Interviews
‘Over Your Dead Body’ Director on Combining Buckets of Blood & Barrels of Laughs [Interview]
Jorma Taccone is a brilliant filmmaker and comedic voice who breaks new ground with whatever he tackles, whether it’s endless Lonely Island songs and digital shorts, helming episodes of television, or directing absurdist feature films. Taccone’s comedy, while wildly eclectic and unpredictable, is often interested in lampooning the style and aesthetics of other genres, like action parodies in MacGruber, documentaries and music videos in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, and now horror and thriller fare in Over Your Dead Body.
In Taccone’s latest, a struggling married couple (Jason Segel and Samara Weaving) resort to a romantic cabin vacation in an effort to reconnect, only for them both to discover that they’ve been planning the other’s murder. Over Your Dead Body taps into the emotional melodrama of a relationship that may have reached its breaking point, while infusing this tension with hyperbolically brutal setpieces. In a year that’s featured blood-soaked horror films like Ready or Not 2, Send Help, and Scream 7, Over Your Dead Body might be the most vicious of the lot.
To celebrate the film’s release, Jorma Taccone opens up on the similarities between comedy and horror, the power of humor as an equalizer and entry point into more brutal storytelling, the challenges of asserting your voice while doing a remake, and why Over Your Dead Body is “like three movies in one.”
BLOODY DISGUSTING: You have such rich experience when it comes to embracing and subverting genre tropes, going all the way back to Lonely Island sketches like “The ‘Bu.” So much of nailing the joke in something involves that meticulous attention to detail and replicating the right genre dynamics. Was that part of the appeal in taking on a project that plays more into the thriller and horror space?
JORMA TACCONE: I think that with all of the stuff that we’ve done, as you mentioned — things like MacGruber, the action genres, overly dramatic teen dramas — it all comes out of such a place of love. We want to be able to not just do it, but hopefully do it effectively. I think I always enjoyed the idea of pushing those genres and doing them well enough so that you really feel like their worlds are believable, even if it’s something as arched as MacGruber, and then bending it as much as you can into a humorous space. I would just say that it’s coming from love, but then, honestly, horror is pretty new to me. There’s a lot of crossover between comedy and horror because I think that there are explosions that are the equivalent of the way a joke lands.
A big part of the appeal of doing this was how much genre-bending is going on. This movie is like three movies in one, honestly. It goes from almost like a suspense thriller, which is a really fun place to be in. There are a lot of really dramatic scenes that are like real acting scenes between both Samara and Jason, who are both excellent. To dip into that was really fun. It sort of becomes almost like a home invasion movie, too, before it becomes a full-on action film in a way that MacGruber is not. MacGruber is like a faux action movie. This goes full-out and gets treated as real as possible. Then layering all that together and threading the needles of pulling it all together in a cohesive vision. I don’t want to say that word. It’s like saying “filmmaking” or “filmmaker“; “I’m an artist.” All words that I balk at. But no, the humor to me is the thing that sort of ties it all together. It was just like a really fun place to showcase many different kinds of things that maybe people haven’t seen me do before.
There were so many moments that kind of felt like War of the Roses meets Panic Room or Home Alone, or something.
JT: All movies I love. All movies I love. I don’t think that there were any specific references to any movies that we were making, but it all goes into the ether of your brain and influences you.
I was a fan of Tommy Wirkola’s original film, The Trip, on which this is based. Over Your Dead Body does a great job at feeling like its own thing with a different voice. Did you try to refer back to the original film at all, and was that a challenge?
JT: It was a fine line there, but something that definitely made me want to do the film in the first place. I love the original. The original is, I would say, much darker emotionally than this film is, but I also wanted to both honor the original — because I liked it so much — but then also keep its teeth, so to speak, because it’s a dark film. European films are often darker, I think, and then the American remake becomes this softer take on it. It’s more my vibe, along with Jason and Samara’s vibes, if that makes sense. The characters are a bit more — and I don’t want to say this because I love the original — but they feel a bit more redeemable. I wanted to be able to have some closure at the end, where you really want to see this couple together, even though they go through this crazy fucking shit.
So it was both. It was trying to honor the parts of the original that I really responded to and do justice to those parts. And then as a filmmaker, not to change things just for the sake of changing them because I felt like it’s an ego-y thing. Why are you changing something that works, you know? So we really tried to keep the parts that worked for us. Then it’s an overall tonal shift to me.
Another thing that I was really concentrating on is that this movie just ramps. It becomes exponential. So that was something that we kind of found in the edit, honestly, because we did follow the guidelines of the original. It does have my own kind of take on all of it, which I was really proud of. Honestly, a big part of making a remake or wanting to make a remake – because I did not want to, like at all – I couldn’t get the original out of my head. But I just loved Nick [Kocher] and Brian’s [McElhaney] script so much that I literally couldn’t not do it. I know that’s a weird thing to say, but I just kept coming back to it.
Another big thing for me was just knowing that I was going to do Tommy Wirkola proud. He loves this version, and I think he’s really proud of it and proud of me, which feels great! It’s great to have something that you respect and then to really feel like you ended up with something that you’re equally proud of. I feel like it’s an equally impressive movie. Also super fun to see with an audience.
On that note, horror and comedy are both genres that are great to experience with a crowd. This film had a great premiere at SXSW, where it also won the Audience Award. I’m sure that must have been a validating way to kick things off. Can you talk a little about feeding off that energy, and if there were any reactions that left you surprised?
JT: Oh dude, we did the premiere — 15 years ago or whenever it was — we did the premiere of MacGruber at SXSW. With Over Your Dead Body, the response was equal to MacGruber. I mean, it was going off in a way that I was like, “Are they doing an impression of an audience liking this movie?” It was so raucous and so much fun. There are these ramps of laughs that then go into violence, and so to have this audience that is like guffawing laughs and then screaming in surprise is just the best. I kind of never want to premiere anything anywhere else.
There are some brutal sequences with so many moving parts to them that are such great showcases. There’s beautiful effects work going on there, not to mention that fantastic lawnmower setpiece. What were the challenges in bringing those sequences from the final act to life?
JT: It’s funny because, like before delving into this, obviously, I’d done some action before. But with MacGruber, it’s like very shot-reverse shot. Nothing’s tied in.
You’ve got long takes going on here.
JT: No, this is like handheld stuff, and like it’s all choreographed for these bigger setpieces that really involve a lot of blocking and movement. You really have to sit there and storyboard. I’ve storyboarded many things before, but it was cool to work with my storyboard artists, with 87North, with my stunt coordinator. Just incredible dudes, and to be able to honestly work with a company that is incredibly good at that sort of thing and knows violence in a way that is fun, funny, big, surprising, gory things. And then to have a sort of slightly different perspective on it. I’m always trying to have the characters come through during a fight, and maintain that these are novices who are not the best at fighting. That provides a lot of humor, and then using some of that fun sloppiness to both accentuate the violence and humor.
It was such a fun thing for me. I actually think that it was a lot of fun for those guys, too. They’re like really funny guys. They’ve actually made a really funny movie in Germany. They’re all German stunt dudes. It was great to collaborate on that. Honestly, there’s an action at the end that’s really fun and over-the-top, too. A lot of blood. All of it was just so much fun. I think that before I was doing it, I had this moment where I was like, “How is handheld action going to feel?” So I shot a little scene with my kid and his friend, doing it handheld, and I was like, “Oh, this is so much easier!” Everything looks amazing off the top. So the combination of doing that with a pretty heavily storyboarded thing gives it this awesome frenetic kind of feel. It’s really fun to do.
It’s hard to even look at Jason’s face by the end!
JT: Oh my God, right? It does play humorously. That was one of the things that I really liked about doing this: I’ve had a lot of people, including my mom and my step-mom, who are watching it and then laugh super hard at really gory shit that I know they would normally never laugh at. I’ve had people who were like, “I am not a gore person. I don’t like violence, but this was so funny.” It’s amazing that the humor can allow them to find some of those things funny, while still being very affecting because it gets over-the-top.
Over Your Dead Body is playing in theaters on April 24, 2026.
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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