The New Yorker Radio Hour - Horror with a Real-Life Message

Episode Date: October 25, 2019

The director Sophia Takal is working on a remake of “Black Christmas,” an early slasher flick from Canada, in which sorority girls are picked off by a gruesome killer. Takal brought a very 2019 sensibility to the remake, reflecting on the ongoing struggle of the MeToo movement. “You can never feel like you’ve beaten misogyny. . . . In this movie the women are never given a rest, they always have to keep fighting.” Her producer, Jason Blum, of Blumhouse Productions, talks with David Remnick about the success of horror movies with a political or social message, like Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.” And the humor writer Colin Nissan combines four scary plots into “The Scariest Story Ever Told.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

All right, snow and car and lights. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. So let's keep rolling. Are we still rolling? Still rolling? Lots of snow, please. All right, guys, let's cut.

It looks great. It looks really beautiful. All right, guys, let's shoot. We're starting out today on a movie set, a huge soundstage near the waterfront in Brooklyn, where a young director named Sophia Takal is working. She's finishing up shooting her biggest project today. And we're going to go.

Wait, Kat, we're going to go back to inside the car. Inside the car. Inside the car on Riley. Kit, are you loving this window? Yes, we love the window. All right, guys, very quiet. Cell phone's still off, please. Anybody on set? Make sure your cell phone is off.

And rolling sound. Takal and her crew are working on a movie coming out in just a few months. It's a slasher film, actually. She's one of a cohort of young filmmakers who are changing the genre, basing horror plots on some very contemporary issues. Black Christmas is a remake of a 1970s Canadian horror film that sort of invented the slasher genre. But this is a version set now in 2019.

That's a modern take on the threat of toxic masculinity in the form of a slasher movie. So, guys, it's going to be the same cue for the car pulling over. There you are. There you are. Right now, we are lighting this car scene. What they're going to do is make the lights look as if they're driving through street lamps. So they have to add all these different lamps that are going to change color.

And there's people with fans to blow fake snow made of diapers to make it look like it's snowing because we're inside a building. And two of the characters have escaped from the house where there's been a killer trying to get out. after them and they're kind of just like trying to figure out what the hell is going on because they have no idea who's trying to kill them. Okay guys rehearsal is up here comes snow, light gag and car shaking and windshield vipers what are we gonna tell them I'd like to remind you we just killed three people possessed or not and they're lying dead in our house right now it was self-defense you want to count on the cops believing that they didn't believe me when I told them about what Brian did to me Why in earth do they believe us now?

You really want to count on the cops believing us? You don't even believe me. I thought that you were a fighter. I've been fighting this whole time. Where have you been? Maybe if you decided you wanted to fight a little bit earlier, we wouldn't be in this situation. And now you want me to go on a suicide mission

because you finally woke up and decided that now is the time to fight. Pull over. Pull the car over, Chris. Shit, Riley, stop! Keep rolling? I want to go again. right away.

It's a story about a group of friends who are all in a sorority together and who are staying at their sorority over winter break and slowly one by one the women get murdered and then the women who survive have to figure out who's trying to kill them and why. I mean I feel like the reason horror is so popular is because it takes our everyday anxiety is in dread and externalizes them for us and allows us to witness a character going through it and usually surviving. Louise, can I just see a look towards. That looks, thank you. Oh, it's gorgeous.

So in early 2019, after the Me Too movement had sort of called out a bunch of bad dudes, I started to feel like a lot of those same men were coming back into positions of power, getting book deals, going into, like going and performing comedy and doing all this stuff. I had an uneasy feeling, like, maybe things aren't changing as much as we thought they were. And so when they approached me about Black Christmas and asked if I wanted to do it when I rewatched the movie, the feeling I had watching it was like, oh, yeah, you can never really feel totally like you've beaten misogyny. And I wanted to make a movie that kind of captured that uneasiness that I felt. And I think a lot of other women I knew felt of not knowing, like not ever knowing, feeling safe.

And so in this movie, the women aren't really ever given, like, a rest. They always have to keep fighting. All right, do you go, feature the app guys? That was fantastic. I'm good to move on if everyone else is. Let's check the gate. On a good gate, we're going to turn around. And we're going to go, wait, Kat, we're going to go back.

Director Sophia Takal on the set of Black Christmas. DeKal's description of how horror can address some very real issues might remind you of the 2017 film Get Out. Jordan Peel's movie is a fantastic scare movie, and it's also one of the smartest films about racism in our time. He was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. And that's what we're talking about, in honor of Halloween this week, how our scariest fictional stories reflect the real world that we're living in.

The producer behind Sophia Takal's movies and Get Out and many other films is Jason Blum. Blum is the founder and CEO of Blumhouse Productions. So, Jason, we just heard from Sophia Takal, who's directing Black Christmas, a film that you're producing, and it comes out in just a few months, right? Yeah, Friday the 13th in 13th in December. Friday the 13th are few and far between on a very important date to Blumhouse. So you don't see it as a jinx? No, it's the opposite. It's a great benefit to box office. Maybe you should, like, you know, cross a black cat's path and walk under a ladder or something like that and do that. I do that, too, before the movies come out. I give you, of course. I give you these tips for free.

Of course. Thank you. How did you and Sophia get together? How did this project come about? So, Sophia, we have an amazing, we make these movies for Hulu in a series called Into the Dark. And the movies are scary movies based on holidays throughout the calendar year.

Scary Valentine's Day, scary Christmas, scary Fourth of July, scary Mother's Day, scary Father's Day. And we have the kind of benefit with these movies is to try working with younger, newer filmmakers. And Sophia directed a movie called New Year New You,

which was our New Year's Day scary movie. And I thought it was really one of the stronger ones of the movies that we had made. So we asked her, it was actually kind of an amazing thing. We were pitched a remake of Black Christmas. We had a Friday the 13th in December. And in March, I think it was in March, I went to Sophia. I said, I really loved your movie. We have this unbelievable opportunity to remake this movie Black Christmas in an lunatic time frame.

Is that something you want to tackle? And her eyes got really wide, but she, never wavered, you know, and she did it. And I'm very proud of the movie. The movie is really like a feminist take on a very sexist, you know, slasher movie. So that is your signature. It's become your signature that somehow inscribed in these genre movies and these horror movies that there's a cause. Were you specifically looking to make a movie that was influenced by the Me Too moment?

No, but when she had the idea, it was very exciting to me. Like as soon as I, we rarely like find a cause and try and marry a movie to it. We really look for, yeah, it's organic. And I think I don't even say to our filmmakers, you know, we're only looking for horror movies that are, that have a cause. But we're, I'm a political person. We're attracted. I'm attracted to things that have something to say. So not all the movies, but most of the movies that we do, there's some social message or some, some, some more to it behind the movie than just a bunch of scares.

Jason, why did you get so heavily into horror movies? I got heavily into horror because I fell into paranormal activity at 35, and I'd been kicking around, trying to find a place for myself in the movie business for 15 years. And I wasn't comfortable in studio film, and I wasn't comfortable in independent film. The making of a studio movie, I made one called The Tooth Fairy, starred the Rock. It was a $60 million, $65 million movie. even at that price, I found the process frustrating. There were a lot of people involved. There was so much money involved

that there was so much pressure on every decision. I thought there was antithetic. The creative process, you've got to be loose. You've got to kind of have fun. On the flip side, I loved the process of making independent movies. The money was lower. The pressures were different.

There was much more freedom. There was much more independence. And so what paranormal activity did was coalesce those two lives that I had. It was the ultimate independent movie, released by the most traditional of studios, Paramount. And paranormal activity, how much that cost to make? 15,000 to make, 200 million came in, or 193, depending on who you count.

I think that's what's called a good profit margin. What's here? What? What are you talking about? I don't know. I feel it. I feel it breathing on me. And I was lucky enough that the success happened when I was old enough to realize I was a small part of it.

If it happened when I was 22, I would have thought I was all of it. And I didn't take the bait. I didn't listen to the advice I got from people, which was, you got to make a big movie. You've made this low, low budget scary movie. You got to make a big genre movie, right? I said, no, you know, I want to see if I can do this. I want to see if I can make independent movies released by studios. And if you look at what the nexus of independent movies released by studios, you look at what the nexus of independent movies released by

studios, what works in that description are horror movies. Did you like horror movies going in? Was that something that was a special obsession of yours as a young guy? I liked movies generally. I was not a horror. I always say it wasn't a horror movie fanatic. I wasn't like I wasn't like Quentin. I wasn't like

Eli Roth or whatever. No, I really love movies. But as I got into it, I discovered what, you know, on the movie side, I was built to do. You know, I was always a weirdo growing up. Halloween was my favorite holiday.

I was an outsider growing up, and I definitely found my people after paranormal activity, and I stuck with it. I stuck with it for 15 years. Did you have favorite horror movies? My favorite filmmaker, if there was any indication,

I think my favorite filmmaker was and still is Hitchcock, depending on if you put it into the thriller or horror, which I think is, you know, I think people who don't like horror movies, but like some of them, call them thrillers. So you get out,

my favorite thing about get out is, I hate horror movies, movies, but I love Get Out. So Newsflash, you don't hate horror movies because Get Out is a horror movie, but to justify, they say Get Out was a thriller, but Get Out is totally a horror movie. How did it come to you? It came to us because Sean McKittrick, who was the original producer on the movie, Jordan had pitched the movie to him. They had commissioned a script. They were trying to get it made for a higher number. We all read Get Out. We came to our Monday meeting. We said, I think we like this. I think it's good. But it's definitely new.

definitely no one has seen it before. There's so many benefits to low budget, but one of the great benefits is when you're making expensive movies, the only way to green light, the movie, is to have movies that the movie that your green lighting feels similar to

that have been released in the last five years. And then we all ask each other, why do so many movies from Hollywood feel similar? Well, they have to go through that process. By making low-budget movies, by giving control to someone like Jordan Peel, which we did, by saying, listen, we love this,

you know, bet on yourself, if we're only going to give you this amount of money. We could do the opposite. We can read a script and we can say, first of all, I like it. And second of all, it feels like nothing I've ever seen. And so I heard that you decided to change the ending from what Jordan Peel had originally planned.

What was the original ending and why did you feel it needed to be different? What's that conversation long? We screened the movie and the movie ended in Daniel, Daniel's in jail. The lead character is in jail. Chris, I really need to I don't remember

impress on you the importance of remember some of those names can finally leave us much to work with I don't remember All right, look I just take it from the top Walk me through it again

Right I stopped it I stopped it The movie ended I ran up to Jordan There were other people around I said Jordan you can't do that I said the movie is too good

Daniel's performance is too good The audience was with it And just so with the movie And they were just bummed to see the jail. They were so sad. They were so sad. But it's a horror movie in some sense. Isn't it supposed to end with it?

You can't. We have a lot of movies with sad endings. I don't have you ever seen a purge movie. Everyone ends worse than the next. I'll say. But you can't ask the audience to digest something they've never seen before and then punch him in the face, which I felt like is what Jordan was doing. There's so much new going on in that movie.

just felt in my bones, you couldn't ask them to accept and embrace that and then take it all away from them. And Jordan, he said very little. He said, I hear what you're saying. Let me think about it, you know, but clearly he processed what I said and he wanted Daniel to wind up in a positive way, not in a negative way. And then he wrote a new one for the movie, which we shot. Jason, certain eras had various themes that were inundating the horror films of their time with the kind of paranoia of the Cold War, the nasty violence that used to see in kind of the Saw era horror films. What are the themes that are at work now? They seem to be identity seems to be a ton of identity.

So we talked about it earlier, but our movie Black Christmas is really a woman's version, a woman's perspective on the very sexist slasher movies of the 70s and 80s. I think most of all identity. And then I, you know, gun control, the purges about gun control. The Purge is about gun control. You think climate change is a theme of horror films? It hasn't. It's deaf.

There's going to be a great climate change horror movie. We haven't seen it yet. There have been climate change movies, horror movies that haven't touched a nerve for whatever reason. We made one. We made one. Barry Levinson directed a movie for us called The Bay.

He was going to make a documentary about the polluting of Chesapeake Bay, and he called his agent said, I want to make a documentary. His agent said no one's ever going to see a documentary about the polluting movie. Why don't you make a horror movie? You know, it's a kind of a side

note here, but one of the tricky things about horror is people who don't understand, respect, like, pick one of the above horror. You could always tell if an executive isn't really a horror movie fan, and they're just kind of in it for the money because they say to me, well, what are the scares in your movie? What are the scares? So the truth of the matter is, they're really only 15 scares, period. There's the, like, for instance, and get out. Stuff jumping out.

The deer hitting the window. Now, the deer hitting the window has been in 9 million movies. In 8,9009,999, 9,000, it wasn't that scary. And get out. You jump out of your seat. Why? Because there's a conversation between an African-American man and a white woman who were dating about race and she's going to visit the white family.

And you're like, oh, my God, oh, my God. The drama, you're so tense. Then throw a deer at the window, you jump out of your seat. So what makes horror movies scary is what's in between. the scares, not so much the scares. The horror films you produce aren't niche genre films. Some flop occasionally once in a while, but your record is pretty good. And some projects stay pretty small.

But a lot of what you work on goes on to make very serious money at the box office. Why is there so much energy behind horror films in particular right now? You know, I'm tempted to say society is so in turmoil. X society. I think that's a little bit true. But I think what's more true is that there's a real shift, which is even, you know, and this, the horror movies

have been doing well for longer than this, but I think they're on an upward trajectory of communal experience. Going to the movies fits into that category. Why do people want to be scared together? You want to be, it's much scarier. It's much scarier. It's much scarier to be in a room with a bunch of people.

You can feel everyone. It's much, much, much scarier to watch a, watch a horror movie in a movie theater than at home. Much, much, much scarier. But why do you want to be scared at all? At all? The same reason you want to take a roller coaster or jump out of an airplane. It raises your adrenaline. Everyone has their adrenaline raised in different ways. But some people get it from scary movies. Blumhouse and you, Jason, are known for the diversity of the people you work with. And you've been very good also about not patting yourself on the back about this. I hate when people do that. So tell me about your thinking on this question. You've had you you you've employed a lot of people of color women who are

directing your films under your umbrella. How does that come about? And why isn't it happening more generally? Yeah. On our our our Amazon series now I'm going to pat my back is all underrepresented directors, all eight not 50 percent, you know, all all eight directors. First of all, why we do it? We do it because, um, beyond it's being the right thing to do. I, yeah, I don't do it for that reason. And we hire it because it's great business. We hire it because it reflects our audience. Our horror movies audience has made up 55% women, 45% men. Young girl, teenage girls, drag their friends, boys, and girls to horror movies.

Not the other way of right. No kidding. 100%. You want to have it that storytellers reflect your audience. So that's why we do it. Another benefit that people have caught up now. But another benefit is because those people have been prejudiced against in the past, they're very talented people who are from an underwerex.

represented group, and they're not getting hired. And we're like, come work here. Now, that's not really true anymore. It's just not true. And that is a good thing. Jason Blumhouse produced a movie called The Hunt. And it was sort of a, I don't know, maybe this is unfair, but a darker version of the Hunger Games. It's about a group of elites that hunts people for sport. Your idea is incredible. I can't argue with that. We pay for everything. So this country belongs to us. It's just business. Hunting human beings. for sport. They're not human beings.

Every year, a bunch of elites kidnapped. And a few months before it was set to be released, Universal canceled it after the mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso. And I've only seen the trailer for the hunt and know a little bit about it, but I'm not quite sure why that would be the case. Well, it was a collective decision. We all made it together.

And looking back at it, I still think it was the right decision. because it was the wrong time in the country for that movie. Is it ever the right time? There are mass shootings all the time. I mean, it never stops. You're right, and we face that on the purge, too. But that weekend fell into even another category for the U.S., which is saying a lot. I do think there's a right time for the hunt.

I think the violence in America and politics got conflated in an incredibly unusual way. The politics of the movie are quite different than what was right. represented in the trailer. And one of my big goals for 20 on the film side of our business is to get that movie out. And I hope we'll be successful in doing it because I'd love people to see the film. I hope the times allow it. I hope they do. You're right about that. Jason, thank you. Thank you. That was film producer Jason Blum, the CEO of Blumhouse. And that's our show for this week. I'm David Remnick. And I want to thank you for joining us. And I hope you'll join us next time. Be sure to touch on Twitter, and you can always find us at New Yorker Radio.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Riannon Corby, Karen Frulman, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Allison McAdam, Mung Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trina Endowment Fund.