Interviews
‘All Fun and Games’: Writers-Directors Ari Costa and Eren Celeboglu Talk Coming-of-Age Horror [Interview]
“It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.” How many of us grew up hearing this from parents or babysitters, then reluctantly agreed to be a little more careful? Unfortunately, that’s not an option for a trio of siblings living with their single mother in Salem, Massachusetts. On a night stuck babysitting their younger brother Jo (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), Billie (Natalia Dyer) and Marcus (Asa Butterfield) find themselves caught up in a deadly game dating back to a shocking incident in the town’s forgotten history. Once the sinister die has been cast, anyone caught up in the horrific festivities must keep playing. The only way out is death– and even that might not break the spell.
All Fun and Games is a terrifying horror film, but the partnership behind it comes from the world of comedy. Writers and directors Ari Costa and Eren Celeboglu first met on the set of Community and quickly bonded over a shared love for horror. In a conversation with Bloody Disgusting’s own The Boo Crew, Costa and Celeboglu share their earliest experiences watching scary movies, the surprising connection between humor and fear, and the seeds that eventually blossomed into their feature film debut. This dynamic creative team dished on the emotional core of All Fun and Games, the collaborative spirit behind Butterfield’s troubled character, and the surprising inspiration for the film’s cursed knife.
The heart of the film is a Coming-of-Age story.
When asked to describe All Fun and Games using only one word, Celeboglu says “trauma,” while Costa replies with “hope.” These two opposing forces which the filmmakers describe as “two sides of the same coin,” combine to create a touching story of adolescent fear.
Describing the genesis of the story Celeboglu says, “We really wanted it to be a coming of age story … wrapped in the subgenres of possession and slasher. So we dug deeper into the backstory of the demon which was this idea of a witch in Salem and her son. We tried to find these echoes and parallels into our family in the present. … It’s such a metaphor for life and for childhood. You learn by playing. You learn by getting left out. You learn by getting bullied. Games are dangerous. Our parents can’t always be around to protect us.”
Costa remembers finding common ground with one of the story’s youngest characters. “I think, for me, Jo was my entry point to the movie, you know, coming of age during this time. This is when I became obsessed with horror movies. My past, my sibling, and then the dynamic with my mother isn’t that different from what’s on the page. So, I really think that the heart of the movie is what appealed to me.”
The film also touches on the difficult elements of childhood and the ways we learn to grow from pain. Celeboglu expanded on this element of the film saying, “Childhood is beautiful, but it’s also really ugly. I think, for me, the real duality of the drama felt very, very real and it felt very emotional. I’m really proud of the ending of the movie, because we come back to reality. You get this huge emotional wallop at the end that a lot of movies skip out on at least particularly in this genre. It’s like, ‘Oh, no. Everything’s fine.’ Or it’s a scary ending. We had those, but when we landed on this, it really made it all worthwhile. For me, it was this idea of the family just trying to get through it and these kids just trying to find their way in the world.”
Asa Butterfield pulled out all the stops to portray the spirit of a demonic child.
The sinister game begins after Jo finds an ancient knife made of bone and carved with a sinister invocation. Hearing whispers from these cursed artifacts, Jo finds himself possessed by a demon hell-bent on playing deadly versions of childhood games. Hoping to protect his little brother, Marcus soon becomes the vessel for this angry spirit. The tricky role required Butterfield to essentially play two versions of the same character: the real Marcus, and the centuries-old spirit of Daniel, the demonic source of this deadly curse. Costa remembers Butterfield’s enthusiasm for this tricky transformation and the collaboration that brought this complicated villain to life.
Costa: Asa was gracious enough to meet with us and he had a blast just talking about the character. He was trying things out over zoom with us. We could tell that he was the guy just because he wanted to play. He was open to trying everything. And I think for Asa, it was a big exploration. It was first like, “Where does the mania come from? Where does the danger come from? Where does the chaos come from?” And then also thinking about who the demon is. The demon is a scared child who was tortured and forced to play these games that he now inflicts on other people. “So can we still find that child in my portrayal of the demon like the twisted way I might smile, the way I might talk or what my eyes are doing?
Also, we had this local actress, surprisingly, who played the demon Daniel. She wore a fully prosthetic mask of a boy’s face that we inflicted all this damage onto. But they collaborated on how he might walk because some of his toes are chopped off. How he might talk because he’s got a slit throat. They really collaborated on crafting the way the demon might move, and you’re just figuring out how to embody that. Asa had a particularly tough job by playing Marcus not possessed which is something that he’s not done before to play this conflicted teen character who is full of rage as a result of being abandoned by his father. He uses his fists and violence to get his aggression out. And then, obviously, [playing] the demon is a whole other thing. So, it was particularly tough for him the whole shoot. But he was a true gentleman and just an amazing collaborator.
The film’s look was inspired by German witchcraft and The Evil Dead.
An opening scene nods to the film’s famous setting and the proliferation of witch-themed attractions throughout the town. However, Billie notes that most people aren’t aware of Salem’s full history. Many stories have simply been forgotten or intentionally hidden over the years. Aiming for authenticity in bringing this Salem family to life, Costa and Celeboglu turned to Production Designer Diana Magnus to help them develop the world of All Fun and Games.
Celeboglu: Diana Magnus is wonderful. She’s a production designer from Toronto. When we met with her, what’s always a wonderful thing is her references were not movies. They were art and photographs and architecture, and history. The vibe of it was just like, “Whoa, okay, that’s our movie,” right away. She was always coming at it from a place of stuff within the house. For instance, she was like, “Well it’s Salem, and it would have been these German families, and this German heritage, and German witchcraft.” So there’s all this kind of stuff that is layered into the house, whether it be antlers, and horns, and sayings, and chairs and a style of chair all through the kitchen. She was layering all the way back to the beginning of Salem into it. She was also just so creative with responding to the things that inspired us. Ari and I, we’re so obsessed with wallpaper, both from The Shining and Prisoners and these movies that make you feel like you’re in a fever dream.
Magnus also had a hand with designing the film’s macabre knife along with prop master Solmund MacPherson.
Costa: Eren and I had this idea that the knife should be made from Daniel’s femur. Basically once he died, his mom took his bone and carved this knife out of his bone. She put these incantations on the knife to sort of draw him out and then put it on the Puritan’s windowsill that night so they would have to do battle with him forever. The knife was something that we had many different iterations of. It’s so cool to have what we think is an iconic prop that has to do with your movie. Honestly, as a horror fan and as a genre fan, to have that almost museum piece is really, really cool. Something like that to represent your movie.
Celeboglu: The knife is definitely a grandkid of The Evil Dead knife which is the granddaddy of those kinds of bone knives. I mean, it’s a lot crazier than our knife, but you know, next time we’ll do the skull sword. [Laughs]
Costa: Even the details of the knife like on the round bone at the top of the femur is Daniel’s face with the mouth open and an X is carved into it. So there’s those sorts of fine details that come into play, which are really cool too.
All Fun and Games is now available to rent. Watch it tonight!
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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