CraveOnline: When you’re looking at a horror anthology film from the outside, there’s a general tendency to rate them. I find that most horror anthologies have just one great one, or just one bad one.
Mike Mendez: Right.
Does that lead to a sense of competition between you guys?
Well, there’s an internal debate that maybe I should not divulge, but I don’t know. I feel competition is good. I feel it’s healthy. I feel everyone should be trying to make the best one. Others don’t. Others feel that no, no, this is a group project, we’re just all doing the best we can. But I encourage it. I want people to say, “I’m going to try to top that person’s. I saw that short, I can do better, I can go further.”
I agree with you, and that’s sort of my problem with anthologies is that you’re lucky if you get one good one even, these days it feels like, and that one good one stands above the other so much it’s really rather jarring. That’s exactly what we’re trying to avoid on this one. That’s part of the reason we’re doing them all together, and I will say there’s a unified look to a certain degree in the fact that we all are using the same equipment. We all are using an Arri Alexa. We all have basically a lighting package we all agree on. But for that the thing was to make it look slick and polished and professional, and not found footage-y and not low budget short film. We want to make cinema. We want to make a movie, and so there was that quality. Quality was a big deal to us, to get it to a certain level.
“We consider that if we have a bad one, we kind of failed.”
So that was also the idea of having the kind of quality control at the beginning of it and kind of determining if we liked your short or not. So that was the thing was that we tried to start off in a place where we felt, at least on paper, we had ten really solid shorts and gave all the filmmakers all the tools they needed to make it properly. So hopefully, I hope, I would love if that ratio – one good one and five not so good ones – is not the case in ours. I would love it if there were ten good ones. But if it’s seven good ones and seven so-so ones, I think that would put us way ahead of everybody else.
We’re really aiming for no bad ones, so that’s another goal we’re having. We consider that if we have a bad one, we kind of failed. So want it to be pretty top notch and pretty fun.
With ten shorts that’s a lot of people cramming together for time. Do you have a framing device, and if not are you trying to carefully focus on you’re going to transition from short to short?
Well, there is a framing device. I don’t want to reveal it quite yet. I think horror fans, particularly the older ones let’s say, or the ones of our generation, will appreciate it. There is someone that is involved that we won’t reveal yet, but that does guide us in and out of the story. And we did also kind of structure them so that they seamlessly, hopefully, blend in from one to the other. So that remains to be seen. Obviously at this moment you’re catching us now pretty much as we’re about to begin the last week of production, so we’ll see. At this point it’s all about let’s just try to get the shorts and get them to a proper place, and then we’ll see how well we can transition between them and make them feel unified. But yeah, the idea is there is a unity and there is a host, if you will.
Are there any particular horror anthologies that inspire you, or that you even just want to simply recommend to everyone reading this interview?
Well, the classic is Creepshow. I would certainly say that that was the one that was probably the biggest influence on us. Understandably people make comparisons to Trick ‘r Treat with us, and I totally get that. People ask us, “What’s the difference between Trick ‘r Treat and your movie?” and the answer is about $14 million. [Laughs.]
But at the same time we love the holiday so much. We felt it was kind of unfair that this one filmmaker took claim to making movies about Halloween. We kind of felt like, no, I think it’s fair that other filmmakers can make movies about Halloween. It’s a universal holiday. I don’t think it should be monopolized by Warner Bros.
“We felt it was kind of unfair that this one filmmaker took claim to making movies about Halloween.”
Anyway, and God, what else? The original Tales from the Crypt is great. Let’s see, what other huge anthologies that were a big influence on us that I can recommend…? We watched all sorts of things, but again, even through the history of them, you get that one good one and some not so good ones. I enjoy Cat’s Eye quite a bit.
I do too.
I think that one’s pretty fun. It’s not Creepshow but Cat’s Eye is not bad. Black Sabbath has got some great stuff in it of course, so I don’t know.
I think it’s an interesting format and I feel what was really special about this one is that it’s not a bunch of random filmmakers pulled together. This is really born out of friendship and this is really born out of love for the genre and the holiday, and this is really born out of support. So I think that’s the one difference. It’s a little bit more akin to Dogme 95, where a group of filmmakers decided to do it together, rather than a producer picked a bunch filmmakers to do something. I think there’s a big difference in that.
Obviously I’m looking forward to Lavalantula, but I’m wondering if there was any movement on a follow-up to Big Ass Spider with those characters.
We want to do it! I don’t know what the hell the delay is. Everybody wants to do it, so I think it’s a matter of finishing Tales of Halloween, but I hope it becomes a priority [in 2015] because we’re not getting any younger, and we’d love to do it. Know that there is a desire to do it on all parties, so hopefully we can find a way to do it where it makes sense. Where we can do it for a number, a financially reasonable way that still hopefully tries to top the first movie. But know that we definitely want to do it. I know I definitely want to do it.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
