Interviews
Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga Tease Big Things Ahead for Their Characters in ‘The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It’ [Interview]
The third entry in the Conjuring franchise takes on one of the darkest cases yet. More importantly, it seems to shake things up with significant changes in the setting. Gone is the familiarity of the haunted house. Instead, it transplants Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga) to a small town where a horrific murder occurs. Stylistically, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It ushers the Warrens into the ’80s, and series originator James Wan passes the baton to director Michael Chaves (The Curse of La Llorona). With so many changes lined up for this sequel, Bloody Disgusting participated in a press event to get an idea of what fans can expect for this devilish new movie.
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It sees the Warrens take on the historical case of Arne Johnson, a man who went to trial in 1981 for murder and claimed demonic possession as a defense. That a real-life murder served as a basis for this story already gives it a darker edge, but the addition of the criminal justice system introduces a new flavor to the franchise.
Chaves explains how this new setting brings exciting energy, “At this point in their careers and our experience with the Warrens, the haunted house has now become a comfortable setting. So, I think it gives us an opportunity to take them places that we haven’t seen. What I’m so excited about is that there are sequences in the movie that haven’t even been in the trailers, but everybody loves them when they see them. It’s because it’s so out of the experience of what we’re used to. And I’m honestly so thrilled that they weren’t put in the trailer because there’s a lot of cool, wild stuff in store for fans of this.”
Conjuring universe producer Peter Safran weighed in on approaching the true-crime element with a tenderness that reflects the most in the Warrens, “It almost requires the most love from Ed and Lorraine to counteract and to balance that real darkness that exists in the real Arne Johnson case. We were always very sensitive about the fact that there was a real victim in this. There were many victims, but there was really one murder victim in this, and so we were always very sensitive to it, and I think that’s probably why it’s the darkest but also has the most love in it.“
Patrick Wilson agrees and says of these characters, “They’ve become the through-line between all these films. And that’s something that sets us apart from other horror franchises because you’re following the good guys throughout instead of the villain. I think, James, those conversations that we had early on in the first one, where you knew you’d get to the scares, but you knew you had to build the character and the relationships.” Wilson adds, “It’s our version of Ed and Lorraine; we don’t know who they were behind closed doors. When you know you can center around that, I think it frees you up to go as dark as you want in the other aspects because you get to balance it out. Because I would say that this film probably had some of the darkest moments of any in the universe, but as you had with the Elvis moment in the second one, or us dancing at the end of the second one, you have those moments in this of just this deep, profound romance. You can’t; we don’t go halfway with either. If you’re going to have these terrifying scares, then we want to have as many love moments as you can.”
More than just emphasizing the love between Ed and Lorraine to balance out the encroaching evil, it seems that The Devil Made Me Do It will uniquely showcase Lorraine’s power. Farmiga teases, “I also can tell you that this is some of the biggest stuff I’ve ever had to play in my career. Like operatic, it’s epic. The emotional scope of this character, not only, I mean, I’ve never had to consider a characters’ spiritual prowess. When you’re denouncing demons, you’re like, this stuff is huge! Her clairvoyance gets put to the test, and we get to see other aspects of her clairvoyance.” The emphasis on her character’s powers and powerful connection to Ed gives the actress a different read on this sequel, “For me, it’s more of a love story than it is a horror story.“
As for the scares, Wan promises plenty, “Mike [Chaves] knows what makes scary movies scary. People love to be scared; that’s the bottom line. There’s a reason why these movies work as well as they do. People want to be scared. I think the Conjuring films, at least for me, and I know it is for Michael as well, is to start with something real. So, base some of these scares off reports that people have talked about. If you start with that, then you can kind of embellish on it, but you always can come back to that point of a foundation where it was grounded in reality, to begin with.”
Wilson enjoyed his experience working with Chaves and explains how it allowed for bolder choices this outing, “I speak to his passion and reverence for the series, but also his ability to swing a big stick, honestly. To make some choices, whether they work or not, we don’t know yet. This is where it’s coming from. It’s always coming from an organic place of wanting to scare the audience, wanting to make the audience feel something, going back to the emotional through-line.”
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It arrives in theaters and HBO Max on June 4.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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