Interviews
[Interview] Nicholas Humphries Talks Debut Slasher ‘Death Do Us Part’
Director Nicholas Humphries is no stranger to genre filmmaking, having directed the web series Riese: Kingdom Falling, and the award-winning Little Mermaid short, among many others. His debut feature film, Death Do Us Part, is a cabin in the woods slasher that sees a soon-to-be wed couple (Julia Benson and Peter Benson) and their friends killed off during a weekend getaway.
I sat down with Humphries to talk about his directorial debut, working with a low budget, and embracing the slasher genre. Death Do Us Part releases today on DVD today from Anchor Bay Entertainment.
Bloody-disgusting: You’ve directed a lot of short films, including the award winning Little Mermaid, and you have a background in web series. How was the transition into your first feature film?
Nicholas Humphries: Scary. I feel like you get to make a lot of mistakes making short films and nobody will notice. Features are another beast. They get distribution and lots of people see them. Combine that with indie film limitations and the pressure to make a good one can be intense. That said, getting to direct the Syfy digital series Riese: Kingdom Falling had kind of prepared me for the experience in a lot of ways. My cast and crew on Death Do Us Part were also very professional and passionate about the film. We had a pretty beautiful and remote location up on the coast too. It was cold and exhausting but we all had a really good time.
BD: Why did you choose Death Do Us Part as your feature debut?
NH: Death Do Us Part kind of chose me. Ryan Copple, who was one of the creators of Riese (along with Kaleena Kiff) had started a production company with Julia and Peter Benson and they wanted to make a horror movie for their first feature. Little Mermaid had just won Best Short at Screamfest so we all kind of just hit the ground running together. Additionally, all I want in life is to direct horror movies. So the simplicity of a tongue in cheek, cabin in the woods murder mystery seemed like a safe place to get my feet wet.
BD: You were working on a really low budget and had a very limited shooting period. How do you deal with those restrictions on set? Anything you wish you had more time for?
NH: I really wish I had more time to kill people. We shot something like 100 pages in about 12 days so I had to be pretty economical when it came to my shot list. We had 2 cameras so covering the more talky scenes was pretty straight forward but it hurt me to have to think efficiency during the scenes where building tension and scaring the crap out of your audience is so key. Although I’m still pleased with the result. There’s some off camera violence but I think there’s something really effective about allowing the audience to imagine what is scariest to them.
BD: Horror fans love their slasher movies, but so much has already been done with the genre that it’s hard to make one that stands out. Was this something you had to keep in mind while shooting? What’s your take on the genre?
NH: Absolutely. I think acknowledging what’s come before is essential. That’s why Scream was such an effective film and has become a classic in its own right. It didn’t try and masquerade as something new. It played with audience expectations for the genre, sure, but most importantly, was a love letter to slasher movies and the fans that continue to support those films. That’s what Death Do Us Part was for me.
BD: It’s also a cabin in the woods film, so you had a lot of tropes and conventions to deal with. Did you embrace them or try to break them?
NH: I think that there are certain beats that you have to hit. If an audience comes in expecting Texas Chainsaw and you give them a rom-com, they’re going to start checking the time and disengage. Simultaneously, we really wanted to take the time to give every character a motive so that everyone is a suspect. So the first act is very much a character study. But I think this juxtaposition intensifies that moment when all hell breaks loose. We’ve also got some neat twists at the end and all the information is properly setup. It was important to us not to lie to the audience. So I guess we were guided by the tropes and conventions but didn’t confine ourselves to them.
BD: I know you love your gore, and some of the promo pictures are quite bloody. How much can we expect in Death Do Us Part?
NH: I would say we have a classy amount of gore in this film. I feel like when movies become about the gore, we desensitize and the bloody stuff can wind up having less impact. My hope is that audiences will have an emotional reaction to these characters getting cut up rather than a visceral one at seeing something gross. Frankly I was a bit surprised at the R rating, but perhaps I’ve just seen more horror movies than your average film-goer.
BD: Canadian horror seems to be on the rise. Why do you think that is?
NH: Canada actually has a fairly rich history in the horror genre. From the low-budget runaway productions of the 70’s and 80’s like Prom Night, Black Christmas and The Changeling, to Cronenberg and beyond, we love making horror movies here. I see it as carrying on a tradition in a lot of ways. I do see a lot of horror movies being made nowadays as more of a business decision. They’re cheap to produce and they’re almost guaranteed to sell. And this saddens me. I can always tell when a filmmaker loves the genre. It radiates from the work.
BD: You’ve got your next film in development. What can you tell us about that?
NH: I’ve signed an NDA so not much unfortunately. I think I can say that it is extremely ambitious and will be my biggest challenge yet. But I’ve been blessed with an amazing and supportive team of people from my Producers to our key creatives. A lot of talent will be bringing this one to life and I can’t wait to get started. I go to camera in June.
BD: What’s next from Nicholas Humphries?
NH: The scariest thing about a career in filmmaking is that it’s kind of hard to make a plan. And you never stop proving yourself. I’ve got the next feature in pre-production and a pretty unique found footage feature script in development I’d like to shoot soon after. And then I guess I’ll see after that. I quit my day job to focus on filmmaking full time for the next little bit. It would be nice to hit the big time but honestly as long as I just keep getting to scare people I’ll be a happy director. Oh and a short film I made will be distributed by Drafthouse on ABC’s of Death 2.5 so keep an eye out for that!
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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