Interviews
[Interview] Director Adam Robitel on ‘Insidious: The Last Key’ and Joining the World of James Wan
It’s no easy feat fitting in with the world of James Wan and Leigh Whannell. Two men who have become masters at their genre have only ever relied on each other when it comes to getting the job done for their Insidious franchise, with Wan directing the first two entries, and Whannell writing all four installments and directing the third. That’s why when it came time to entrust another soul with the egregious task of living up to the guys who have redefined modern day horror, Wan and Whannell knew they really had to find a filmmaker who was up to par. Luckily, they found Adam Robitel, director of The Taking of Deborah Logan, and the rest is history.
I was fortunate enough to have a chat with Adam Robitel himself, director of the fourth entry in the series, Insidious: The Last Key. In the interview, we discuss the difficult task of trying to live up to the hype of James Wan, casting a mature actor as the face of a franchise, and feeling at home with the monsters.
Bloody Disgusting: One thing I think is cool about this movie is how we’re led to believe that Elise’s father is a monster, but by the end, we realize that he’s actually being controlled. Has there ever been any sort of monster in your life that you initially feared but then came to realize was actually okay?
Adam Robitel: That’s an interesting question. I’ll just say anecdotally, I struggle with this because yeah, when you see horrible things in the news, I think it’s human nature, to want to blame it on a demon. People say, you know, ‘Maybe there’s some metaphysical reason why a guy in Las Vegas just shot seventy people from a hotel window’ because at least that type of reasoning doesn’t hurt as much. So, we went back and forth, it was interesting with this movie to say things like, ‘Are we letting Gerald off the hook?’ in a way. I think his own pain at the end of the movie was punishment enough for his actions, but this idea of being a puppet. As far as a monster that I was fearful of in which I became unafraid, I mean, honestly, I’ve always loved monsters. To be honest, I mean being a genre geek, Pennywise was always so cool to me. I never actually saw it as evil, I always saw it as ‘The Other’ and I relate to ‘The Other’ on an implicit level, so there was no separation between me and monsters. There was always a kinship, so whether it be Clive Barker, or whomever. So, I’m a weird one in that sense, I always sort of related to monsters.
BD: In the movie industry in general, but especially in horror, we usually see this extremely youthful casting, that only seems to aim for younger and younger actors as time goes on. I think it’s really cool to not only have a woman as the star of this franchise, but somebody who’s a bit more mature. It feels much more relatable.
AR: My first film, The Taking of Deborah Logan had a wonderful actress by the name of Jill Larson, and I was really close to my grandmother and I feel like, like you said, there’s a dearth of great roles for older actresses and I feel like it’s a real shame because they’re the matriarchs of our society and Lin’s character, I’ve known Lin a long time and I’m a personal friend of Lin’s and I have to tell you, she’s so grateful, and lives with such gratitude about this renaissance that she’s been having and she went to Hell and back, I mean she literally gave 100% of herself and how fantastic to have a franchise like you said that is wrapped around her, she’s such an underdog. I told James Wan, in chapter one, I saw an early screening of it at LA Film School and Lin Shaye’s monologue about The Further and about astral projection and rules of the world, if she didn’t nail that the way that she did, I’m convinced the movie wouldn’t have worked because she had to have such supremely dexterous ownership of the material and make it real, and her making it real makes it real for all of us, and our suspension of disbelief is directly related to how good she is in the movies, and so she’s earned it. Chapter 4 is so much of an origin story for her character, and I always thought if you’re going to do four or five movies, there has to be a reason for them to exist. And this one is a really good one. It’s about abuse, it’s about a little girl who has this gift, and is not accepted by her father. So, those are great, compelling reasons to have a movie.
BD: Yeah and I think maybe having a character who is more mature is a little bit more relatable for some of us.
AR: Absolutely. I mean, look, there’s nothing wrong with attractive actors in a movie, but when it’s just like, ‘Oh that’s just the way in’ and ‘Puerile teens drinking and smoking’, there’s a place for that, but I don’t relate to it. If I’m watching a documentary, I want to see real people. If I’m watching a horror film, I want people I can invest in, and that goes back to part one, people like Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson, these are just two normal people. And look, this isn’t new, I mean it’s taking its cues from Poltergeist and other movies that came before, but you want grounded people who feel real and then you put them in an unreal situation and it’s just much scarier because of that.
BD: It’s a huge honor that they would choose you to direct this movie because I mean, James Wan and Leigh Whannell are the only people who have ever directed an Insidious movie until now, so how did they approach you? What do you recall from that experience?
AR: It was a huge honor, it was incredibly daunting and I felt like I was stepping into the shadows of like Michael Jordan. I mean Leigh and Wan are like the modern day supernatural masters, and I did not take that lightly. I had known James personally through Lin, like we’d go out to dinners at Lin’s house, so he was very gracious when I was trying to get my first film made and then he was just lovely in the press after he’d seen it, and he supported it, so I’ve had such a, for whatever reason, he’s just been so amazing to me and a very lovely person just about saying, you know, ‘Stick with it’ and so when Leigh decided he wasn’t going to direct it, my name was put on a shortlist at Blumhouse. Now, I had only made a found footage movie and if you watch a good found footage movie, people think, ‘Oh it’s just spontaneous and they just run around with cameras’. Well actually, the opposite is true, everything is choreographed and everything is designed, but I had to prove to Jason Blum that I could put together a traditional three-point coverage kind of movie, so I went in really heavy, I did a look book and I did a bunch of animated storyboards and really showed them what the movie could be, and the earlier draft that Leigh had did not have a demon in it, and I said, ‘Guys, to be honest, when I think of Insidious I think about Lipstick Demon and the iconography of the franchise. You guys need a demon that is kind of evocative of prison and locks and keys’. So, out of those first couple of meetings I got the job and then we ended up coming up with Key Face.
BD: I mean, coming in on the fourth installment, you have a big weight on your shoulders. It must be difficult finding the balance between your vision and what Wan and Whannell have already established in the franchise.
AR: It was hard. I mean at first, I was always saying to myself, ‘What would James Wan do?’ and that’s an easy trap to fall into. I cannot out-Wan the Wan. He’s so good at what he does, and so that was kind of a liberating point for me, I think it was like a weekend of shooting, I was like, ‘You know what? Let me not try to do what James is going to do’ because it’s natural, right? It’s like he’s so good and then I kind of leaned into the material, and I said, ‘Okay, what would Robitel do? What is this material really about?’ and again, I’m more frightened of what my abusive father could do to me than I am of a demon that comes out from underneath the bed, and that’s the reason we have horror, is to create a safe way for us to experience catharsis about the shit that really bothers us. So leaning into that was very liberating. I mean look, doing scares and how to create tension, like there’s a very definitive way to do that, but it starts with characters that you care about. Like little Ava, she’s so good in this movie and her performance is so good, and again, something that James often talked about and Leigh talked about is that you’re only as scared as the people you’re watching. The scariest part of The Conjuring is literally the little girl staring off into the corner and pointing. We don’t see what she sees, but we’re as terrified as she is, so if you can do that, that’s your special effects. All of the cats jumping out of cabinets and big loud sounds doesn’t compete with performance.
BD: You may say that you can’t out-Wan the Wan, but what is the definitive way to scare someone? Because I’m a big horror nerd and I know so many die-hard horror fans who watched The Taking of Deborah Logan and were like, ‘This is really scary. This is legit’, and even in the new Insidious, there are some really great scares in there, so how do you properly frame a scare?
AR: With The Taking I always felt like, what scared me was medical stuff, our own mortality, I think Alzheimer’s is really terrifying to me, what was exciting in that movie was to just start with something really grounded and then slowly start to take the wheels off. I think found footage has a bad rep but if it’s done right, you really kind of buy into it being real. With Insidious, so much of it was again, really being invested in the characters, and look, I learned a lot on this movie, because there were times, you always want as much coverage as you can get and so like for example, little Elise, we know that there’s a guy who just got fried at the prison, and little Elise is talking to her brother and then he says something weird, she opens her curtains and realizes that her brother’s actually sitting across the room from her, that’s not her brother who she was talking to, so that builds the tension, and so there’s so much about creating that first pre-charge, and then it just becomes about the traditional camera work, don’t show them everything, stay behind her, build the tension, she gets up, she pats down the blanket and there’s nothing there, the audience breathes, they thought they were gonna get the scare but they didn’t so they deflate for a second, then she turns around to her brother and then you do the sting. So, so much of it is timing and so much is context, and then sound more than anything. But none of that works if you don’t care about who you’re watching.
BD: I thought it was interesting too, to have Elise’s niece turn out to have the gift as well. Like, was that you doing that or was that Leigh’s idea?
AR: It was Leigh wanting to do that. I think maybe it’s genetic and it opens doors to potential other storylines and it was a neat way to connect the two of them, having been away for so long and having abandoned Christian this was a good sort of gut punch. Like hey, I’m just like you. Where it goes, that’s up to Leigh.
BD: I’ve been wondering if in the future Imogen is going to turn out to be the frontrunner of the franchise.
AR: Maybe! Although death is not necessarily the end in Insidious movies, so even though Elise is gone, or will be gone, maybe it’s not the last time you see her, either.
Insidious: The Last Key is in now theaters everywhere.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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