Interviews
‘Insidious: The Red Door’ – Patrick Wilson on How Collaboration with Ghost on “Stay” Track Covertly Came Together [Interview]
It ends where it all began. Sony Pictures’s Insidious: The Red Door is out in theaters now. The horror franchise’s original cast is back in Insidious: The Red Door, directed by and starring Patrick Wilson. But Wilson covertly pulls triple duty in this sequel; the filmmaker collaborated with the band Ghost, singing on the end title track “Stay.”
The track is a cover of Shakespears Sister’s 1992 hit, which you can check out below.
For the film’s release, Bloody Disgusting spoke with Wilson about his directorial debut, where Wilson recounted the entire story behind “Stay.” The director candidly broke down how he covertly pulled it together and the inspiration behind it.
“It happened behind most people’s backs. I’ll tell you that. Of course, if it’s a big hit, they’ll all take credit for it,” Wilson jokes. “No. I knew I wanted a song, a really cool song. I had this wild hair about Dokken singing ‘Dream Warriors’ in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3. I knew that won’t work because people will ask, ‘What is this? This has nothing to do with the movie.’ Lyrically, it’s pretty sound, but I didn’t want it to seem like a joke, even though I love that tune. But I long for that kind of song at the end of a movie. I’m a big Ghost fan. Blumhouse had worked with Ghost on ‘Hunter’s Moon’ for Halloween Kills. Right?
“That was always in the back of my mind, but I didn’t know if I wanted to ask them again. I wanted to do something different. I knew it needed to be different. But I knew I would not have a lot of time or money, to be quite honest with you. I became friends with Tim Bickford, who’s at their label, and he and I just on our own would sit and throw around ideas and certain songs like, ‘Hey, you know Tobias [Forge] has got five new tracks, that he is going to start releasing these covers.’ And they were awesome. ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero.’ That’s cool, but I can’t say ‘Thunderdome’ in my ‘Insidious’ movie.”
Then I said, ‘Look, I don’t know if we can do this, but thank you for trying. These are the themes of the movie.’ I went through everything because they hadn’t seen the movie. I said, ‘This is stuff I want to deal with if I could find a song.’ Then, literally within two weeks, he was like, ‘This may be the track. It’s already done, so you don’t even have to pay for it to be done.’ Because I said, ‘And my dream is to sing on the track,’ because I think it would be one, probably not since John Carpenter and singing Big Trouble Little China. I don’t know if a director has sung on their own track on their own album or their own movie. So, he sent me the track, and the lyrics blew me away. Then he said, ‘Tobias would really be down for you doing the first two verses, and then he comes in like, basically, the devil’s presence.’ I thought, ‘This is incredible.’ It’s like Josh Lambert singing it in a weird way. Oh, this is going to be great.
“Then they just set it up, and literally, there was an email chain that was, ‘What is the end credit’s song?’ Then a bunch of people write back, ‘Oh, there’s nothing. We’ll find it.’ I replied, ‘No, no. I’m recording a song with Ghost,’ and I get this influx and people from Blumhouse. They’re like, ‘What?’ I was like, ‘I’m done asking for stuff. We’re just going to do it.’ So, we just went and did it. Luckily, Dan Malsch is the engineer on maybe a couple of their albums. He worked with Avenged Sevenfold, a bunch of bands that I love. He’s like an hour away from me. I went to the Poconos, talked to Tobias on the way, and was like, ‘This is what I’m thinking of doing. I’d like to wail at the end a little bit and do something different.’ He said, ‘Go for it.’ And they loved it. Here we are.”
Here we are, indeed. Listen to Wilson sing with Ghost below.
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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