THN talk Tales of Halloween and more with director Neil Marshall

Neil Marshall is a British director who burst onto the horror scene with the fantastic Dog Soldiers. His brilliant début saw a group of soldiers on a weekend training expedition confronted with a band of werewolves. Marshall followed this with The Descent, a film which is easily one of the most claustrophobic and terrifying movies of the this millennium. He then took a side step and created Doomsday, a science-fiction, post apocalyptic action film in the vein of Mad Max. Marshall’s last feature film was Centurion all the way back in 2010 and starred a then unknown Michael Fassbender.

Since then Neil has been working hard within the world of television and has directed episodes of shows such as Constantine, Hannibal and Game of Thrones. He’s currently promoting anthology film Tales of Halloween, a film that unites several well-known names in the horror circuits and celebrates everything Halloween.

We were lucky enough to speak to Neil about Tales of Halloween, his time working on Game of Thrones and his excellent taste in music.

How did the idea for Tales of Halloween come together?

It had sort of been knocking about for a long time. Myself and my wife Axelle (Carolyn) who came up with the whole thing, have been friends with all the other directors for around about eight years now. We moved to Los Angeles two years ago and we just hang around with these guys all the time. There’s this big community of horror directors, writers, actors and journalists that all hang around together in LA, mostly in the valley. Whenever there’s an event or a screening, especially at Halloween, we all go to it together. Once we moved here Axelle just said off of the back of things like V/H/S and ABC’s of Death that anthology movies were a possibility now and we’ve all talked about, even half joked about the idea about all working together on something in the past so why don’t we make an anthology movie, but make it about Halloween because we are all passionate about Halloween.

Within a couple of days of coming up with the concept she had all the directors on board saying ‘yes we’re up for it, we’ll make time for this’. Then a few days later we had a meeting with Epic Pictures; one of our directors, Mike Mendez, had just done a film with them called Big Ass Spider. We went to them and they said that they would finance it, all this happened within a week. It was absolutely insane how quickly it came together, there was no script at this point, it was just that we had this bunch of directors who wanted to do a Halloween anthology what did they think? They liked the idea and wanted to do it. Obviously the price of getting a film together so quickly was doing it for very little money, but that kind of added to the charm of it all.

In a nutshell what’s your segment about?

My segment is about a pumpkin or Jack O’Lantern that comes alive to seek revenge for all the pumpkins slaughtered every Halloween. It’s a genetically modified pumpkin as well.

Bad Seed is a little more light-hearted than some of the previous horror films that you’ve done, how much fun did you have playing around with things?

I think in a way it’s more like my first feature Dog Soldiers which has a lot of laughs, despite the horror and gore it still has a lot of laughs to it. I think it’s a case of like you do something if you stand back and look at something objectively it’s completely ridiculous, a werewolf movie or a killer pumpkin movie. So you have to be aware you can only play it slightly tongue in cheek. You play it straight but it’s going to be funny no matter what. It’s a pumpkin biting people’s heads off, that’s funny. The tone came naturally from the idea, it’s a little bit Jaws, it’s a little bit Gremlins, it’s a little Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and we went from there.

You mentioned that you and the other directors were all friends, was that the same with the cast?

I didn’t know Pat (Healy) before I made it but I’d seen his work in films directed by people I knew. Kristina (Klebe) was introduced to me through Axelle who’d met her through some festival, I got incredibly lucky having those two in my movie. But then I also padded it out with some insane cameos, people like Greg McLean the director of Wolf Creek. I got John Savage in there, he’s in The Deer Hunter, and amazingly I got Drew Struzan the poster artist, the world’s greatest poster artist to appear as a police sketch artist and we make a joke out of that. And then Joe Dante at the end to be the mad scientist seemed like such a perfect fit, especially with the Gremlins vibe. Also in my scene in the police station, everybody in that scene other than the main characters is either one of the other directors of the anthology or one of the producers, my agent is in there, all our friends just came together.

We all showed up on each other’s film sets to help out in any way we could with the filming progress. In one case I showed up for Mike Mendez‘s film, we were shooting inserts for the film Friday the 31st, and he needed somebody to chainsaw this girl in half. They had the dummy of the girl but nobody knew, I was the only one there who has operated a chainsaw before so I was the one who had to do the chainsawing. The ridiculous things we got to do for this film, I got to chainsaw a girl in half! (laughs)

Which story other than your own (and your wife’s) stands out the most for you?

That’s a tough one. I really like Grim Grinning Ghost, it’s beautifully handled, regardless of the fact its my wife directing, I think it’s got some killer jumps towards the end. I love Dave Parker‘s Sweet Tooth, I think that’s very good at capturing the flavour of Halloween and urban legends. Mike’s Friday the 31st is just wonderfully outrageous. They all have their strengths and that’s what makes me so proud about it, is that there is no weak link there.

Your body of work seems to rely a lot on practical effects rather than CG, why is this?

Because I still think it looks better at the end of the day. Certainly in something like a killer pumpkin movie which is hailing back to movies of the eighties in its style and it just felt absolutely right that I had to have a practical, working killer pumpkin on set. I think it’s better for the actors, it certainly looks more realistic at the end of the day. I’ll always favour practical effects first and foremost and then what I’ll end up doing is, like with the pumpkin, is use CGI to enhance those effects. We couldn’t get the tentacles to work practically so in some shots the tentacles are CG, in some shots they are practical, but using old school tricks. We reversed the film so it looked like the tentacles were coming out of the creature when they were actually being pulled in, that’s real old school stuff, but it works, and you can’t question it because it’s real.

Recent years have seen you work on Game of Thrones, your episodes both featured iconic bloody battles how much pressure did you feel to get them right and do you have any plans to go back?

No, I have no immediate plans to go back unless they ask me, it’s up to them not me. In terms of how much pressure there was, you know I think there is pressure on anything I do because I want to get it right and do the best job possible no matter what. Certainly in terms of Game of Thrones because there is such a huge fan base, there’s the books to live up to, George’s fantastic books plus the two show runners David and Daniel who write the TV show. Everybody’s done such an amazing job of getting it where it is, then yeah you absolutely feel responsibility for going in and not messing it up. You don’t want to be the guy who messes it up.

Then of course there’s the responsibility to the characters. If I’m going in and doing a scene where one of the major characters dies off then you have to be responsible for that. Getting the right about of drama and power and pathos and sadness and whatever that scene’s meant to encompass. But I embrace those challenges.

What film will you be picking as your Halloween scare?

That’s a good question, well I usually watch Trick R Treat around Halloween. On Halloween I usually watch Halloween. I think I’d like to watch a couple of werewolf movies, An American Werewolf in London, and The Howling might be nice, I haven’t seen either of those for a while.

Will there be more Tales of Halloween in the future?

It depends on how successful this one is. If people like this one then what we want of course is for Tales of Halloween to become like a Halloween staple, people will watch it every year. So when you ask the question ‘what movie are you watching at Halloween?’ people will be saying Tales of Halloween. If that happens [it’s successful] then there’s room for a sequel, I’m sure all the directors have got more tales to tell, or maybe some other directors as well. I think what you have here is the opportunity to bring in new directors and talent, we’ll see.

What are you working on now?

Well I’m currently in Toronto shooting a TV pilot. It’s a slight change of pace for me, it’s a political thriller with lots of action in it, no supernatural stuff in it which is interesting. After that fingers crossed a feature.

Before I go I have to commend you on your taste in music, especially in Doomsday.

Oh awesome, yes (laughs). I wrote it with some of them in mind, Two Tribes absolutely had to be the music, that was in the script from the start. But other things like I was so, so pleased to get Siouxsie and the Banshees in there. I’ve been wanting to use Siouxsie and the Banshees in all my films, so to get that in there was great. I bumped into Steve Severin from Siouxsie and the Banshees and he was like ‘I’m so proud you put that in the film’, that was just so wow and perfect. I’m kind of obsessed with eighties music and that was just the perfect opportunity to get some of it in the movie.

I’d use Siouxsie and the Banshees on pretty much everything I ever did if I could. I was very jealous recently, I did an episode of Hannibal and the creator told me he’d commissioned Siouxsie to do a song for the last episode so I was a little bit jealous of that.

Tales of Halloween is out in US cinemas now and available to download in the UK via Vimeo. A DVD\Blu-Ray release is still TBC.  Read out review now.