Exclusive Interview: Horror Royalty Barbara Crampton

Barbara Crampton is a horror icon. Starring in such movies as The Re-Animator and Chopping Mall, she became one of the most familiar faces of fright flicks throughout the eighties and nineties. She then stepped away from the genre around the late nineties as she became a series regular on American daytime soap The Young and the Restless. However, she couldn’t stay away for long and for the last few years has been getting back involved in the horror genre, popping up in such films as You’re Next, We are Still Here and Road Games.

Road Games screened for a second year in a row this year at Frightfest. The film debuted last year and this time around saw the director, Abner Pastoll, return to take part in a live director’s commentary. It also forms part of the third wave of Frightfest Presents titles. Ahead of the screening at Frightfest we caught up with Barbara. She lamented that she was disappointed to be missing the festival and described her visit in 2015 as ‘one of the best experiences of my life’. We spoke all about the project, some films that are touring the festival circuits this year, as well as getting all the details about next year’s Death House.

Road Games is quite a unique film, how did you come to be involved?

I met Abner Pastoll on social media actually. He just contacted me maybe two years before we even started filming and said he had this script, and that he wanted me to read it. Sometimes I reply to people like that if I don’t know them and sometimes I don’t, but he seemed quite nice and genuine and we’d been chatting about movies a few times. So I thought I’ll give him my email and I read his script. I thought it was brilliant, really good and had great wonderful, interesting characters and a good twist at the end. I said – ‘wow! I’d really like to be involved in this’, and then they had lost some of their funding initially so it took a while for them to get back all the funding so that we could actually move forwards. I think it was almost two years after he first contacted me that we were were set to go into production.

What was it about your character Mary that you liked.

She was just kind of frail, timid and scared, and at the same time there was something really odd about her. At different times through the film you think that the killer is one or a number of people, and at one point you think and believe that I could be the one because I’m so strange. I though that was interesting. I liked that I got to act a little frightened and frightening at different times.

How good was your French before you started filming?

I had taken French in high school for three years so I was really familiar with it. But in America we don’t use our French and it was a long time ago that I was in High School. I did have a friend who’s fluent in French, who wound up helping me with my dialogue. She was great at it. She lived in France for a while and went to school and she speaks like a native, so she helped me. But then I didn’t have that much French and my character is an American who lives in France, so if I don’t speak perfect French or I speak it with an accent, which I do, it was fine. I didn’t have to be French. It all worked for the character.

Horror films more than any other genre get sequels and Road Games ends with a cliff-hanger. Would you be happy if a sequel were made or would you rather it stay as it is?

Thinking from a business stand point the only way that they make these sequels is if the first one makes an enormous amount of money. Then they want to be able to cash in on it. This is an independent movie so they’d have to really recoup a lot of their money and more to be able to warrant making a sequel. That being said, it was terrific fun doing it. I loved all the people that we worked with, especially Frédéric Pierrot who played my husband. I would kill again to be able to be able to work on this movie if we got a sequel. It was terrific fun.

How has the landscape of horror changed over the years? 

Well there’s a lot more movies being made these days. A lot of people are interested in the genre, much more than before. The horror genre seems to have a cult following, it always did before, and it does even more so now. With the advantage of social media I feel like we’re all connected, the fans and the filmmakers and the actors. So people like Abner can contact you on social media and say ‘Hey I have this movie, would you like to be in it?’ Usually what I do say to those people is ‘okay, well contact my agent, here’s the details and when you’re ready to go into production let us know.’

It feels like a nice community now and it’s growing because so many more people are making movies. I’ve noticed coming back to the genre in the past few years that, especially in the Los Angeles area, the horror community really help one another. All these independent filmmakers. They watch each others movies when they’re in production and they give notes to you. I did a movie that’s playing at Frighthfest called Beyond the Gates; our director Jackson Stewart is quite a young guy and he has a lot of filmmaker friends. When he did the first cut of the movie, and the second and third, he had very trusted allies who work in the horror genre come in and just give him notes on his cut and see if there was anything that he left out, or needed to add, or if the story didn’t make sense etc. That really helped him to make the best film that he could make.

I feel like everybody today is really supportive of one another and we’re not working in a vacuum like we did in the eighties. Back then you got a call to come in for a movie, you showed up on set and that was it, you didn’t hear about the movie again until it came out. Now the advantage of social media you hear about the trappings of making a movie for a year before the movie hits the film festivals. 

Beyond the Gates seemed like a throwback to those genre films of the 80’s and 90’s, was it fun to step back into that environment?

It was terrific fun. I’ve known Jackson Stewart for a number of years. He was an intern for Stuart Gordon a long time ago and he’s quite a young guy; I worked on a lot of Stuart Gordon‘s films. So he has that eighties throwback mentality in his brain and worked with Stuart for so long. It was a lot of fun. I’ve watched Jackson over the past five years or so make a lot of short films and all of his films had this eighties feel to them. He became quite good at storytelling through all the different shorts that he worked on, and when he was ready to actually do this film and sent me the script, I read it and I was blown away. I immediately said ‘how much do you need, what do you need, how can I help you on this?’ I just loved the movie, it felt like I was coming home when we worked on this movie.

My part has little humour in it, but she’s also quite menacing and it was terrific to work with him and the whole cast. Graham Skipper who plays one of our three heroes as we call them, he actually played Jeffrey Combs’ character in The Re-Animator musical. They made a musical of The Re-Animator and they played in Los Angeles and New York and Edinburgh. I knew him for a number of years so that was really fun to get to work with him.

I also recently caught Little Sister which is a beautiful film, was it nice to be in something more light-hearted for a change?

Yeah a lot of my character is for the comic relief. It was a charming movie. It’s not a horror movie at all, it was just a coming of age, slice-of-life movie. It was a beautiful, charming film told in a really interesting and sympathetic way. It wasn’t too taken with itself. It was a really nice movie; it was delightful fun. I loved the script for that movie so much. It’s so heartwarming and beautiful. A really cool story. Just to be in that movie was special. It’s such a charming movie, I think they have some distribution in place now and so I hope that people will run to see that. I also have to point out that I thought Ally Sheedy was wonderful in the movie. It’s Addison Timlin‘s movie and she’s the star of it, and she’s terrific, but I have to say I’ve never seen Ally Sheedy be better. She just floored me with her performance.

You’re also part of Death House, a project being described as the Expendables of the horror world, what can you tell us about that film?

That started actually in the brain of my agent Mike Eizenstat, maybe seven years ago. He has a lot of horror clients and he went to his client and out mutual friend Gunnar Hansen (who passed away recently) and asked him if he would write an outline, and then a script, for this idea he had. At the time he called it the Expendables of terror and he wanted to use a lot of his clients. He’s quite a fan of the horror genre so Gunnar said ‘yeah I think that’s a great idea, lets work on that’. So they worked on the idea together and Gunnar came up with an outline, and wrote the script.

Then they started shopping to different money people and producers and that takes a lot of time before anyone’s even willing to read your script, think about giving you money and putting it together. It took them two or three years and a few different producers before it finally came together with Rick Finklestien and Steven Chase at the Entertainment Factory. Then they were able to talk to Harrison Smith who was really kind of new in the horror genre, but had written a couple of beautiful scripts and said ‘we need a rewrite on this, would you come and work with us and perhaps direct it?’

It was a puzzle they were all putting together in the meantime; we didn’t know that Gunnar had pancreatic cancer which took him quite quickly, so he wasn’t able to see the dream of this movie realised. They worked very closely with him in the beginning and did refine and re-tailor his script, but did use a lot of his initial story points and the theme of what he wanted to get across, you know who’s evil and who’s good, and using a lot of the stars of the horror genre and people like Gunnar.

I’ve been with the project for a very long time, I was one of the first people involved. Then Harrison took it and really brought it up and added a lot of people that he really wanted to be in the project. It is what it is now. I haven’t seen any of the footage really, well not too much of it, I’ve seen a couple of scenes here and there. I know the pictures locked right now so they’re working on special effects and music and things like that. I think within the next eight weeks it’ll be a completed project and then they’ll start shopping it around, because again it’s an independent movie and they have to sell it to a distributor.

It was a lot of fun to work on and I had some wonderful scenes with a lot of terrific actors, not the least of which is Dee Wallace. She and I had a few scenes together so that was a lot of fun for me. And Kane Hodder, I have a few scenes with. Kane and I go back about thirty-five years. On the first project I worked on in Los Angeles was a soap opera, Days of our Lives. He was the stunt coordinator for that show and I was twenty one years old, fresh out of college and that was my very first job. So I’ve know him for a very long time and he and I get to face off in the movie, so that was really fun, and to see him grow as a performer and start out on stunts and grow into a fully fledged actor, and be as good as he is. He has a premiere role in the movie it was really wonderful to see what he brought to the table which was really quite good. I’m very excited about the project and was very happy that I got to work with a lot of my old friends, and make some new friends as well.

Road Games is available to buy and digitally download now.