Exclusives
[Interview] Director Darren Bousman On The Look, And The Gore, Of ‘The Barrens’
Darren Lynn Bousman‘s psychological horror The Barrens, which stars Stephen Moyer, Mia Kirshner, Erik Knudsen, J Larose, Allie MacDonald, Max Topplin and Peter DaCunha, will be hitting DVD and Blu-ray on tomorrow, October 9th.
I recently hopped on the phone with Bousman to talk about his use of Super 16 in the film, working with Stephen Moyer and his approach to gore as well as the legend of The Jersey Devil.
In the film Moyer plays “a man who takes his family on a camping trip to the more than 1 million acres of dense forest known as the New Jersey Pine Barrens, where he becomes convinced they’re being stalked by the legendary winged monster that looks like a deformed hybrid of several different animals.” The legend of The Jersey Devil has been passed along for hundreds of years, as the creature has risen from obscurity to take its place alongside the Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot and the Chupacabra. Get more at the film’s Facebook.
Head inside for the interview.
What initially struck me is the look of the film. Aesthetically it’s much different than something like Mother’s Day or The Devil’s Carnival.
I think I try to make each film unique and different. The first thing I do is to figure out the kind of movie I’m making. And the question is, “will the movie work outside of the gimmick?” In this case, the gimmick is the monster. In Repo the gimmick is the singing. With the Saw stuff the gimmick was the violence. So it’s all about, do these films work with that stuff removed?
With Repo the question was would it work if I removed the singing. The Barrens needed to work if I removed the monster. And it’s almost not a horror movie, it’s a drama with monster elements. And the look is something that compliments this. It’s an homage to my favorite era of filmmaking, which is the 70’s. I didn’t want to do something that would make it look clean and clear and polished. We immediately turned our back on HD, we turned our back on 35MM and we went with Super 16 which had more character to it. That old, filmic, grainy quality.
The Jersey Devil has been an urban legend for quite some time. How did you settle on it for the film?
I’m a huge cryptozoology fan and there are hundreds of different creatures from the Chupacabra, to Bigfoot, to the Loch Ness Monster. I wanted to pick one that had not had a barrage of movies made about it. I feel like each time a movie is made about something it becomes saturated very quickly by other films. To me, The Jersey Devil was almost an obscure legend. So I wanted to do something I had a little more leeway in and present something that the audience might not be familiar with.
It’s a cool story and it spans hundreds and hundreds of years, which is fascinating.
Can you talk about working with Stephen Moyer? He’s a real journeyman when it comes to taking a lot of these roles.
Moyer is f*cking awesome. He’s one of the most talented actors I’ve ever worked with. And he took a huge risk making this movie. He’s a leading man on “True Blood”, he’s good looking – he’s Bill Compton. And you put him in this movie where he’s not going to look good, he’s going to have bags under his eyes, he’s going to look grumpy at all times.
It was a big risk for him to take it and he knocked it out of the park. It’s all about perception. I think people going in expecting a monster movie are going to be severely disappointed because it’s not really a monster movie. It’s a character study on Stephen Moyer, and I needed someone who had the ability to not only be sympathetic but also dangerous. You can tell that he’s a tortured soul but you have to have compassion for him. You have to wonder if he’s committing these horrendous acts.
You’ve got a lot of carnage in this movie. You say it’s not horror, but there’s plenty of gore.
Naturally I couldn’t just go off and make some drama. I had to appeal to the horror crowd, knowing that they would be the main audience. A lot of it is animal violence but you also get glimpses of gunshots and other nasty stuff that happens to the characters.
One of the lores of The Jersey Devil is how it kills. One of the legends is that it goes for the stomach and it removes the innards. And that was the theme I went with for this. The scene at the beginning is great, we actually have vultures and all of this ream-life disgusting stuff in there.
Exclusives
Doug Bradley Would Love to Play an “Older, Darker” Pinhead in a ‘Scarlet Gospels’ Movie [Interview]
Demon to some and angel to others, Doug Bradley achieved horror icon status for his portrayal of Pinhead in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser and its first seven sequels. Although he hasn’t reprised the role since 2005, the consummate actor wouldn’t rule out a return. “I certainly never say never. I’ve never said I was done with it. I’ve never said I’m retired from it.”
He continues, “I’m sensible about these things, too. I was in my mid-30s when I first played the character, and I was just turning 50 when I played him the last time. I ain’t in that age range anymore. I’m now in my 70th year, and to some extent I think special effects makeup is a younger man’s game.”
Bradley’s ideal circumstances for a return would be an adaptation of Barker’s 2015 novel The Scarlet Gospels, which concerns the end of Pinhead. “If we did that, we could maybe present an older Pinhead to be aware of the fact that I am the age I am, that time and gravity does what time and gravity does.
“An older, darker Pinhead would intrigue me, one not so much in love with the flippant one-liners and the witty comebacks and so forth.”
He notes that The Scarlet Gospels‘s vision differs from that of Hellraiser. “Christian theology was very much avoided in relation to the way that Hell was talked about in the first Hellraiser movies. Clive typically blew that wide open with The Scarlet Gospels. It’s very theological on a cosmological scale.
“That would be the perfect bookend to my life in latex, if I can put it that way,” he says before reiterating that no such thing is in the works to his knowledge.
“I’ve never turned my back completely on the character, but realistically, I think that’s probably that, and that’s fine. I’m proud of what we did with the movies, and I’m proud of my work in it. I’m cool with being where I am now.”
Pinhead was most recently portrayed by Jamie Clayton in David Bruckner’s 2022 Hellraiser reboot, to which Bradley had “a positive response, coupled with a slight disappointment, to be honest. That’s not a judgment on her at all.”
He explains, “I thought that the design elements of the remake were really the star of the show. I loved what they’d done with the redesign of the box. That metal grid around the house, I had no idea why it was there, but it was certainly very cool. And all the stuff going on up in the ceiling, great!”
Bradley perked up when Clayton’s Pinhead came on screen. “I thought the redesign of the makeup was very cool. It was a bold thing to take on redesigning such an iconic makeup, and I thought they did a very good job with it. I loved the change of pallets. I loved those intestinal pinks and pale purples and so forth.
Jamie Clayton in ‘Hellraiser’ (2022)
“Jamie is very slight. She’s tiny across the shoulders. I was immediately intrigued by it and kind of sat up. When Pinhead first appears in Hellraiser, it’s very in your face. In spite of the fact that I’m wearing a skirt, it’s very macho. It’s very masculine. It’s, ‘Here we are. We’re Cenobites. We do this, we do that. Fuck with us, and we’ll tear your soul apart.’ It’s very clear.
“[Jamie] looked rather doll-like, a little bit childlike, and I remembered Clive’s original description of the Pinhead cenobite from The Hellbound Heart. It — gender unclear — had a light and breathy voice like that of an excited girl, and that was what I wanted to hear. We didn’t get that. We got a voice that was rather close to the original Pinhead voice. I wanted something that matched the image; something quiet, delicate, a little bit playful, but still with the threat riding through it.
“She wasn’t really asked to do very much. There were some wonderful shots. There’s the distance shot where she’s standing on water outside the house; beautiful, beautiful shot. But I felt she wasn’t asked to be terribly proactive thereafter. So I was excited, intrigued, and ultimately a little bit disappointed — but not by Jamie’s performance at all.”
Although his time as Pinhead may or may not be behind him, Bradley can next be seen in Thorns, a Hellraiser-inspired movie that melds themes of religion and science with practical special effects. It opens in select theaters in Michigan, Missouri, Kansas, and California on February 23 with an expansion aimed for later in the year.
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Doug Bradley in ‘Thorns’
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