Special Report: Clark Collis on Screaming and Conjuring

It is a trip through the horror genre for the last say twenty five years, that sweet spot between when Scream came out and then the Conjuring movie started, and a whole lot more. It is a just wild ride that he takes you on. Goes before Scream, of course, and goes after the Conjuring movies, and talks about a whole lot of stuff that as you hear this interview, your mind will just start racing with all of the other titles that came out during that wonderful time. Thank

you so much for listening. Definitely pick up Screaming and Conjuring and I hope you enjoy this interview. Clark Collis, thank you so much for coming back on the show. I always appreciate talking with you. I had such a fun time talking about You've got read on you and am super excited to talk about Screaming and Conjuring. So when I saw the title of the book, wasn't exactly share what it was about, but I kind of had an inkling how did you approach this topic and what inspired this book.

waves of horror that arrived during that time. So obviously following Scream, you had a lot of horror teen slashes essentially, and then that was followed by both the short lived craze for j horror and the rather longer lived crazes for remaking every horror movie ever made, and also what became known as the torture porn sort of period. Plus you had the French extreme, you had influences from abroad. From abroad, essentially the book is very US and to

some degree UK focus, but primarily US. And then that also led to this started the sort of supernatural, both fan footage, the enthusiasm for fan footage movies and for supernatural horror, which began with paranormal activity and then insidious and then ultimately the conjuring. And I think there had been books about the screen franchise, for example, and torture porn and Jay horror, and I just thought it would be interesting to me certainly, and hopefully the readers weave

together a tale. I could see the story in my mind, the way that one wave or one batch of filmmakers inspired the next sort of positive legal negatively, So you have scream inspiring all the team slashers. But then you know, after two or three years of that, you had the onslaught of as I said, quote unquote, torture porn movies, which to some degree was the reaction to that Rob Zombie, and he was like, I was never going to make a Screamer, I Know what you did last Summer, or

an Urban Legends. It was always going to be My influences were always going to be from the seventies, essentially. Then he went on to make House one Thousand Corpses and The Devil's Reject, so that was in my mind. Originally. I pitched my wonderful publisher, Matthew at nineteen eighty four Publishing, doing a book that kind of described the creation of ten or so franchises from the period, because studying it

was Scream in nineteen ninety six. You do have this new wave of franchises because the previous franchises of the eighties, Your Halloween's and your A Night We're in Elm Streets had run out of gas a bit by the mid nineties and then were replaced by Scream, I Know what you did last Summer saw obviously hostel and then leading

into paranormal activity and insidious and the conjuring. So I suggested picking ten franchises and looking at that, Matthew made the student observation that's all well and good, but if somebody doesn't, for example, the Saw movies, and that's the

whole chapter that just gonna skip. So maybe it would be best to make it a little bit more palatable to those people too, to weave the weave all the stories together, which which I think he was one hundred percent rider, and I'm happy with the way that it turned out.

and just take me through this. And you are such a good host to take me through this entire journey.

it was quite a popular film. But then I interviewed and interviewed the lovely and very talented Patrick Lacier, who was Weds Craven's long time editor but also directed a bunch of films, including it was the second film actually, Dracula two thousand, and he related the story of how in I guess February two thousand Bob Weinstein, and Bob Weinstein said, Okay, I want you to make a punk

call Dracula the two thousand. This is Bob Weinstein, obviously the brother of Harvey Weinstein and also the head of Dimension Films. He said, I want you to would you be interested in making punk call Dracula two thousands in February, but it has to be out by December of that year, so he had nine months to do it, and even films, films are made within a nine month period, but it's usually means that at the start of that nine month period they at least have a script or some notion

of what this film is going to be about. And even then it's a hell of a race. And Patrick walked me through that experience, and then I was like, I've got all this of material. It's a fascinating story. And even though you know, I think it's not a film, a lot of people remember, I kind of want to stick that in. The funny ending to that story is that Bob Weinstein was obsessed to the idea that it had to come out in two thousand because it was

called Dracula two thousand. But it being two thousand is not really essential to the film. It's not like all that many people saying Dracula is alive in the year two thousand and that doesn't really happen all that much. And so in foreign territories it was actually released in two thousand and one, and in those territories it was retitled Dracula two thousand and one, which seemed like a very easy fix. To be honest with you.

old material. The strange thing was sometimes I'd be like, Ah, I wish I'd spoken to such and such about this film, and then I would just do a search of my documents on my computer and realize that I had indeed spoken to such and such about that film. Everyone in Entertainment Weekly was speaking to a lot of people. During the two thousands, I did about fifty reviews specifically for the book, and then I have no idea, probably included

quotes from fifty more people that I'd interviewed before. And then, frankly, I was in London and I went to the BFI, the British Film Institute, and they've got a wonderful library and they have two rows of band Fangoria magazines. So I spent two months at the BFI London going through every issue of Fangoria from that period. And it really I've always loved fangoria, but I have to say, boy, like they really covered horror. I mean they and continue

to do. But like I would like, there are so many films that, like I say, people might not remember that they would have devoted a story to the production, then another article and a different issue maybe to the effects. And yeah, that was a glory, that was a pretty that was a pretty fun couple of months. But it took a long time to crank through seventeen years worth of what was then like it was like every single month. I like the writing process, so I like interviewing people

and writing. And I think some people, if they decided to write this kind of history, would be like I'm going to get all the DVDs and I'm going to spend three months watching the DVDs. And I certainly did spend a lot of time watching the DVDs, but like

to get on with it. Having said which, if people who are active horror fans during the two thousands or any kind of film fans will be aware that if you get those DVDs, like often there's two or three or four commentaries, like an Eli Ross film might have seven different commentaries and that's another Again, I'm not suggesting that's hard labor, but like the Hostile DVD are like Happened Fever DVD, I'm you know, sitting down and listening

to all of that because even though I interviewed Eli, like, you never know what kind of little factoid is going to spring up during the commentary. And also those people's memories now are a lot hazier than have gotten hazy over time. So it's fantastic to get to listen to commentaries that were made when the blood on the fake

corpses are still wet. Pretty much, this book is about four uder and fifty pages long, and it literally couldn't be any longer because you need to physically bind this thing, although I did. After I finished it, I realized the Barber Streuisen's autobiography was nine hundred pages, and I did almost call up my publisher and be like, wait, why did this thing have to be like and got only

four hundred and fifty pages because it's been longer. So I'd interviewed like Greg Nicotero, who is this who I interviewed before, but he's mostly known I guess as a special makeup effects wizard. He co founded K and B his craigs all the way back to Evil Dead two, and then over time he's become like a second unit director. He's one of the main creative forces behind The Walking Dead, which is probably now what he is most famous for, but he's worked on pretty much like he's worked on

dozens of horror movies. And so I interviewed him, and I spoke to him about the ten most prominent horror films from the era that he worked for worked on from The Mess to Jennifer's Body to Drag Me to Hell to and so I'd interview him and then I'd get up the next morning and transcribe the interview, and it's not the best, but I always think it's like when a sailor puts a net into the sea and then pulls it in and then you see what fish

you've got, And that's what I mean. People A lot of people use transcribing services, but I like to transcribe myself because you're like, this is what I got. Because when you're interviewing somebody, especially if you're interviewing someone about lots of different movies, you're not always really taking in what they're saying. Necessarily, or you need to be a better interviewer than I am to do that. You're thinking, what's the next question going to be? What's the next

film going to be? Because there's always a time issue, And so I would get all these great quotes safe from Greg Nicaturio and they would then I would go into the text and just add them with that really, and then so this would happen day after day with different interviewees, and I wasn't really that worried about how big the book was getting until I woke up one day and realized that it was like eighty thousand words longer than it could be, really, that it physically could be,

and to those who don't know, like eighty thousand words is like two hundred pages basically, So I had to Then I was extricker because the time was grinding on, the deadline was getting close, and this thing was now like a book more than it should be, really, and so then I had to go in. And I'm pretty good at cutting my own work. I usually find that if I leave something for a week and go back to it, that I'm like, what is half of this nonsense You've written like a week ago? So that was

fine in the end, but yeah, that was something. But it's good when you've all it's good when you've got

too much material. And I always think that perhaps if you boil something down, as I had to do, from two hundred and fifty thousand words to one hundred and fifty thousand words, then hopefully people, even though it's not there, people can still sense that the half that was there, the sort of that you still get on the like a physical feeling of hopefully well made or at least extremely sturdy antique desk or something.

for instance, which I guess is technical horror. And I should say that I like what a lot of Las van von Trier's filmography did a wonderful I've saw a wonderful two season show set in a hospital in like the maddest hospital that ever existed called The Kingdom, and I remember going to a cinema and watching all of

the second season in one day. But I've never seen Anti Christ because I think I read reviews was aware that it was a bit of a tough watch, and I watched it, and it's artistic certainly, but I was like, Oh, this is no fun and I'm glad that I hadn't seen it before. There was stuff that I felt that I probably wouldn't be writing about at length, but I felt I needed to check out to sort of make sure that I shouldn't be writing about like or to

understand its position in the context of horror. And I mentioned I did mention Anti Christ and a couple of other extreme horror movies, but then did a section on The Human Centerpede, which in its own way is equally grotesque as Antichrist, but it's very much more of a

traditional horror movie. And there was an odd period of time and Entertainment Weekly when I was one of my jobs was basically being the Human Centerpede correspondent because it was something of a theatrical success, but what really became popular was the idea of stitching people together and so it was referenced on thirty Rock and The Colberg Show

and all of these TV shows. And I had like lunch with Tom six, the director and the cast of Human Center bed two at very nice steak restaurant in Midtown. So I had all this stuff on the Human Centipede, which I thought was of interest. And yeah, there's definitely some sort of smaller movements of the era where I'm like, these are the three or four films of importance, and let's look particularly at this one movie.

It's interesting that. I think when you go to the cinema, you always wanted to be the best film in the world, and then when it's not, you're like, okay, that was all right. But I think from a perspective of twenty years, it's amazing how many films that I probably didn't regard that highly at the time. I'm like, this is fun, this is just flat out fun. If this turned up today, then I would really enjoy it. What I thought what happened is I would watch a lot of horror films

from the era and they just wouldn't have aged. And certainly there's some if you go back, especially to the early two thousands when it's that period of Maxim magazine being very popular, the Manjdo and all of that stuff, some language in some of the films which has an aged necessarily well in terms of slurs and this and that. But with regards apart from that, I was surprised how many of those films still stand leve. I am afraid

to admit that I watched. I do not have a big steps TV setup to you would think that I have one of those theaters and big comfy armchair and a in popcorn machine but not. I just watched everything on the same old crappy computer that I'm speaking with you on them. But I would put on like The Descent, for instance, Neil Marshall's tale of sperlunkers who meet monsters in an apple Eachian cave system. And I'm really hobbling the film's chances of frightening me by watching it on

my tiny little computer. Another thing scary as hell in any format, I have to say. And it's as scary now really as it was twenty years ago. And again, films were either as good as I remembered or had improved in my mind through time.

ended up going to. And just like this was not very successful just because of times of change, but the filmmakers didn't seem to realize that.

directorial debut. Who's trying to get finance for it? And for those han't seen it, it's got essentially a anthology horror movie, but the stories are woven together. But you've got were wolves and zombies and a serial killer, but it's not like a teen serial killer thing. And he was trying to sell this in two thousand and was rapeatedly told no one gives a crap about like vampires or were wolves or anything that you're talking about. All

people want teen slashers. And Michael was thinking to himself, but they're not gonna want teen slashes by the time we've made this film, because that'll be in two years time, and by that point they'll have had six years of teen slashes and people will no longer want to citizens, which was absolutely proven correct. And again there are so

many stories. The book starts with a story told me by Don Coscarelli, the writer director of Fantasm, created the Phantasm franchise and later went on to direct Bubba Hotel and John Dies at the end. But in the early nineties was trying to get an adaptation of a Joe Lansdale zombie Western off the ground, which you would actually think,

that's the fantastic mix of stuff. And he sent it out the studios and all the he was like, even New Line, which was like the sort of house of horror at the time, send a note back saying, no one will ever want to see a zombie movie basically. So then he went back at I think I got to him across there all references to zombies and just put monster instead. But who's the same, Because, as you said, it has to be the right time. Maybe if Don had made a Zombie West in the nearly nineties, that

wouldn't have worked. But what I can tell you is that ten years later, suddenly everybody's making zombie movies and zombie zombie genre is not just the most popular horror genre in the world, but it's one of the most popular genres in the world. For ten or fifteen yearsn't even up to today.

absolutely terrific. I would say I saw it off for a couple of drinks at a free press screening, but people loved it. It was a general audience press screen but it was a preview. I started writing this book about two years ago, and pretty soon it was always called Screaming and Conjuring, and then I came up with the sort of subtitle which I still have to look at the cover of the book to remind myself what it is, but it's Screaming, Conjuring, the Resurrection and Unstoppable

Rise of the modern horror movie. But I did think, like in the back of my head, was like, what if it stops by the time this book comes out. And there was a period about eighteen months ago, I don't know if you were a call when there was a clutch of movies, including like an Omen prequel and the vampire movie Abigail that came out, and it was a Sydney Sweeney supernatural movie, and they all underperformed. Now

because they're low budget, relatively low budget horror movies. None of them were disasters, and I'm not saying they're bad. Within about six weeks or so, three horror movies came out. None of them was big hits, and people were like, maybe this is the end of horror, and I'm like, but sir, I'm writing a book about the unstoppable rise of horror. Am I going to have to change the thing.

But then of course it comes to this year, and it's Sinners, it's weapons, it's the Conjuring, Last Rite, Spinal Destination Bloodlines twenty eight years later, which I mean was me only a medium size hit, but people were very much all for it, and yeah, I couldn't. As it turns out, fortuitously, it couldn't have worked out better for me. I will say, people still either underrate or take for

granted the box office success of a right. It is interesting to me that the last Conjuring movie came out and made four hundred and fifty million dollars pretty much around the world, and just went and mentioned people were like, oh, yeah, what do you expect. I'm like, what do you expect?

That's the eleventh Conjuring movie and relatively quick succession. Many people would expect it not to make almost half a billion dollars, And now people I loved one battle after another, and I understand why people are wringing their hands over the whether it's going to be a box office head or not, of what that means for original material and so on and so forth. And I'm like, could we just spend another sentence talking about how this Conjuring movie

made half a billion dollars? But I'm not saying. I'm not saying we should just make horror sequels all the time. Far from it, although that's what people are doing, but it's still taken for granted. I think one of the reasons now that people can make one battle after another is because of the money that horror makes. The two things people go and see a horror and then rejigged

versions of hids IP from fifteen years ago. Essentially it seems to be the oh, what's like car of the name they keep on making, like How to Train Your Dragon and so on.

was difficult to come up with a suitable image. It wasn't difficult for me because I didn't have to do it, but I know that my publisher Matthew and Gary myself set around and had a meeting, and the problem is that it's you want something that says horror, but we didn't really want to say what kind of horror, necessarily because it's a book that covers slashes and zombies and

vampires and virus movies and everything. So if you've ever been to a marketing meeting or any kind of meeting of this sort, then you know that comes a point where someone's, yeah, but we want it to be cool. Whatever it is, this soapbox, all people to know that it's got detergent in it, but cool. And if you've ever been one of those meetings, you're like, what are

you talking about? What does that possibly mean? But when we were having the meeting, was Gary I heard myself say, yeah, it's horror but cool, and inwardly I shrank in shame. But I think he managed to fulfill this stupid and extremely brief wonderfully. Yeah. Yeah, what are you working on these days? I'm working on another book about a single film, but it's not It hasn't been announced and hasn't been announced to the people who made the film yet, so

I'm not really sure. I'm at liberty to say too much about it, really, but I'm really enjoying I'm really enjoying researching it. It is fun writing these books where we were also embedding screaming the films within the context of what was going on like at the time as well, and how that impacted the way that the films were made and then released, And going back to Screaming and conjuring, there is a lot of stuff about nine to eleven and then just some degree the financial collapse, and then

ultimately in the apologue Covid. I should know I've made it sound like a terrible book to read. These are quite lightly a touched upon, but there's no doubt that the movies at the time a specifically horror movies reflective of the times which they made because they can reference things that are going on in the current day without

being necessarily a huge plot point. If people have seen Grindhouse, for instance, in the Planet Terror section, there's these soldiers come back from war and they bring a disease with them and they just mentioned that they've just killed the

Samba bin Laden in a cave or whatever. I'm not making I'm not been tried about the subject matter as Robert Rodriguez said, the great thing about exploitation movies is you can rewrite the script as you go along to incorporate what's happening in the in the present day.

What's on? And they look and be like, I'm not going to say transcendence out loud. You know what I mean, We'll go and see something else that's stead my theory. Yeah, there was one theory that I read that I wanted

to include in the book and then didn't. But I was reading a book about I think there's a whole book abou essays about Blumhouse, and there is a theory that I don't necessarily subscribe to, but that the wave of movies about ghosts in houses so your insidious is and your parent normal activity were partly inspired by the financial crash because they made houses and homes such a stress point and sort of the struggle to keep your house and to by extensions cinematically defeat the ghost which

is hanging around in your house. It made that sort of even more of a worry for people than it was before. You can overconnect these things, and I wasn't

entirely sure about that. Well, I will say when people may remember the drag Me, when draged me the house, so those of these things happen accidentally, and when Dragged Me the hell came out, which is a film which was kicked off is kicked off by the lead character not giving a loan to the antagonist essentially, who is a Ramani an older Romani lady, and so the older Romani lady loses her house and then curses the lead actress. And when that premiered, it can in I'm going to say,

to thousand and eight or nine. They got a lot of questions about it was written up as like the first film of the sort of financial crash era, but in fact, Sammaraimi, who directed and co wrote the film with his brother, it was actually like a twenty year old script that they dug up. They had started working on Her twenty years previously. But then sometimes the film

just meets the moment. Saul was written long before the start of the Iraq War, and yet that is a film that very very much again seemed reflective of the state of politics and diplomacy, geopolitics, and then I think was partly embraced by people because they were becoming familiar with things awfulness on the news. That's a cherry thought for you.

housing crisis. I mean, I actually really agree with that, and especially films like I mean even you know, Viberium, or even that Poultergeist remake, where it just feels like we have a home. We have to do what we can to protect the home, not just as the family unit, but as a financial investment. We don't want this investment to be screwed up.

to be correct. I tell you, the thing that I'm most fascinated about with these franchises is they got locked into this idea that there was a big hit that was franchisable, then they should make the second one the following year, like they should only allow year to pass because they wanted to they wanted to cash in. And

this was particularly true with the Saw franchise. But often the people that made the first film are like, yeah, good luck with that, and we're going to go off and do something else that James One, who directed the first Saw movie, did not make a Saw two, and the director of the first Paranormal Activity movie did not make the second one. So again, going back to our story of Dracular two thousand, once again, they've got less

than a year to make this movie. I find that race to do that and just incredibly interesting to research and write about it. It's almost like the second movie those franchises is almost more of a story than the first. Right now, there's so much riding on it. Yeah, so many people have so much riding on it. It was an idea with Paranormal Activity too. Jason Blummer had an idea that they should give ten different filmmakers a very

small amount of money. I comeber those ten. I think they should spend a million dollars, giving ten different filmmakers one hundred grand each and just released the best one, which I would have loved that to have happened, but cool I had prevailed and wise I had or maybe less less wise heads prevailed and they did it in a more traditional fashion.

But I remember when I was about I don't know, nine, and we had a very eccentric music teacher who went to see Alien and then decided to spend the next music lesson telling us the entire plot of Alien from beginning to end, and we're like, and I'm like ten years old, and I'm like a GoGet this And then I bought the novelization and eventually somehow got they must have screened it on TV and got it on the video and would freeze frame the alien coming out of

the egg and the chest burst the scene, And then was old enough to go and see Aliens in the cinema, which is one of my favorite cinematic experiences of all time. I'm just now telling what I think some of the best stories of my book. But I interviewed Thomas Jane for my book, who is just a great guy and has certainly an interview like he's eccentric, but like also a great storyteller, so that's super And he was just

one of those guys. When I was choosing people to interview for the book, it was often people who'd worked on several horror films, because you fine, you do get that, because it's just easier and then it's fun and they can become a recurring character. And he had been in he was in Deeply See, which I mentioned somewhat briefly, and then DreamCatcher, which I talk about some lengths, and then The Myths, which I also talk about some lengths. But he was he just described as a kid being

taken to see Alien like. I think he grew up in Chicago in one of the the big no Washington I think it was Washington, DC, in one of these sort of huge picture houses, and he went with his family. He was like, we couldn't afford a babysitters, so my parents would just drag their kids to wildly what would now be regarded as wildly unsuitable films at a young age. And he said, what do you remembers? Was this woman sitting next close to them at the cinema when the

chest burst the scene happened. She was holding like like a huge carton of coke, like a vat of coke, and it just he just jumped in her seat and the coke went all over her. And he said, I just he said that he remembered her sitting there shouldn't leave to clean herself up. She just sat there covered in sticky coke for the remainder of the film because she was so transfixed by what was going on screen

and a lot of those stories. As much as I love talking to people about working on War of the World or something Tom Cruise movie.

were just delightful and normal people. And then Eric was going to see the Room that night, and he invited me and my friends along, and he wouldn't tell us anything about it, and we went to the Sunset five. I think we're a bit late. When Sunset five Olliwood Boulevard wherever it is, that's a strap and went in I've never even heard of this film, but I'm knowing a hacked theater was two hundred people throwing plastic spoons screen.

I like, what the hell is this? So then I convinced Entertainment Weekly, against possibly their best judgment, that they should devote like six pages to this film that was terrible and no one had ever heard of. Because of my experience Human Centipede correspondent, I then became Entertainment Weekly's The Room correspondent, and that proved to have even longer legs than the even longer legs and the Human Centerpede

because ultimately they made The Disaster Artist. So that was like a full decade of talking about so bad it's good movies and in particularly The Room. So it's got a bit burned out on it, really. So I haven't gotten around to see The ice Cube starring War of the World as yet.