Hi, I'm S.A. Bradley and welcome to Hellbent for Horror, a podcast devoted to all things related to horror, where I remind you that you used to love horror movies and you secretly still do. So here we are amid another holiday season. And as longtime listeners know, we celebrate ghost stories for Christmas here every year. And they also know that another of my obsessions is a subgenre of folk horror films.
Now, folk horror and ghost stories look at conflicts between the ancient and the modern worlds and the fine line between the natural and the supernatural, if there's a line at all. Now, how thin is the line between ghost stories and folk horror stories? They both intersect in the haunted season, a new annual Christmas ghost story streaming right now on Shudder through the month of December.
This can be your ghost story for Christmas this year. A new short-form horror tale will premiere every December, just like the old BBC specials did in the 70s. This year's movie is To Fire, You Come At Last. And it's not only a Christmas ghost story, but it's also included in the new folk horror box set from Severin.
My guests today are the co-conspirators who brought these two worlds together, Kayla Janisse and Sean Hogan. Now, Kayla is a film writer, producer, acquisitions executive for Severn Films, and the creator of The Haunted Season. She's the author of the highly influential book, House of Psychotic Women, and her new book is Cockfight, A Fable of Failure.
Now, Cale also wrote, direct, and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, which was a history of folk horror. Now, from the success of that came the acclaimed Blu-ray box sets All the Haunts B.R.'s, which is a compendium of folk horror, where on volume two... right now. I think that might be the last one. There's a million movies in both of those. Now that was recently released and in that it contains To Fire You Come At Last.
That brings us to Sean Hogan. He's the writer, director of Too Fiery Come At Last. His feature credits include the critically acclaimed The Devil's Business and The Borderlands.
He also directed a short folk horror film, We Always Find Ourselves in the Sea, which is also included in the All the Haunts be Ours Volume 2. And he's currently in production on a new feature film project, Scenes from a Young Girl's Disappearance. You guys have obviously been very busy. That took a... a bit to say kayla and sean thank you so much for being on the show no problem nice to be here thanks for having us
So I guess first question I have, I love to find out about obsessions and passions, right? I mean, that's why a lot of us do what we do. And there's usually something that's like the starter of it all. I like to call it the first kiss of horror. Sean, I'm really interested. to find out what was the first horror movie that you saw that struck you so deeply that you became a fan for life?
I don't know if it's strictly speaking a horror movie, but certainly the gateway movie for me that I remember was probably King Kong, the original. I have vivid memories of being obsessed with that as a kid. And from there, it just seemed really natural. I was just one of those kids that seemed to have a genetic predisposition towards horror.
which has always appalled my mom, who doesn't understand where I get it from. But I don't know what it was like in the States, but in Britain in the 70s, it just seemed like horror was in the air. you looked there was horror whether it was in comics or books or on tv or films you know and in those days there were a lot of older horror movies shown on tv still so i you know i remember sitting and watching the lon chaney phantom of the opera on tv one afternoon
But my dad would also let me sit up and watch the late night double bills, which were generally sort of hammer movies and that kind of thing. So I just got a taste for it very early on. And then I'm the right age that we got a VCR. when they first came on the market so all of a sudden i was watching wildly inappropriate videos as well because my parents were kind of fairly laissez-faire about that kind of thing i was allowed to watch most things with the odd exception so yeah
Yeah, it was just kind of in my blood, I guess, and has been ever since. That's kind of like in my upbringing. I could watch a lot of violent things, but no sex. So it's just one of those things where it's like, that was the cutoff. A bit of gore was okay, but I just remember my dad turning off The Evil Dead. I rented The Evil Dead and my dad was like, oh, well, I'll set up and watch that with you. And we got about 25 minutes in and he was like, this is appalling and turned it off.
And I also remember... renting the texas chainsaw massacre and my mom being like don't tell your dad so i got away with that one yeah that's one you can't really get away with right and what do you have oh just a title you're doomed we had the same kind of thing in the 70s
we had the horror hosts who were kind of our gateway people. You know, the weatherman would put on a cape and then he would show these movies that came from the 50s that were sold very cheaply from the universal vaults to all the independent television stations.
And I think that really was a gateway for a lot of us. And Kayla, I don't know if you want to talk about your first kiss, but gateway is probably pretty interesting as well, because you have this incredible encyclopedic knowledge. You have so many movies that you've seen.
Back when I was a kid, there weren't any big resources that were out there. So what was your first Corrupter? I mean, it was, as I talk about in my book, my first horror movie I remember seeing was Horror Express. And I was... too young to even really absorb the story or you know really anything about it so it was it was just the it was just like a central image from that film that became like part of my regular nightmares but
It was always, you know, it was storybooks that had monsters in them, you know, so like there was a Hallmark book that was called Lamont, the Lonely Monster. And this was a big one for me. And then Rover, the Sesame Street book, the monster at the end of this book. So it was I was always drawn towards storybooks that had something to do with monsters or ghosts, you know, and so that naturally.
translated into film and television. I loved Scooby-Doo. I loved all the Scooby-Doo ripoffs that were like the groups of teenagers solving mysteries and stuff. I loved the Hardy Boys mystery. So it was kind of like, we didn't have the plethora of basically horror kids TV that they had in the UK. I mean, they had like outright. Or for kids, you know? So we tended to have things where...
At the end, it would be revealed it wasn't really a monster, it wasn't really a ghost or whatever, you know. But you would still get the trappings of a horror story, like kind of all through the episode or whatever. So I sort of grew up with that. And then my dad used to take me to flea markets all the time. So my stepdad, who was a big fan of...
older horror films. So he really liked Hammer films. I guess they weren't even that old at that point because it's the 70s now, you know. But he liked AIP films. He liked Hammer films, you know, and they would play on TV and he would be like, oh, you know, come watch the movie.
And so I would watch these movies with my dad and then also like Bowery Boys types. He loved the Bowery Boys and Eastside Kids and stuff. And they used to play on Sundays, like every Sunday morning. You'd get all kinds of Bowery Boys and Bowery Boys derivative shows.
Or I guess the Bowery Boys themselves were the derivative show of like the Eastside kids and the Dead End kids and stuff. But so you'd get these movies where, you know, they'd be in a haunted house or they'd be, you know, be meeting Frankenstein or whatever.
And so there was a lot of this stuff that I associated with my stepdad and with like just fun times with my stepdad, you know, and part of what we would do all the time were because me and my stepdad lived in this little bubble almost, you know, in our family. And we would go to every weekend, we'd go to garage sales, flea markets, things like this. And I remember buying my first like famous monsters magazine at a flea market.
Same with my first Fangoria. So I didn't get the first Fangoria when it came out. I think it was like the first time I saw Fangoria, I think it was the one that had the shining on the cover, which was like issue number seven or something.
Yes. Or right around the same time, because I got them like I would get them used, you know, so I wasn't getting them like in sequence or as they came out. So I remember also getting the one with Dragon Slayer on the cover very early. So it was one of those was like my first. fangoria and my first famous monsters i think had like jaws on the cover it was like jaws versus ape like a the old middle finger ape yes
And so that was like the first famous monsters I got. And so but there wasn't anywhere you could buy them just regularly or whatever, you know, like there was it wasn't until I was a teenager that I found stores where you could just go and the new Fangoria would be there, you know. So just.
kind of be like, as I would find these old monster magazines or books, you know, like vampire books or whatever. And my dad would just, he would either buy me this stuff or I would save my allowance and buy it with my allowance, you know, and. But so it just, my parents never discouraged it. As you guys both said, sex was a no-go, you know, so my mom would make me cover my eyes if something played that had kissing or sex or anything.
even like just normal affection um but like um but horror and gore and all that stuff was fine my dad was less interested in gore you know And my mom could deal with it, but her kind of favorite stuff was more mellow drama type of horror. So like she loved the ABC movie of the week. type of horror you know right um things like that and she read a lot of the mainstream uh books you know so she read all the stephen king books which i would then get from her and
And then all the V.C. Andrews books and whatever, you know, like whatever. But she would read this kind of stuff and then pass it down to me. So it was kind of coming from all these. All these different places. So, Sean, it's been brought up a couple times now about the 70s and the BBC, or at least the UK.
As an American, I have to say that if they put any of this stuff that was on, you know, Children of the Stones, Owl Service, even the Ghost Stories of Christmas, PBS would have been closed up by now because there was such an overt kind of... of paganistic feel to it. So there's always been this interesting embrace that UK has for its past that America doesn't necessarily have. Were you steeped in folklore, in the culture as a kid, or was it something that you came to later?
I think I more came to it later. I mean, as you say, it's kind of something that's in the air here, so you don't tend to think about it that much. So when we had the whole folk horror explosion... you know for certainly like you know british horror fans of a certain age you kind of look at it and go huh yeah i guess all that stuff is connected um you never really thought about it it was just something you accepted because we're so used to that kind of vein of horror
But yeah, it was certainly not something I thought about. growing up all that much and i didn't see i was kind of alive when a lot of that stuff was being broadcast but i didn't see a lot of it at the time the whole kind of this sort of rich vein of UK supernatural TV that was, you know, very prevalent throughout the 70s was something I mostly came to later because I was just obsessed with horror movies. I didn't really get that.
there was all this great stuff being done on tv as well so that was really something i had to go and ferret out later on because for years i was i guess you take for granted what you know so When I was younger, I was completely obsessed with the U.S. kind of new wave of horror of the 1970s. That was kind of like my... what I aspired to. And I was like, oh, British horror is so old. It's like, you know, all that stuff's really boring.
And it took me a while to kind of find my way back to it and discover what was really interesting about it and catch up with stuff that I wasn't previously aware of. And, you know, the stuff made for TV is a big part of that because it's always been. now more than ever, but it's always been difficult to make films in this country.
There was a time, it doesn't happen anymore, you know, the BBC and whatever are not interested in making Supernatural TV now. But there was a time when this stuff was just considered... drama like anything else so you they've made quite a lot of it and a lot of it is like really interesting really cutting-edge stuff and this is important to the genre in this country as something like hammer
Yeah, it's very interesting because when later in my 20s and 30s, I started to hear about Christmas ghost stories. I'm going. Britain had ghost stories for Christmas. That's the coolest thing ever. And you're probably like going, uh, yeah, great. You know, it's probably like mom and dad watch that. I don't want to watch that. Now. I always love to find out about connections because obviously both have a very store.
careers. How did you connect? Was this the Miskatonic Institute? I know that you had done a few lectures there, Sean. Yeah, it was back when I used to program for Fantastic Best, like the first time I programmed. twice for them. But the first time I was like one of the founding programmers there and Sean had come over with his film Lie Still. But we still didn't really know each other very well. And it was because I had to go to the UK.
And I needed to stay with somebody because I was making a documentary about reckless Eric. And then I somehow got in touch with you and was like, hey, I know you don't know me that well, but can I stay at your house while I... go over and film my movie and then sean ended up like rescuing me because i got totally screwed and left with no money and sean had to basically take care of me for the whole week oh my goodness yeah that was that was kind of how it started
And then you used to come over and stay with me fairly regularly in London at that point. You would often be over every year or two. And I think it was during one of those times when... You said to me, oh. Because we would sit and watch movies and stuff, as you'd expect. And there was one time Kayla said to me, show me something I haven't seen before. And I was like, what the hell haven't you seen before? But it was specifically like, show me something I haven't seen before.
you in the UK, everybody's seen, you know, something that like everybody here would just take for granted that you've seen it. but that I haven't seen, you know. And that was before the BBC Ghost Stories were widely available. They hadn't been re-released at that point. But I had some bootlegs of them, like, taped off air.
So I was like, oh, yeah, I could show you some of those. And I can't remember which ones we actually watched. The very first thing you showed me was actually the stone tape. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. So you were like, have you ever seen the stone tape? And I was like, what's that?
it's so funny to think about now it's so funny to think about now because now I feel like all those movies are now just baked into me like i now have been dealing with projects related to these movies for so long that you forget that there was like a time before you ever heard of this thing you know and it was only like 2012 or something. So it was like.
you know, whatever, 14 years ago, I had never heard of any of this stuff, you know? And it was Sean being at his house. We watched the stone tape and I was like, oh my God, more, more, more. And so then he showed me some of the ghost stories for Christmas and like, and the painter. And I think the show, An Exorcism, I saw. Yeah, which I love, yeah. Just all this stuff. It all came to me through Sean.
So the stone tapes, you bring that up. It's something that I was going to get to about folk horror that a lot of times we think about it as looking back. But there's kind of this digital age kind of, there's a bit of science fiction. I thought of... Doctor Who's Christmas specials. Do you think that there's some films, once again, a definition of folk horror we can try and get into, but it's like wrestling with smoke. But the idea of...
The futuristic stuff being folk horror as well. I was thinking of, did you ever see the movie The Paper Man? It was a made-for-TV movie. Oh, with Dave Stockwell? Yeah, the college students and they have this. So that was kind of this thing where I felt when I was watching it, even though I had never heard the term full car, that when full car got brought up to me later, I thought of that because there was this idea of like.
There being a ghost in the machine. And it doesn't just live in the technology. It tries to build a corporeal part of itself. It's like punch cards and everything turning this thing. So do you feel that there's... Something in modern films like, say, John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness. Do you see that as folk horror as well? Or is that in its own? I mean, don't.
Prince of Darkness is kind of a good example because I was going to say Nigel Neill was kind of the main guy who was doing this mixing of folk horror and science fiction. And Nigel Neill wrote the early, I don't know the whole history, but he wrote like the early draft of Prince of Darkness. No, I think he wrote, it was Halloween 3 that he worked on, and then Carpenter nodded to him that Prince of Darkness was very Neil-influenced because his pseudonym was Martin Quatermass.
acknowledge the debt. But yeah, I mean, like, you know, Prince of Darkness is very Nigel Neill. Nigel Neill is the guy who... i think is like largely responsible for that mixture of sort of folklore and science that was one of his pet obsessions you see it in the stone tape obviously but you also see it in quater mass certainly quater mass in the pit And I think that was something he kind of...
got from Lovecraft a bit, but because Lovecraft was working with his own invented mythology, whereas Nigel Neill sort of looked back at English history and melded that with science. And I think, you know, that... is still there to this day, really. He's been incredibly influential. For someone who was largely forgotten... or not even acknowledged for a while. It's been kind of heartening to see him get restored to his proper place in the Pantheon.
Yeah, I actually even have a whole set of Nigel Neill stamps that were made by the Isle of Man. Well, you got those. I didn't get those. You got those. I got those. And the funny thing is now every year I get a Christmas card from the Isle of Man post office. I love how the obsession of collection just takes over. I never even heard of these. And both of you are like, oh, you lucky devil. How did you end up getting those?
So let's talk a little bit about the box set, but more importantly, the Christmas ghost story, because that's running as of right now. And Sean, to fire you come at last. The first word that came to mind when I watched it was... There's just this black and white, high contrast darkness. And I love how it starts open.
And then it becomes a coffin, right? By the end, when they're on this road, it's completely black and they're just stuck in this claustrophobic world. It kind of reminded me of like the ghost stories of Christmas, like the earliest ones. The body snatcher. I think the Ransley character most certainly felt like the body snatcher. What were you...
It's obvious that you were trying to do Christmas ghost stories, but I guess the thing that I wanted to talk about is what was important to you about the Christmas ghost stories, and what did you try to veer away from? Because, of course, as you mentioned before, you didn't really watch them when you were a kid, so they're kind of considered chestnuts. Yeah, I mean, I suppose what's important about them to me is I think they're sort of beautiful miniatures of genre filmmaking craft.
For one, I think Lawrence Gordon-Clark, who directed the original run, most of the original run, if he'd made an equivalent series of... films for the cinema he would be acclaimed as a great uk genre director uh and he's still not really and yet i think the sort of the the way those films are put together the sort of grasp he has of mood and landscape all on very minimal budgets i i think is astounding and they're just sort of great examples of how to
create atmosphere and tension with minimal resources. You know, they didn't have huge budgets. There's a lot of suggestion in them. And so for me as a filmmaker, that kind of thing has always been quite inspirational. Partly because I never have any money either. So I'm always trying to make a little go a long way. And they just sort of.
You know, I'm a big fan of sort of mood and just that kind of understated dread which you find in them. That's always been something I've been interested in. So when I sort of discovered them and finally saw them, they just sort of... in exactly with the kind of thing i was interested in so yes there's always been an attempt to to sort of work in that mode as it were i mean you mentioned
Val Luton, the Val Luton film, The Body Snatch. Yes. And again, Luton is someone similarly, someone I kind of constantly go back to because those films do something similar. They make a little go a long way. They're very literate and they're very understated. And that's just sort of. something i really like so yeah so that was always something i was striving towards i suppose the only thing
that I wanted to sort of shy away from. And I don't think this is necessarily true, certainly of the original run, but... In this country now, because they've sort of, the Christmas ghost story tradition has been brought back somewhat, even though I think it's still a struggle to get one made every year. But it has been sort of resurrected, and we do get one most years now.
But there's a certain coziness to them now, which I think is really the only reason the BBC still agreed to make them, because they're now seen as like costume dramas, a bit slightly kind of something, some comfort food for Christmas Eve or whatever. And that's what I'm not interested in. Yeah. That's, you know, I wanted to fire to be Stark. I wanted it to be bleak. I wanted it to be, you know, there's, it's not a feel good movie.
And, you know, I don't think the original ones are cozy, however much there may be a certain kind of cloud of nostalgia surrounding them now. I think if you go back and look at them, they're not cozy at all. Oh, no. quite grim a lot of them and it was that was kind of something i wanted to get at
Yeah, I agree. Looking at the BFI Blu-ray set where they have Whistle and I'll Come to You, they have both versions. And the difference between the two of them is just ridiculous. And I think something that... Luton did, something that you were working with on yours and the original, say, Whistle, is that sound matters so much. And there's a starkness to the sound as well. So what really hit me re-watching the original...
is that it's really experimental in some ways. You have a guy who's mumbling.
for most of it you're right there's not a drive a narrative drive that's really pushing it forward except for these little things and i think i i don't know if you uh based one of the shots on something from whistle but there's this moment in whistle where he's why he just grabs the whistle you know he's why he goes finders keepers and he's walking on the on the beach and the foot comes right down in the middle of the soil so he's like walking on the sacred ground just
being that guy, that Philistine. And there's a scene that's... very much like that in yours, where they're carrying the coffin, and it's the start of the corpse road, and this foot just comes down in the center, and I'm like going, aha, that feels like it's an homage, but I'm not sure. Well spotted.
Yeah, that is absolutely lifted from whistle. Yeah. The sound design on there is great. And what really hits me is how with the small amount of money that those had and the difference between, say, the newer ones that are being done is that. they relied on no soundtrack. In other words, there's no musical score. So there's nothing that is hinting what's going to come. So as small the thing as it is, I think it was like a weather balloon or something, the creature in the back.
background on the beach. Whatever that was, it still freaks me out when I watch it the first second that it's there because it hits on something that's very nightmarish and the sound cut is on a screen, right? It's not a full screen. It has this little...
chop. So anyway, I felt that in what you were doing, that in a way you were limiting yourself in a way to not only hit the budget, but get a feel for that old time when nobody just really... watching what the i think most of the great innovation happens when nobody realizes there's money involved and they're not watching and so it's like suddenly they're like hey wait a second these are making some money and in fact the original whistle wasn't
a ghost story for christmas right no no no it was made for a i think i believe it was made for a documentary strand um which is weirdly how what the world the original ghost stories were also under the purview of the documentary department originally so
Lawrence Gordon-Clark was able to sort of kind of get away with having no one looking over his shoulder for a little while. So again, it kind of goes back to, they just had a little bit of money and they went away and sort of made these weird little things and no one really cared.
just turned out that they were successful but yeah no that's exactly i mean you know that's that's the way i like to work i'm quite happy to be given you know just just enough money and then to sort of go away and not have anyone you know over interfering too much and just yeah come up with something weird like that whistle was the only one i think that i went back and looked at specifically again before we made this because i mean the other they're all in my head anyway and i tend to
watch some of them every year at Christmas. The Whistle was the one I went back and looked at specifically for that kind of starkness of that black and white and just that really just... gritty quality that it has the sort of 16 mil black and white You know, we didn't shoot 60 mil, but I tried to get a bit of that same grittiness in there. I didn't want it looking too clean. You know, there's something about those films. They have a slightly handmade quality to them, and I wanted to keep that.
And I think it's great that you folks are working together. And this is the idea that, you know, you get a certain amount of money and it's like, go with God. In other words, Kayla, it seems like you're executive producing this kind of thing where you just come up with an idea.
find someone that you trust. Then you tell them, find a crew, get it here by this deadline. And I can't help but feel that that's a little bit of the world that you came. I know that you've been with Severn for a little bit. But I think that you've had this amazing career before that, so we can't help but look at it like the Beatles and Elvis finally meet, you know, you and David Gregory. It's just like this perfect mixture. And Woodland's Dark and Days Bewitched, I saw it at the...
Chattanooga Film Festival. It completely blew me away. I was like sitting there going, all my notes were the first 30 minutes, you know, and everything else was things I never heard of, never had a clue or even there. So it was like this. Wonderful Bounty. Now, that was supposed to be like a 30-minute short, right? And it's become a three-hour and 15-minute film. How much, getting David Gregory to agree to it, but how much leeway?
does he give to be able to let you... I mean, for that I had total leeway because he was so... busy with other things that even when I tried to get help from him, he was too busy to help me and I would just have to figure stuff out on my own. And I'd be like, I've never made a movie before. I don't know what I'm doing. And so I just had to make choices, you know, and just basically, you know, surround myself with other people like the editors and stuff like who knew what they were doing.
And if you look at my first assembly, because I did the first assembly myself, because at first I was thinking I was going to edit it myself. And it really is edited like a book. It's just... information, you know, but there's no sense of drama or pacing or it's just like info, info, info. And then bringing in the professional editors, Winnie and Ben. It was like night and day. I mean, basically, it was like they kept everything I had there.
And they kept everything in the same place where I had it and yet somehow still totally transformed it so that it actually felt like dramatic. And it had these moments, you know, like and it did not have that when I was trying to edit it myself, you know. But David Gregory basically. because originally it started as an extra. And when I proposed it to him, it was not even for myself to make, because at that time I was still just an editor at Severn. So I didn't propose ideas. I didn't.
have any creative input in anything. You know, I would just get assignments and I would edit some interview or something. And I said, you know, we were doing blood on Satan's claw. And I was like, somebody should make a, like a little folk horror thing.
And he was just like, okay, go ahead, go do it. And I was like, what do you mean? Like, go do it. And he was like, just, you know, he's like, you know, all the people you should talk to. I'm sure, you know, people who can film things. He just was like, okay, go do it. After, you know, so I filmed a few interviews and then I had this like, even just with the first six interviews, I had like a two hour thing and I didn't know what to cut, you know?
And so then he encouraged me to do more. He's like, wow, you have so much interesting stuff. Why don't you just go further instead of cutting it, you know, and just try to make something that like, if you were making a documentary about folk horror, who else would be in it, you know? and then just try to get those people.
And so, you know, so so it basically was like if I go to David and I say, I want to make a three and a half hour feature film and I want you to give me this much money to make it. He'll say no. You know, but because it was like these little pieces, you know, where he would see progress and he'd be like.
like, Oh, I like that. You know, if I give a little bit more, then you can get more. And then I would show him how far I got. And then he'd be like, Whoa, if I give you a little bit more, maybe you could do this, you know? And so he basically like kept increasing the budget. in like little increments, you know?
And he's still kind of like that. You still can't go to him and just be like, I want to make a film and this is how much money I want. You know, it's like he'll he'll agree to it as long as it goes with the kind of cash flow of each month, you know. And luckily, because he's got he's it's a Blu-ray business. Primarily, he does have revenue coming in every month. There's regular cash flow. So it's not like a lot of other film production companies where you make a film and then you just hope.
some funders come through or, you know, it's like, you have to have all this money at once, you know, like, and you don't, you don't have this other like side business that's generating money, you know? So in that sense, it works really well that he can kind of fund these movies in this little piecemeal kind of way so that as the bills come in, they can just be paid.
but he didn't care about the length he did you know because he's like ultimately it's going to be on a blu-ray so it doesn't matter how long it is um and uh you know so there was no he he gave me like no uh constraints whatsoever you know and a lot of times when I work with people whether it's somebody like Sean making this film or making his previous film, we always find ourselves in the sea, or even artists that I work on lay out for books or whatever.
The main thing is I don't want to micromanage people. I don't want to have to micromanage people. I also don't think I have the talent to micromanage people. So I'm much more interested in finding people to work with who I already know they can do what I want.
you know so i do tend to hire people who are good at specific things like i know there's a lot of filmmakers and designers that can just kind of do anything you know and i don't tend to hire those people i tend to hire people who are good at really specific things because then i already know they can do the exact thing that I want, you know? And then I can just say, okay, go do your thing.
Because that's how I think, and I think most creative people work best that way. I think most creative people work best when they're not trying to fit into all these little boxes, but they can just kind of trust their own instincts and go, you know? Well, I think that, I mean, similarly, we should, we should.
just we should point out that um to fire was originally meant to be a conventional short film when when kayla first approached me about doing it she was just kind of like i want you to make a a short for the for the next haunts book set and it was you know intended to be a conventional 15-20 minute short and that was what i initially started developing i wrote a whole other script which was a more conventional short film and i finished that script and i was like
It's quite what she's going to want. And I had this other idea like bubbling in the back of my head. Kayla had mentioned in her the brief she'd sent me, she'd mentioned. that she wanted to do something about ritual and she'd mentioned corpse roads as an example.
Already done a lot of research on Corpse Roads because I actually have now published a novel about Corpse Roads. And I was like, yeah, I know about that stuff. And so this other idea just kind of came into being. So I ended up writing both scripts. and sending them both to her. I was like, look, one's a short film, the other is longer, but I have a feeling that might be the one you like more. And then Kayla was like, yeah, I don't know what I mean.
And I was like, all right, well, we need to talk about money because I can't make that on a budget for a 15 minute film. But again, I think you went to David and you got it all sorted out. Yeah, because that's the thing. When he sees the progress and stuff, he'll up the amounts, which is why I always... It's like, I know that he won't let something fail, you know, like he won't, he, he's.
Yeah, he's cautious about coming in at the outset, but usually once he sees things going, he'll be like, oh, that's good. Let's put some more into it. I think the passion is what... Really, I'd be surprised if he would stop anything because you can almost feel the locomotive engine speed that you have a momentum with the ideas that you come up with. I mean, you're kind of a renaissance person. You've worked in every medium.
magazines, film festivals, documentaries. It's a huge body of work. And when I first heard about Woodlands Dark, I had no idea whether you... liked full car or not but as soon as i heard it i was like oh and this is going to be fucking awesome only because i knew how deep of a dive you do so for us obsessives that don't get out much, that kind of thing really is exciting to hear about. And it seems like that idea of...
Hands off, not being a micromanager really works as well in how you tell the story. Because I think one of the most brilliant things about Woodlands is that you never try to define what full car is. Instead, you have a bunch of experts. who basically contradict each other. The first half hour is like these people are just like saying all this stuff, which makes it feel like it's wrestling with smoke. Now, with that said, you still have to curate two box sets.
full of these movies so what is it that makes you go this one over this one well i mean i used the movie really as a guiding You know, it was sort of like whatever people talked about in the interviews, you know, because there were some people who thought folk horror is this and other people who thought folk horror is that. And so the films that I chose for the box that tended to kind of bounce between these two.
Poles, you know, and those two poles generally defined would be, you know, people who felt that the source of the horror in the films was something folkloric, like a folkloric creature or folkloric. witch or monster in the woods or something. And you would have these folk rituals to like ward off these things. And then the other uh branch of folk horror which is that the people who have those rituals and believe in these things that they are
they are the source of the horror, you know, that their weird beliefs are the source of the horror. And so those were kind of the two strands, you know, and the Anglo-centric, and they don't fit. totally neatly geographically, but very roughly, it was like the Anglo-centric type of folk horror tended to focus a bit more on the horror where the people who believed the weird things.
were the source of the horror. And then once you get into Eastern Europe and Asia and stuff like that, the horror tended to be some kind of creature or monster. And the folkloric beliefs were actually the things that saved you from that. So the folkloric beliefs were a good thing, you know.
That brings me to some of the things that were really impressive in the second box set. Of course, the idea of the international films that are brought up. And when I first watched Woodlands, one of the biggest images that had my mouth watering was a mask, a wooden mask being put.
on a fire and i was like oh i can't wait to see this in the box set and it wasn't there and i was going how do i find this thing so finally getting to edge of the knife was amazing and you know we have this movie that's in the haida language there's maybe two dozen people that still speak it. So it's not just...
a horror, a folk horror film or folklore. It's also like this piece that is a touchstone of preservation. So you have something that, what I loved about that and like Mike DeLeon's Rites of May. is that you're immediately brought into a world mindset that you can be fascinated with.
What's the difference between folk horror and folklore in some of these pieces? Because with something like Edge of the Knife, what I thought was really interesting is that the monster is almost just like a mental issue, right? Everybody comes together instead of like trying to kill them. I mean, they hurt him, but they're trying to fix him. And I thought that was really interesting, something that's not usually in our monster movies. Yeah.
Well, it's like he's overtaken by a spirit, you know, so it's like they're trying to drive the spirit out of him and heal him, which is basically because of his his grief, you know, because of and his guilt, you know, and. I mean, in terms of folk horror and folklore, I mean, like folk folklore tends to involve. I mean, yeah, it's.
It's broad, you know, because folklore can involve, you know, folklore about Bigfoot, you know, but it can also be like if you tie a chicken to your foot, you'll cure the measles. Right. Or whatever. Well, that's funny because in America, you know, we may not immediately understand folk horror versus folklore. But if I'm to say something like Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle.
In there, people go, oh, yeah, well, Rip Van Winkle's not a horror story. That's more folklore. And the Sleepy Hollow, well, that feels much more like folklore. But you mentioned something that gets me to another of the movies that I thought was amazing, The Legend of Hillbilly John. which is, you know, having to defy the devil. Main reason for that for me is it resonated because I'm from the coal mines of Pennsylvania.
All of that stuff, you know, the idea of the long lost friend, the book, and the idea of powwow medicine is really interesting to me. And it gets me thinking once again about Mike DeLeon's Rites of May, where... You have... the christianity side of things but it almost feels like it's taped onto what's actually there underneath and that's the christianity and that's one of the things when i was choosing it for the box set because the religion being
depicted is Christianity. And I'm like, well, Christianity is the dominant religion. So can this really be considered folk, like a folk religion. And then I talked to some of the scholars and they were saying like, no, when you get into the rural areas of the Philippines, their version of Christianity is, we would consider it like a folk religion.
I felt that in Ireland, southern part of Ireland, where you go to some of the old cemeteries and you're like, well, there's the Catholics, the new school Catholics, very... crim and perfect. And then you see these stones all over a small mound and it says something like he's in the wind now. And I'm like, okay, that's a whole different kind of feel to the idea of death. I guess, Sean, I don't want to turn you into.
to the Corpse Road guy. But at the same point, there's something about haunted places, sacred places, things that have to do with death that take on a certain level of gravitas. And that seems to be what this story is about. There's this gravitas that's what has happened to this man. And he becomes a ghost and haunts everybody. But it's also on this corpse road, which brings up so much.
superstition. And in Ireland, there's the fairy mounds. And when I was in Iceland, the elf villages. What do you think is like the modern equivalent to that kind of thing? Because to me, it's like full cars started becoming big. at least from what i saw when we started having the fiscal crises in in ireland and across the world and all of a sudden you had logging going on in ireland and the next thing you know you have the hollow that colin hardy movie where uh they're logging
And of course they get the zombie disease. So it's like, we're once again, starting to look at these places that perhaps it's from a sin, an industrial issue, whatever it is. Do you think there's something that's an equivalent right now? That's a question I'd need to go away and give some thought to. I don't know. But I do think there's something in it. It's weird how folk horror exploded.
For something that had been there all along, and all it took seemingly was someone to stick a label on it, and then all of a sudden everyone... became completely obsessed with it and and i keep thinking that it might go away somewhat but so far it's still here And I think there probably is something that it is tapping into a sort of kind of contemporary anxiety about.
what's being lost or the state of the natural world or all these kind of things that folk horror sometimes taps into. And it does seem to have really kind of ridden that wave. I think it's strange how... something that's so fixated and concerned with the past and is often set in the past and a lot of these things were made quite a long time ago are speaking to us now.
uh that's one of the really sort of interesting things about this whole phenomenon but as to yeah i mean as to what what the equivalent of some of these things are now i'm not entirely sure i just think that what's what's interesting about it for me anyway is the ability to make something that's about the past, that's set in the past, that speaks to the now. I mean, that was sort of one of the things I was trying to do with Tophaya.
was, you know, aside from kind of like the period trappings and the spookiness and all that kind of thing, but one of the elements of it that was really important to me was the sort of class politics of it. Right. Which never got away.
You know, and that's a film that's set hundreds of years in the past, and yet I think there's elements in it that we can still recognize now. You know, the same way that you look at something like... which find a general and again has a sort of political consciousness to it that
just as applicable now as it was then you know and it was a film very much of its time the kind of revolutionally radical late 60s but i think again it speaks to the times we're living through at the moment yeah that's great because that's something I wanted to speak about, we aren't nearly as class motivated in the United States, yet we were able, I was able to completely follow that there was something.
Even with a dialect, like everybody had a different language. They're all in Britain, but at the same point, they have different... They have different languages almost. And in fact, at one point, the upperclassman is saying, I don't even understand the lower class that they're even talking about. I guess for us, we look at it like middle management, CEO.
Guy who's unemployed and the guy who's working. And I kind of felt that was the connection. Was there anything that you think that we might have missed because we're not so class motivated? No, I think it does. I think people get it. I mean one of the most interesting things for me was this film actually premiered in South Korea.
That was its first public screening took place in South Korea, which was just, you know, they wanted to show the film. It was read just at the time we were finishing the film. So it just kind of happened that way. But and I went over for the screening and Kayla was there as well. And I just kind of thought, my God, how is this going to play to, you know, I'm used to showing stuff to foreign audiences, but it's that's a very, very different culture.
And the language and everything in it, I just thought, I don't know how this is going to play for a Korean audience. Well, also, who knows what the subtitles were saying? Yes. Yeah, no, I know. Because there's words in there that are very archaic. you know like period words and i don't know how they translated them um but what i found was that they actually the audience really seemed to respond to that kind of material that they were
I think from what I understand anyway, Korean society is still very hierarchical. And so the audience there were quite young and they responded to that aspect of it because it's still however different the class... system may be there the way it is here they still recognized it they still recognize that's how the world often works and and responded to it so so yeah now i i think that's
I know the UK is sort of a more class consciousness is more baked into our history, but I think it's hopefully universal enough that people can recognize what it's really about. Well, and I think also right now, like literally now in the US, I don't think you can say people don't understand class differences.
I mean, some of this stuff about the folk horror and the villagers with their weird beliefs and stuff like that. I mean, like all these anxieties feel very real right now dealing with like politics in the U.S. where you have people like so.
Divided and so fervent in their beliefs like they're like looking at the other people like that person's crazy how could they possibly believe that and the other side is thinking the exact same thing about them you know i feel like a lot of the stuff that we see in that type of folk horror definitely people are connecting with it right now. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I never thought of Donald Trump when I was writing The Squire because I certainly did.
Yeah, of course. Yeah, I mean, I feel like I'm in PTSD right now. I grew up in a religious cult that said the world was going to end in 1975. And the same kind of philosophy and the same kind of argument. is what I grew up with. with the idea of the persecution complex and stuff like that. So it's really crazy. It does feel like like the last reel of kill list has come true. And I'm just kind of stumbling through, you know, these little tunnels trying to get out of here. So superstition.
folklore all of that it's it's kind of regional as well as you had mentioned and for me when i was growing up because we did the strip mining because parts of the city collapsed underneath the coal mines all this terrible stuff uh the devil Devil used to pop out of the ground. That was our big thing. Come out of the tunnels. Or you would have the sound of dying miners, ghosts of miners coming out of places at midnight.
What was the folklore around your place when you were growing up? Was there anything that you had that was the equivalent of that? I'm not sure I remember anything. I was not. I mean, I sort of grew up. somewhat in the countryside but not in heavily rural areas so i i don't remember anything particularly like that they're probably if you lived in the right
then I dare say there would have been stories like that. But I don't think, certainly that I remember, that I ever came across anything like that as a kid. I don't know if Kayla did. So for me, it was like, I don't remember.
folklore so much as I do remember a lot of worries about child snatchers you know there was there was like a rash of uh killings in detroit in the late 70s where a bunch of little kids were murdered at some point like the son of the founder of gm was like the main suspect or something
I'm trying to remember because there was like it was kind of like not right in the core of Detroit, but it was kind of like in the in the rich suburbs, you know, these little kids were being kidnapped and killed and then like left in the snow. And right around the same time, there was like a little girl that went missing not that far from my house. And so all these stories were kind of going around and it was really.
uh you know the beginning of what we would see in the early 80s with the milk cartons and all of a sudden you know if you're a kid all the freedom of the 70s was gone and you had to start get you know your parents started paying more attention to where you were you know because for a while there in the 70s you could just run wild like a feral child you know um but then but that was kind of the thing i remember like always like i started sleeping with a knife under my pillow as a child
because I was so certain someone was going to break into the house and kidnap me because these were the kinds of stories that were always going around. So that was the only thing I really remember is like these mythical child snatchers. it's a mythical but it's somehow i think somehow connected um the the there's a public safety film quite famous now a British public safety film from the 70s called Apaches which
Some people have sort of tried to kind of link to folk horror because it's basically about a bunch of kids that die in farming accidents. And it's very disturbing. And, you know, I suppose if you could make a case for it as folk. or if you wish. I had vivid, vivid memories of being shown that film at school because I lived in an area where there were farms and things like that.
i they just they took us all into like the assembly hall sat us down and showed us apaches on 16 mil and i was traumatized by it and for years I had no idea what it was it was just this weird film that I'd been shown at school and then obviously it kind of got rediscovered and I was like oh my god that must be the thing and I watched it again I was like yes it is
That's what I was shown, and it's still as disturbing now as it ever was. So, yeah, in a weird sort of kind of tangential semi-folk horror way, that was a very formative experience. And that film was made by the guy who made The Lawn Good Friday.
right oh no kidding really yeah that's hilarious we had a mystery one of our own which was bus etiquette how to get bused in school and there'd be an accident and they would show the accident in slow motion and with blood and then it happened and then it happened yes absolutely insane the thing i remember is a kid like smuggles a lock blade knife in he's like everybody's going look at the knife blade so in the accent he's holding it like this and people are getting
as they're flying by and i'm like going my god this is madness and it's like the one where it's like one of the little kids has like a mouse and shows it to the bus driver and then she faints while she's driving the bus and they end up in the water right
Yeah, there's like this rolling and stuff and then it ends up in a lake or then it goes off a cliff. Yeah, it's astonishing the way that we used to scare people. I loved how you mentioned myth of because we had all sorts of things about child abductions in Pennsylvania. And it's like murder ballads because there's like this story that's true, but then it travels everywhere.
I guess I know we're pretty much out of time and I want to thank you for the time you've given me. I guess I want to end with, we talked about ghost stories for Christmas. Is there a favorite ghost story for Christmas that you both have? In terms of the BBC ghost stories for Christmas? Sure, it can be BBC ghost stories for Christmas, yes. I mean, my favourite of the actual run of the original...
Christmas Ghost Stories is probably The Signalman. I just think that's the kind of peak of the series, just in terms of how well that story comes together, the performances, everything. You know, it's just a little gem of a film. But I also have a great fondness for The Exorcism, which is...
It is literally a Christmas ghost story. I think it was broadcast in November. It wasn't broadcast at Christmas. But it is a ghost story that takes place over Christmas dinner. And it's the most... feel bad christmas story possible it is so bleak it is so depressing just the idea of anyone sitting down and watching that at christmas just amuses me no end uh but i think it's like a
Again, it's a beautiful piece of work and there are probably strands of it into fire, but that's also, that's my kind of other pick for a really feel-bad Christmas ghost story. And that one was part of, was that part of Dead of Night? Dead of Night, yeah. Okay, so yeah, there was another show called Dead of Night, and it was like an episode of that. But I mean, of the official ones, I was going to say also probably The Signalmen. Although...
The Dickensian one, the Dickens one. Yeah, it's the Dickens one in terms of like the most effective, like for what. what the remit of the series is. You know, I agree that that's kind of, although, you know, there are things in, there are like shots in the first one, the stalls of Barchester that I think are amazing because supposedly it was all shot by candlelight or.
mostly shot by candlelight is what the director said. But I'm also controversially, I mean, not so controversially now, but for people at the time, I'm a big fan of stigma. which is the first of the modern ones because the last two episodes of the original series turned to modern original stories like they were not adapting stories from the past and so from what I understand people were like you know this isn't like
They ruined it. But the first of those is called Stigma, which is about a woman and her family that move out to this place in the country near a bunch of standing stones, and they're trying to remove a standing stone from their yard. And they unleash this spirit that gets into the woman. And basically, she spends the whole movie hemorrhaging.
like just bleeding and she's trying to make dinner and do her, you know, but she's like in the bathroom, like constantly bleeding, even though she has no like wound. There's no visible wound, but she's just bleeding, bleeding, bleeding. And she's trying to hide. At first, she's trying to just hide that she's bleeding. And then eventually, it's like she can't hide it, and she's in bed dying.
And I love that one, I think. And I've said before in interviews, you know, I love that one, I think, because like, I think like women can really relate to the idea of being in a bathroom. Bleeding and trying to make it seem like you're not bleeding. I feel like all the women really love this episode of Ghost Stories for Christmas.
um yeah so that's a really great one too yeah god bless uh youtube weirdly enough i got when i first found out about ghost stories for christmas uh outside of what the the originals were i just tried to find it anywhere and i got to see that one kind of jaw-dropping. I really like Stahl's Barclister as well. And I really, for the new ones, and it might be controversial, the Tractate Mid-Off.
I just absolutely... I like to try to take it off. I think it's one of the best new ones, definitely. Yeah. It's because it's... kind of casting the runes in a way. And I love that kind of story. And it just felt very, very cool. So anyway, thank you so much, everybody. I want to thank my guests, Kayla Janisse and Sean Hogan for their time. It's been great.
You can catch the inaugural episode of The Haunted Season on Shudder for the entire month of December. There's still time. Get out there and see it. Volume 1 and Volume 2 of all The Haunts BRs are available at the Severn Films website, as well as other Kayla Janisse offerings. There's the Central World of Black Emmanuel box set. There's the House of Psychotic Women box set. Some fantastic movies in that. There are specific movies from her book. And coming up, Killing for Culture, correct? Yeah.
Yeah, so Severin has licensed or optioned the book Killing for Culture by David Karekis and David Slater, which was a hugely important book for me. as a teenager or I can't remember if I was a teenager in my early twenties when it came out, but you know, dealing with Mondo films, snuff film, death, like death captured on film.
this whole phenomena of, you know, this industry of this type of filmmaking, basically. And, you know, so it's going to be a much more grim film than... woodlands dark and days but i won't make people sit through three and a half hours of it that's all i can say at this point is my aim is for it to be a lot shorter than my previous film just because the subject matter i think will be too
for people to, you know, and then also having to be a bit more experimental with what I'm doing with the footage because I also just don't want to have like people watching death footage for 90 minutes, you know. being like, like this is soul destroying. So, so yeah, so it's been, it's been interesting because I'm trying to think of unique ways to make that film that can make people.
really think about and talk about what those films imply, the impact of those films culturally and stuff like that. Well, I have both volumes, the newest edition. And if there's anything telling about where we are in the country and the world right now, is that the original book takes from the silence all the way up to 1993 or whatever, when it was first done. And the second.
half, which is 93 to now or whenever it was, it's double the size, more than double the size. And you're just going, man, if that's not telling right there, I don't know what is. But of course, this is a holiday. Once again, thank you both for being on. And thank you for listening, everybody that is out there. And happy haunted holidays. And thanks for listening to the show. Hellbent for Horror was written and broadcast by me, S.A. Bradley, and produced by me and Lisa Gorski.
You can find more on our website, hellbentforhorror.com, and I'm also on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash hellbentforhorror, and my Twitter handle is hellbenthorror.
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