Interviews
Writer Paul Hart-Wilden Talks About His ’90s Slasher ‘Skinner’ [Interview]
The ’90s slasher Skinner has languished in obscurity for the last 25 years. I myself had not heard of the film until Severin Films announced the Blu-ray release a while back. With that release the film has slowly started to pick up the steam it’s missed out on over all these years. And it’s a good thing too. Had Skinner been on video shelves throughout the ’90s it certainly would have appealed to many horror fans. I know I definitely would’ve been drawn to it.
Paul Hart-Wilden, the film’s writer, recently caught up with Bloody Disgusting to discuss Skinner.
“I’m not sure there was ever one specific trigger that brought Skinner to life. I’d already seen Living Doll get picked up and so I was looking for material for my next horror project – the question was, what was it going to be?
“The eighties had given us so many horror movies, novels, even TV shows, so many different and varied kills, so many great horror villains, it really was about finding an angle,” Hart-Wilden told us when asked how the idea originated.
“I’d been into horror since the day I was born and was reading a lot about serial killers, reading horror novels, watching horror movies, learning the history and origins of the genre, and you add to that an intense curiosity about just how fucked up and inhumane people can be when left to their own devices and you’re being bombarded with notions, ideas, and inspiration. That brought Ed Gein into my frame of reference – and he’s such fertile ground to plow in terms of fucked up humanity.
“So I had my ‘angle’ – let’s write about someone who dresses up in other people’s skin.
“Once you get your angle, you look for the world you want to place that angle in. At the time of writing the script I was fresh out in the world, I was just learning about renting rooms and apartments and had lived through the eighties, which while being rich in terms of horror movies and also quite rich in terms of social upheaval and economic depression – so that gave me my world for the skinning to take place in.
“So you bring all these different elements together, add in a dash of inexperienced writing by having all the victims being prostitutes and you have the script for Skinner. Then, of course, it takes 5-7 years for the script to get sold and the movie come out and by that time everyone has seen Silence of the Lambs and figures you just copied that – but such is life.”
After Hart-Walden had a finished script, he began the search to find someone willing to produce. After years of trying and hitting a number of dead ends, a producer finally stepped up but he came with a catch – the producer was going to bring in his own director, Ivan Nagy. Hart-Wilden agreed, which essentially took the script out of his hand.
“The transition from script to screen is a road filled with many potholes and hazards. It’s one of those weirder aspects of the business and one that takes a lot of getting used to,” Hart-Wilden told me. “My previous film to Skinner was Living Doll, and on that project the producer handed the script over to to the directors and they brought in a writer and between them, they sat down and basically rewrote the entire script from scratch. Even having an ‘agreement’ – quotes being the realization that often times verbal agreements aren’t worth the paper they’re written on – it was a very dispiriting process to have to go through and have no ability to fight against. Skinner was a different scenario. From what I remember, once we made the deal, I did a fairly perfunctory polish on the script – handed it over to the production company and that was it.”
To Hart-Wilden’s delight, the script remained almost entirely intact.
“It was actually one of the more gratifying aspects of the film to see that by and large, they made almost no changes to the script. I remember when I saw a rough edit of the movie I noticed Ricki Lake used the word ‘procrastinate’ which seemed to stand out to me as I didn’t remember writing it and couldn’t find it in the script. But in many ways, it’s kinda testament to how much they stuck to the script if you can notice specific words as being different.”
Despite keeping most of the script as he wrote, a few changes were made, one of which was quite odd.
“One of the biggest things that stood out to me was that for some reason they had changed the name of Traci Lords’ character. In the script she had been called ‘Vicky’ which was my attempt at being ‘clever’ by having Vicky be shorthand for Victim – as she had been Dennis Skinner’s first victim – but when I saw it, her name had been changed to Heidi and I couldn’t figure out why.
“There’s nothing inherently wrong in changing a character’s name but ‘Heidi’ just seemed weird. In the UK where I grew up and where I was living when I wrote Skinner and while it was being made, Heidi is the name of a children’s book and television character – a kind of Pippi Longstocking type person – so it just felt completely wrong to me that you’d name someone in a fairly hardcore horror movie the same as in a fairly famous children’s TV program, but of course, as I later found out, that wasn’t the reason for the change. Several years after Skinner had been made, I was watching TV in Los Angeles and during the news and saw someone I recognized. It was Ivan Nagy, director of Skinner and he was in a courtroom, as I remember, as part of the proceedings in the trail of certain Heidi Fleiss…so…exactly.”
Heidi Fleiss is most famous for organizing and running a prostitution ring in the late ’80s and into the early ’90s. Fleiss was dating Nagy at the time and through him was introduced to Madam Alex. Madam Alex then got Fleiss into the world of prostitution.
“Now it all made sense, I mean, ‘made sense’ in not really making sense kinda way. I never met Ivan other than a brief handshake the one viewing of the film sometime in the late ’90s, so although I can kinda see where the source of the name change might have come from, but exactly why the change was made, I have no idea. I mean, in a movie chock full of weird and reprehensible characters, I’m not entirely sure whether it was intended to be a positive or negative thing, but I figure I at least understand the origin of that name change.”
The most noticeable change came in the addition of a scene, that even in 1993 should have raised a few eyebrows and is most certainly questionable at best by today’s standards. The scene in question involves Skinner killing a black man, wearing his skin and then prancing around dishing out offensive, stereotyped phrases. It’s an unnecessary, cringe-worthy moment.
“And since we’re on the subject of sticking to the script, I guess it’s worth making a comment about ‘that’ scene. I mean, it’s difficult to talk about in this day and age and it’s important to view things in the correct context, especially in terms of changing social mores, but ’that’ scene, it wasn’t in the script. It wasn’t anything I ever wrote and has been admitted as something that was decided upon during filming. It’s not my place to second guess anyone’s choices or reasons for something – especially viewing those choices from 25 years distance.”
Slight adjustments aside, Hart-Wilden is pleased with how his script was treated and executed.
“So it’s ultimately a strange feeling, yes, it was cool at the time and kinda still is today that by and large, the script I wrote was the script that was filmed, but it also comes with the caveat that there were a few things that were changed, added, etc in terms of what ended up being the final movie – and boy, those changes!
“It’s a good lesson for a writer and one that I had to get on board with, that you can’t be too precious with your material. Contractually there’s almost no chance of you ever holding onto your ‘droit moral,’ as the French call it, and so the purchasers of your script and the makers of the film based on your script have every right to make whatever changes they deem necessary. Often times, you have an idea in your head of exactly how you want the words you write to sound, but an early lesson you learn is that just saying those words out loud is completely different to how you heard them. And then you might write a nice page long speech but on set an actor skips a line, or the director and editor decide to cut out various pieces for time or emotion or any one of a thousand other reasons and all of those reasons are entirely legitimate and perfectly acceptable – often times making what you wrote in isolation many weeks, months or years prior, better than you could ever have imagined.
“You want to be able to allow other people to bring their creativity and personality to any project and so presenting them with an immutable set of words denies them a lot of options to bring their own contributions to the process. Ultimately if you want your words experienced exactly as you write them – then write a book. So the notion of whether the script you wrote is the script that ends up on screen is not ultimately as important as the knowledge that without your script – there wouldn’t be a movie at all.”
Once the script was written, Hart-Wilden took it around to a number of different production companies hoping to get the project off the ground. One of those companies was the legendary Hammer films, which seemed like a perfect fit. Surprisingly, Hammer passed on the project, essentially writing it off as too offensive.
“I guess looking at it through the eyes of a rebellious youth there’d be some kind of joy at being able to turn people off, upset or offend them, but honestly, the real feeling I had coming out of that meeting was one of just intense disappointment. I’d watched Hammer films avidly as a kid, seen their first TV series in the early ’80s with blood and boobs and all the things teenage boys look for, but then seeing that morph into the Hammer House of Mystery & Suspense, all the blood, all the horror, gone.
“And so we’d had this institution that was known the world over that had dwindled to just a shell of its former self, When I met them they were literally one office tucked away in Elstree Studios – and so the overwhelming feeling was of just sadness that something so many people had loved and aspired to – had become, nothing. So when I went to see them to see if they’d be interested in something like Skinner the reception it got wasn’t really that surprising, it was just evidence of exactly why the Hammer name had become what it was. So there was no real coating, no satisfaction – just sadness and disappointment.
“It’s a similar thing with this script and scripts in general – you don’t write these things to turn people off. Yes, you want a reaction, but you also want it to be positive. You want to write Silence of the Lambs, you want to write Evil Dead. If all you want to do is upset people or make them sick, that’s easy but the real trick is to find something within the material that is going to speak to or resonate with people.”
With the recent release from Severin, the film seems to be getting a second and in some ways a first, life. I’m a fan that will happily recommend it to others and I have friends that will do the same. Hart-Wilden talked about what the experience of the film’s re-discovery has been like.
“It’s funny when I was at the Egyptian Theater recently doing the Q&A with Ted Raimi after the Valentine’s Day screening of the Skinner restoration, I looked at the full house and thought to myself, ‘Where were all these people when the movie first came out?’ – and it wasn’t long before I realized, probably the majority of them weren’t actually born when it came out. Ultimately it’s gratifying to find that people connect with your work whenever it happens. I mean, I’ll be honest, I’m human like everyone else. We all want to be successful, and we all want it as soon as possible. I’d hoped back in the day that Skinner would have gone on to be as successful as Evil Dead or a Friday 13th – I mean, who wouldn’t? But for some reason, it never hit.
“Who knows the reasons why? It’s not the greatest movie that came out of that era but then there are plenty of movies that became successful that you look back on now and are like, ‘How did that ever get anywhere?’ There were problems with the distribution, I believe Cannon Films was going to come in and put it out theatrically at one point, but then they went bankrupt, then the original DVD of the film was heavily censored and really terrible quality. It’s like a succession of so many things that all seemed to gang up on the movie and so it basically just disappeared.”
In many places, such as the UK and Australia, Skinner has never received any type of home media release.
“Under a different set of circumstances, who knows. But here we are just past the 25th anniversary of the movie and thanks to a bit of detective work, and a great restoration job by Severin Films, Skinner has a new lease of life. As I said, you do these things to hopefully make a connection with people, so wherever, however, or whenever it happens is something to be extremely grateful for.”
I finally asked Hart-Wilden what he would do differently if he were to remake the film today and take over the directing reins. His answer suggests it is something that has crossed his mind a time or two.
“One of the main thought processes I had when I began the process of trying to track down Skinner and find all the original elements was to get it released in a form that did it justice after the original release with all of its problems – but then on top of that I also thought to myself about the possibility of remaking it, updating it, seeing what it would be like to be responsible for doing my version of it. So what would that version be?
“The Valentine’s Day screening was the first time I’d actually sat and watched the movie from start to finish, so it was a bit of an eye-opener. Obviously being something I wrote when I really was just a fledgling screenwriter there are major problems with it. It’s very much a work of its time and I’m sure I’m a better writer now and so could flesh out the supporting characters lot better. The other thing I noticed beyond the laborious pacing was that there’s a distinct lack of gore and violence in the movie.”
Hart-Wilden’s comment about gore actually jumped out to me, but it’s true. While the film features some wonderful effects work and some parts that are fairly extreme, there actually isn’t that much gore.
“One of the first whitings I said at the Q&A was that if I did it again I’d put a load more blood in there. Now that’s probably a result of being low budget and low budget contributing to a short production schedule, but it would need a whole lot more character and a whole lot more blood if I were to redo it today. But that’s a straight reboot, the more I got to thinking about it I maybe wouldn’t reboot it, I’d do what people did back in the day, make a sequel, a part two. In many ways, that to me might be a more interesting way to go with it.”
I’d line up to buy a ticket on day one if a Skinner sequel were to get made. And if Raimi came back, I’d buy two tickets.
“At the end of the movie (spoiler alert) Dennis is pretty convinced that he’ll just get found guilty by reason of insanity and by biding his time and hopefully being a good boy, he’d one day be considered rehabbed enough to be let out. And that’s how it wold start. It’d be set in present day, Dennis would be exactly the age he is today – and of course, there’s only one person to play Dennis Skinner, so one of the things I’d need would be for Ted to agree to do it. To step back into Dennis’ skin as it were.
“Now my actual favorite character when I was writing the script was Eddie, played perfectly by Richard Schiff. So my second conceit in a redo of Skinner would be to bring Richard Schiff back. He’d be playing Eddie again, and I figure he was such a sleazy lawyer in Se7en that I’d have Eddie recover from whatever bad things Vicki/Heidi did to him in the movie and he became a sleazy scumbag lawyer, in fact, he became Dennis’ lawyer.
“So you’d have Eddie the sleaze-bag, work his legal magic to get Dennis released from whatever institution he was locked up in, and so Dennis is this middle-aged man with a dark past, back on the streets, and of course, we all know that once Dennis Skinner is back out stalking the streets, it’s not going to be too long before he gets the urge to play dress up.
“And since we’re in fantasy land, if it came to pass that all things fell into place to remake/reboot/sequelize the movie, one other thing I’d do is make sure there was enough money in the budget to ensure we could afford to get Frank Sinatra singing “I’ve Got You, Under My Skin” – that had always been something I’d wanted when the movie was originally made but there just wasn’t the money to do it.”
Here’s to hoping we can get that sequel.
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.
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