Jim Jarmusch has made two horror movies now – the vampire romance Only Lovers Left Alive, and the brand new zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die – but just because he spent most of his career directing thoughtful dramedies set in the real world, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love the scary movie genre.
In fact, horror movies are how he got into film in the first place.
“I’m a film fanatic so I’m open, always, to many, many genres,” Jarmusch explained in a recent interview with Bloody-Disgusting. “Horror and sci-fi are the first films I really encountered because in Akron, OH there was, in the suburb, there was a theater. The State Theatre, and on Saturdays they had double and triple features. And my mom would drop me off there and then she could have time with her friends, or I don’t know, and my sister didn’t want to go.”
“So I would see films like, you know, Attack of the Giant Crab Monsters or The Blob or The Thing [from Another World], or all of those kind of films I saw very early on,” Jarmusch continued.
“Then we had a guy in Ohio, on the Cleveland TV station, called Ghoulardi. Friday nights. You know of Ghoulardi?” Jarmusch asked, referring to horror host Ernie Anderson, who was also the father of Oscar-nominated director P.T. Anderson (Inherent Vice).
“He was amazing. He had a lab coat, a goatee, a fright wig, glasses with one dark lens and one with no lens. He talked in beatnik, kind of jive talk. He blew up model cars with cherry bombs. He would put himself into the films with a very early kinescopic effect, so he could be in the tunnel, like ‘Kids, look out! The crab monsters are coming! Whoa!’” Jarmusch said, imitating Ghoulardi’s familiar patois.
All the other Ghoulardi fans out there are in for a treat with The Dead Don’t Die. Jarmusch said he filled the film with Easter Eggs.
“He was fantastic, and he had all these slogans, and they’re in the film,” Jarmusch confirmed. “Like they say, Caleb Landry Jones’ character says to some kids, they say, ‘Turn blue! Stay sick!’ These are things Ghoulardi used to say, slogans that he had. Anyone from Northeastern Ohio whose, let’s say older than 50, would know all of this stuff.”
Jarmusch is a busy filmmaker, of course, and it’s harder for him to stay current with the genre than it used to be.
“You know I’m not up on recent stuff. I do want to see the new Godzilla film,” the director said. “I’d kind of like to see it. I’ve followed all the Godzilla things for a long time and all the off-shoots. But you know I’m sort of old school. My favorites, my kind of peers are certainly Sam Raimi, those are masterpieces, The Evil Dead trilogy, for sure. I love Wes Craven and John Carpenter. I’ve always like the European stuff, Mario Bava and Dario Argento and those things.”
And when it comes to modern zombie movies, there’s one film that keeps coming up again and again in our conversation with the director of The Dead Don’t Die.
“Zombie-wise, you know, Train to Busan was the most kind of badass thing I’ve seen,” Jarmusch said, referring to Yeon Sang-ho’s acclaimed 2016 thriller about the passengers on a commuter train trying to survive the zombie apocalypse.
Of course, Jarmusch’s dialogue-driven zombie comedy isn’t aiming for the same dramatic and action-packed heights as Train to Busan.
“I’m not trying to make Train to Busan or something,” Jarmusch said. “Which is a kick-ass, fucking great zombie movie, but it’s kind of a revolutionary zombie movie. That wasn’t our intention. We were trying to make kind of these periods of dumb dialogue and then interspersed with a zombie attack. Now that changed as I wrote it a bit, and it became a little less of that and maybe a little darker in the end too.”
And in case you were wondering if Jarmusch was familiar with a certain other film called The Dead Don’t Die – a 1975 made-for-tv zombie movie directed by Curtis Harrington – the answer is… not really.
“I wasn’t aware of it until I came up with the title on my own,” Jarmusch explains. “A brilliant, genius title and then I thought oh shit, there is a film with that title. I looked it up and I saw part of it but I haven’t seen the whole film.”
“You can’t copyright titles,” the director adds. “But anyway.”
The Dead Don’t Die shambles amiably into theaters on June 14, 2019!
