Max’s (Olivier’s) first wife. Brilliant simplicity. Max’s beloved ‘she’ (Joan Fontaine) can all but wilt.

Many of these favorites are book adaptations, and two are from the Mensa Stephen King, which begs the question: as a writer/director, are the novels only influencing me as a writer, or does that pure storytelling transcend to the mechanics of directing? Either way I love King’s books and too, Daphne du Maurier’s. A great source like a novel or story helps deepen and richen an adaptation as opposed to an original. It’s not a coincidence that a lot of great movies and horror specifically come from source material with deep and rich characters. To me the emotion and complex characters of the past have gone the way of only jump scare fests that feel like an amusement park. Some of modern horror has taken a giant step in this direction to its peril.

“My Life in Horror”, Jonathan Penner

So nepotism is alive and well in my life. And apparently here on Bloody-Disgusting as well. See, Stacy Title, the brilliant director of The Bye Bye Man and this week’s guest editor, also happens to be my wife and the mother of our two marvelous children. She not only got me hired to write the script (and also put me and the two kids in the movie), but now she’s asked me to write a short piece on my life in horror.

Anyway, dear readers of Bloody-Disgusting, she wants me to write about two things; acting in horror and writing horror.

Acting wise, I have been killed in Tony Randel’s inimitable Amityville 1995 – It’s About Time wherein I get covered in toxic goo and then strangled by a phone cord, and in Adam Marcus’ TV cut of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, in which I get my face smashed to shit in a motel sink. From those two directors I learned to shut up and be as funny and easy-going as possible on set.

I love horror and will do and have done anything to be involved with it. Going to conventions, looting the Ackermansion, even trying to get a Famous Monsters of Filmland show on the boards. I’ve read every book, and seen many of the movies (only a fool would say he has seen everything… and while I may be an asshole, I’m no fool). So basically, with The Bye Bye Man, knowing what I knew, I just tried to write as much stuff into the movie that I’d never seen before, and hoped that, in Stacy’s capable hands, it would translate into something compelling and scary as hell. I always said to Trevor Macy, who actually did produce the movie and very well, that I wanted The Bye Bye Man to make people so scared they’d either cry or piss themselves. Going for anything less would be bullshit, I said. And I believed it.

The Bye Bye Man will open in theaters tomorrow, Friday the 13th.

Related Topics:Stacy Title The Bye Bye Man

Brad Miska

Horror movie fanatic who co-founded Bloody Disgusting in 2001. Producer on Southbound, V/H/S/2/3/94, SiREN, Under the Bed, and A Horrible Way to Die. Chicago-based. Horror, pizza and basketball connoisseur. Taco Bell daily. Franchise favs: Hellraiser, Child's Play, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Scream and Friday the 13th. Horror 365 days a year.

3 Comments

Editorials

Finding Faith and Violence in ‘The Book of Eli’ 14 Years Later

Published

1 day ago

April 22, 2024

Luiz H. C.

Having grown up in a religious family, Christian movie night was something that happened a lot more often than I care to admit. However, back when I was a teenager, my parents showed up one night with an unusually cool-looking DVD of a movie that had been recommended to them by a church leader. Curious to see what new kind of evangelical propaganda my parents had rented this time, I proceeded to watch the film with them expecting a heavy-handed snoozefest.

To my surprise, I was a few minutes in when Denzel Washington proceeded to dismember a band of cannibal raiders when I realized that this was in fact a real movie. My mom was horrified by the flick’s extreme violence and dark subject matter, but I instantly became a fan of the Hughes Brothers’ faith-based 2010 thriller, The Book of Eli. And with the film’s atomic apocalypse having apparently taken place in 2024, I think this is the perfect time to dive into why this grim parable might also be entertaining for horror fans.

Originally penned by gaming journalist and The Walking Dead: The Game co-writer Gary Whitta, the spec script for The Book of Eli was already making waves back in 2007 when it appeared on the coveted Blacklist. It wasn’t long before Columbia and Warner Bros. snatched up the rights to the project, hiring From Hell directors Albert and Allen Hughes while also garnering attention from industry heavyweights like Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman.

After a series of revisions by Anthony Peckham meant to make the story more consumer-friendly, the picture was finally released in January of 2010, with the finished film following Denzel as a mysterious wanderer making his way across a post-apocalyptic America while protecting a sacred book. Along the way, he encounters a run-down settlement controlled by Bill Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a man desperate to get his hands on Eli’s book so he can motivate his underlings to expand his empire. Unwilling to let this power fall into the wrong hands, Eli embarks on a dangerous journey that will test the limits of his faith.

SO WHY IS IT WORTH WATCHING?

Judging by the film’s box-office success, mainstream audiences appear to have enjoyed the Hughes’ bleak vision of a future where everything went wrong, but critics were left divided by the flick’s trope-heavy narrative and unapologetic religious elements. And while I’ll be the first to admit that The Book of Eli isn’t particularly subtle or original, I appreciate the film’s earnest execution of familiar ideas.

For starters, I’d like to address the religious elephant in the room, as I understand the hesitation that some folks (myself included) might have about watching something that sounds like Christian propaganda. Faith does indeed play a huge part in the narrative here, but I’d argue that the film is more about the power of stories than a specific religion. The entire point of Oldman’s character is that he needs a unifying narrative that he can take advantage of in order to manipulate others, while Eli ultimately chooses to deliver his gift to a community of scholars. In fact, the movie even makes a point of placing the Bible in between equally culturally important books like the Torah and Quran, which I think is pretty poignant for a flick inspired by exploitation cinema.

Sure, the film has its fair share of logical inconsistencies (ranging from the extent of Eli’s Daredevil superpowers to his impossibly small Braille Bible), but I think the film more than makes up for these nitpicks with a genuine passion for classic post-apocalyptic cinema. Several critics accused the film of being a knockoff of superior productions, but I’d argue that both Whitta and the Hughes knowingly crafted a loving pastiche of genre influences like Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog.

Lastly, it’s no surprise that the cast here absolutely kicks ass. Denzel plays the title role of a stoic badass perfectly (going so far as to train with Bruce Lee’s protégée in order to perform his own stunts) while Oldman effortlessly assumes a surprisingly subdued yet incredibly intimidating persona. Even Mila Kunis is remarkably charming here, though I wish the script had taken the time to develop these secondary characters a little further. And hey, did I mention that Tom Waits is in this?

AND WHAT MAKES IT HORROR ADJACENT?

Denzel’s very first interaction with another human being in this movie results in a gory fight scene culminating in a face-off against a masked brute wielding a chainsaw (which he presumably uses to butcher travelers before eating them), so I think it’s safe to say that this dog-eat-dog vision of America will likely appeal to horror fans.

From diseased cannibals to hyper-violent motorcycle gangs roaming the wasteland, there’s plenty of disturbing R-rated material here – which is even more impressive when you remember that this story revolves around the bible. And while there are a few too many references to sexual assault for my taste, even if it does make sense in-universe, the flick does a great job of immersing you in this post-nuclear nightmare.

The excessively depressing color palette and obvious green screen effects may take some viewers out of the experience, but the beat-up and lived-in sets and costume design do their best to bring this dead world to life – which might just be the scariest part of the experience.

Ultimately, I believe your enjoyment of The Book of Eli will largely depend on how willing you are to overlook some ham-fisted biblical references in order to enjoy some brutal post-apocalyptic shenanigans. And while I can’t really blame folks who’d rather not deal with that, I think it would be a shame to miss out on a genuinely engaging thrill-ride because of one minor detail.

With that in mind, I’m incredibly curious to see what Whitta and the Hughes Brothers have planned for the upcoming prequel series starring John Boyega…

There’s no understating the importance of a balanced media diet, and since bloody and disgusting entertainment isn’t exclusive to the horror genre, we’ve come up with Horror Adjacent – a recurring column where we recommend non-horror movies that horror fans might enjoy.