The Letterboxd Show 3.23: Scott Derrickson
[clip of Poltergeist plays]
Poltergeists are usually associated with an individual. Hauntings seem to be connected with an area—a house, usually.
Poltergeist disturbances are of fairly short duration, perhaps a couple of months. Hauntings can go on for years.
Are you telling me that all of this could just suddenly end at any time?
Yes. It could. Unless it’s a haunting, but hauntings don’t usually revolve around living people.
Then we don’t have much time, Doctor Lesh, because my daughter is alive somewhere inside his house.
[The Letterboxd Show theme music Vampiros Dancoteque by Moniker fades in, plays alone, fades down]
SLIM Hello and welcome to The Letterboxd Show, the podcast about movies people love watching from Letterboxd: the app and social network for people who love watching movies. This week, spooky season continues, so we picked up the black phone and called in a sinister filmmaker known for raising hell... Here are just a few samples of Letterboxd opinions about our guest today: Chandler writes: “Scott Derrickson I love you.” Gabriel writes: ”I respect Scott Derrickson’s decision to make Ethan Hawke look like hotter Scott Derrickson.” “Scott Derrickson, you will pay.” writes Aiden and James’s review of The Black Phone: “Scott Derrickson is back baby!”
GEMMA Yeah, as you may have worked out, our guest today is writer, director and producer Scott Derrickson, whose new film The Black Phone is on VOD platforms right now. Scott is here right now on The Letterboxd Show to talk about his four favorite films and they are—this week at least—I Saw the Devil, Poltergeist, Suspiria (the original), and Carrie, the original. Scott, thank you for going towards the light of The Letterboxd Show. [Slim laughs]
SCOTT Oh, thank you for having me in the light and thank you for including some sort of a veiled threat in those things that you read. [Gemma & Slim laugh] “Scott Derrickson, you will pay!” Like, oh god...
GEMMA That was a four-star review, by the way.
SCOTT Was it? [Gemma laughs] They may jump out with a knife at the end of this interview.
SLIM This is a lot of pressure, Scott, to be on The Letterboxd Show in October, spooky season, but you have a pretty strong four faves. Was there any pressure at all to come up with, you know, four movies that encapsulated your history with film in this month?
SCOTT No, I mean, it’s hard to limit it to four. But I chose four films that I have personal histories with and strong personal opinions about, they’re not necessarily my four favorites. They’re all four in my top twenty, for sure, most of them in my top ten—probably all of them in my top ten, actually. But yeah, I picked ones that I have things to say about.
SLIM We’ll be talking about The Black Phone during this episode later in the show. But Sinister, if I could just briefly talk about Sinister and demand an apology from you, has maybe the scariest moment in any horror movie I’ve ever witnessed. If anyone wants to watch Sinister, by all means, it’s the lawnmower scene. So I’m ready for your apology, Scott, for making me feel that way.
SCOTT That lawnmower scene has done a lot of damage out in the world from what I gather. [Scott & Slim laugh]
GEMMA Not just damage, but like, quantifiable damage. They’ve done studies to show that it’s one of the scariest movies in of heart rate—this is crazy!
SCOTT Yeah, Forbes magazine did a test where they took the 50 so-called scariest movies ever made and played them all for an audience and monitored their heart rate during the movie, all of them. And Sinister came out way ahead of the other 49 movies, in of elevated heart rate.
GEMMA Do you get a trophy for that? Do you get a medal for that? And I wonder what it would look like... [Scott & Slim laugh] A little chainsaw, a little baby chainsaw...
SLIM You get an insurance bill from anyone that had heart issues.
SCOTT Yeah, it’s a heart monitor with this flatline. [Gemma & Slim laugh]
GEMMA So, looking at your film history, looking at the films you’ve chosen today, I need to ask, what kind of bike did you ride when you were a kid? Were you one of those bike-riding around the neighborhood, going-on-ghost-hunts, kind of kids?
SCOTT Oh, yeah. I mean, everybody—when I was in middle school, having a bike was the thing. And, you know, a lot of kids were getting in the alloy rims and things like that. What was the big models at the time? I’m blanking the names of them, but it wasn’t, you know, this is past the Schwinn era, you know?
GEMMA Oh, yeah, yeah. Or like the first Sidewinder, the first mountain bike, maybe? No?
SCOTT That’s after.
GEMMA That’s after. But we’re talking choppers and Raleighs and these kinds of things, right?
SCOTT Yeah. I mean, everybody had a bike when I was in middle school. No one didn’t have a bike of some sort. Because it was, you know, it was a time when everybody just left the house, if it wasn’t a school day, if it was summer and the weekend, we just left the house in the morning and didn’t come back until dark or after dark and you just took your bike everywhere.
GEMMA I’m a grown up and I still do that. [Slim laughs] Honestly, there’s nothing like it. I’m a bike-rider for life. At the beginning of Poltergeist, 1982, Tobe Hooper’s fantastic family ghost-house adventure of some sort, a film by Steven Spielberg. There is a bike, I was thinking there’s a kid coming around the corner riding a bike, but it turns out to be a grown-man carrying far too many cans of beer for one man. But such a great intro with that amazing music by Jerry Goldsmith, who was an absolute legend in of being able to go from that very sort of action-adventure soundtrack through to the full-scale horror. But anyway, when was the first time you saw Poltergeist? Talk us through it.
SCOTT I saw it in the theater when it was on its initial release. And I saw it with the girl I had a crush at the time, who became my girlfriend for a short time, but this is before that. And the thing I most vividly was the feeling of a lot of screaming and shrieking, but everybody having a good time. So it was the first time in my experience that I had seen a horror film. And it was kind of, it was just a new thing, to have a horror film that was actually that scary, but it was also just so funny and delightful. And so it was the first kind of roller-coaster-ride experience watching a horror film. I the guy, you know, when the guy rips his face off in the mirror, the theater almost came apart, people were yelling and screaming so much and I just that that was a new kind of experience for me in any movie. It was great.
GEMMA Imagine seeing this movie for the first time in cinemas with your crush, like that is an unbelievable experience.
SCOTT Like oh my god. It was wonderful. It was wonderful. [Gemma laughs] What year was this movie?
GEMMA ’82...
SLIM ’82.
SCOTT ’82, yeah, so I would have been... I would have been fifteen.
SLIM Holy moly.
GEMMA Wow.
SLIM What a weekend. [Gemma laughs] What a friggin’ weekend.
SCOTT It was awesome.
SLIM When I was a kid, I had seen this, and this was one of those like movies that scarred me, I think, as a kid. I’d seen bits and pieces, the clown obviously. But I think my earliest memory of this movie is The Simpsons parodying it. I think that’s probably my earliest memory of most movies, to be honest.
SCOTT This is the sad thing about growing up in this era. My kid—you know, Joel McHale is one of my closest friends, he and Cargill were both best men at my wedding in May, so my kids grew up watching Community and the rest of their upbringing has been watching movies and going, “Oh, this is that one from Community!” [Slim laughs]
GEMMA Ohhh! [Gemma laughs]
SCOTT Every single movie they see, they’re like, “Oh, this is that episode from Community when they did this!” They’ve learned the history of cinema before the history of cinema through Community.
GEMMA That’s pretty funny. Okay, so I’ve got a few questions about Poltergeist. When Steve—Craig T. Nelson’s character—so he’s the dad, you know, father of three, he’s made $70 million for this development company building this new suburban housing development—it’s so very Spielbergian, I love it. But once they work out that there’s some kind of ghost in their house that’s stolen the youngest child, Carol Anne, and he goes to have a meeting with the parapsychologists, and they’re asking him all about his family and he says that Diane, his wife, “is 31—not wait, she’s 32 and our eldest is sixteen...” My brain went, ‘Uhhhh?’ [Slim laughs] ‘Wait... So then that means she was...’ Is sixteen legal in America? I don’t know. I’m New Zealander... I don’t know. [Gemma laughs]
SCOTT Well, you know, I’m telling you, the subtle details in that movie are really amazing because, you know, they were these ex-hippies, you know, who smoke weed in the evening when their kids go to bed. It’s part of the narrative of that story, I think. That wasn’t a thoughtless choice, that was a deliberate choice. And in all the weird, sly, little sexual entendres with that teenage daughter that are all the way through the movie and she’s always eating a pickle or licking some phallic symbol... [Slim & Gemma laugh] And then the workers are flirting with—the best moment of the all of those, at the height of, after all this shit has really hit the fan. And they’re like, “We gotta get out of here, let’s go to a hotel,” and they name a hotel and she goes, “Oh, yeah, that place is nice,” and her parents just kind of glance at her. [Gemma & Slim laughs] And she says something like, “Oh, that’s what I’ve heard,” and they just move past it. It’s like she knows how nice the local motel is...
GEMMA It’s gotta be Spielberg’s raciest story, right?
SCOTT It really is.
SLIM I was thinking that, on this rewatch, you know, as a kid I had these memories of this movie, but on more recent viewings, like I just watched the new 4K version that had just come out.
GEMMA Ooh!
SLIM I love the marital story of this movie now, like as I’m older.
SCOTT It’s wonderful.
SLIM I love what these two together. It’s so good, right?
SCOTT Yeah, it’s so good. And, you know, I loved the movie. I had such a great experience seeing it when I was young, and I rewatched it multiple times, I showed it to my kids and knew how great it was. And then I did a rewrite on the remake.
GEMMA Oh...
SCOTT You know, because I loved the movie so much, they had sent me the draft, which wasn’t bad. And I think this was a job I did with Cargill. And I it’s one of the few jobs I’ve ever taken that I just ended up really regretting and really hating. Because as I was working on it, I went back and watched the movie a few times and did a little breakdown outline of the original, and that was when it really sunk in for me, ‘Oh, dear, this movie is perfect.’ It’s perfect. There’s not a single wasted moment in that film. There’s not a single bad performance. The quality of the writing, the directing and the acting, everything. I think it’s literally a flawless film. And so, you know, it became very, very depressing. [Slim & Gemma laugh] Trying to work on this rewrite going, ‘This is a bad idea. This is an absolutely untoppable movie in every regard.’ So...
GEMMA It’s funny, isn’t it, the things you do fixate on when you’re a kid watching it and then when you become a—I mean, I’ve got a six-year-old, nearly seven-year-old now, so of course I’m watching it through the lens of of JoBeth’s character, the mum. There’s a great review by Willow Maclay on Letterboxd, she writes: “Poltergeist is a movie about real mom shit. Stepping on toys that you asked your kid to pick up and put away 100 times. Cradling your son and telling him everything is going to be okay on a sofa in the dead of night. Following your daughter into an unknown hell to save her from the bad influences of ghosts. Ya know. Just everyday mom shit.” [Slim laughs]
SCOTT And then the emotional power of her performance, you know, all the way through to the end of that movie. I really think she should have won the Academy Award for her performance that year.
SLIM Yes.
GEMMA 100%.
SCOTT I think it was one of the great actress performances I’ve ever seen. She’s just amazing—she’s the emotional power of that movie.
GEMMA And she’s got a real interesting vibe, right? Because for a lot of the film, a lot of the first half of the kind of haunting, the ghosting, she’s kind of got half a smile on her face, like it’s really interesting, like that moment when she says to Craig T. Nelson, “Just suspend, pretend we were who we were back in the day, you know, suspend your disbelief for a moment and watch this,” when she’s showing him the chairs move.
SCOTT And the way she hoots and hollers and cheers when Carol Anne is—you know, usually the the introduction of any paranormal material in a scary movie is very suspenseful, you know, she’s got her daughter in a football helmet, jumping up and down like a cheerleader, because it’s so fun.
SLIM You’re talking about the parapsychologists and the ghost-hunters—Scott, have you ever gone on a ghost-hunt yourself?
SCOTT No, I would never do something—
SLIM Never?!
SCOTT No, I’m too scared to do shit like that. [Slim & Gemma laugh] I would never. No, I’m serious. Research—I’ve seen everything there is to see in doing research and, you know, really weird shit that’s never been made public. I’ve seen some terrifying shit.
SLIM Oh my god.
SCOTT But I’m the last guy in the world who’s going to spend a night in a haunted house.
SLIM Next time we’re in LA... Let’s just table it. Next time we’re in LA, we’ll see what we can make happen, you know, have some fun.
SCOTT Yeah, don’t count on that... [Gemma & Slim laugh]
GEMMA So this ‘Cargill’ you’re talking about, for listeners who don’t know, C. Robert Cargill, your long-time buddy, scriptwriter, producer, mate. How do you—like what do you do? Do you just kind of phone each other and go, ‘Oh my god, I just saw this in some police files,’ or ‘I just had a dream about this. I’m gonna freak you out, man.’ Like what is it? Are you just constantly trying to one-up each other on how scared you can make each other?
SCOTT No, you know, we don’t do anything like that. We mostly talk about movies. And when we’re working, you know, trying to craft something scary, trying to come up with something scary is always really hard. But I don’t think of Cargill as a guy who scares easily at all. I have a hard time picturing him being scared of anything. I think he—I bet you he’s opposite, I bet he would love to spend the night in the most haunted place in the world.
GEMMA Oh my god, probably.
SCOTT He would probably jump at the chance to do that. [Gemma laughs]
SLIM I’m taking notes down. I’m taking notes for that LA trip. How often do you talk with him about Suspiria? Dario Argento’s 1977 horror movie?
SCOTT I’ve talked to him at length about that movie. That’s probably the most influential horror film on me as a creative.
GEMMA Ohhh, tell us why.
SCOTT Well, you know, I always loved storytelling and images, I used to build haunted houses in my basement to bring the neighborhood kids through. I always had a fascination with that stuff. But even by the time I went to film school at USC, I didn’t have any intentions of moving into horror specifically. I mean, I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I didn’t have that genre in my sights at that time. And I think the thing that really changed that was seeing Suspiria when I was in film school. And when I saw it, it really, it was a real revelation. I mean, it was a profound experience for me seeing what matched the horror films that I had seen, you know, up to that point in my life, which are mostly American slasher films. Everything from, you know, Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and even the onset of the Scream franchise, you know, these were all amazing slasher movies. And here was Suspiria, a slasher movie, but it was also high-art. And I had a love, a real love at that point in my life—I still do—but I was really obsessed with European cinema and that’s why I ended up watching these Giallo films and Argento in particular. When I saw it, I just realized, well wait a minute, you can make even a slasher movie and do it as an attempt at high visual art. The uniqueness of the score, the ambition of the production design, the look of the film, the way it was shot, all of it. And, you know, in America, in the United States, what I had been exposed to, I’d seen a good handful of classic horror films, but modern horror films were low-budget films, you know? And the exceptions to those rules were always master-filmmakers who did one-offs, you know, Friedkin doing The Exorcist or Kubrick doing The Shining or something like that. And I was like, oh, here’s a guy who made a career out of making a horror films and they were so artistically ambitious, as well as ambitious in of scariness and storytelling. And that made me feel like there was something in the genre that I could contribute to. I felt like, well I can bring my love for cinema and my love for ambitious filmmaking into the genre and possibly bring something new to it. So it’s always been like a beacon for me. It’s always been like the goal is to make a horror film that entertains and satisfies artistically the way Suspiria does.
GEMMA Wow, nobody said it better—and we’ve had this film come up a few times on this particular iteration of The Letterboxd Show. Everybody loves it!
SCOTT It’s so good. It is my favorite horror.
SLIM Ooooh.
SCOTT It is the top of my list.
SLIM Six and a half thousand fans on Letterboxd and it’s the second most popular film of 1977 behind Star Wars, believe it or not. So this is the number two movie for that year.
SCOTT That’s impressive, yeah, for an Italian movie. [Slim laughs]
SLIM Yes, exactly.
GEMMA Do you ever just put on Goblin, you know, while you’re cruising around the house, weeding the garden?
SCOTT No, but I have a friend who asked that as a ringtone, I’ve always been jealous of that. [Slim & Gemma laugh] And I did go American Cinematheque screening at the Egyptian a few years back and Goblin played the score live to a screening.
SLIM Oh my god.
SCOTT That was pretty fantastic.
GEMMA Ooh...
SCOTT They’re still going at it, those guys.
SLIM They are, they’re unstoppable. The first time I saw this movie, I think it was last year. And it’s readily available, so I started on Tubi or Pluto, one of the free services. But then as I was watching it, the music hit and then I started reading about how there’s a brand-new 4K transfer and I literally stopped the movie after twenty minutes, I have to wait, I have to get the highest quality I can possibly get on this movie. The audio and visuals work in this movie, maybe differently than any other movie I’ve ever seen.
SCOTT They do, they do. In fact, it’s interesting that you bring up the first twenty minutes. I think that the first twenty minutes of Suspiria are the finest horror filmmaking that’s ever been done. Everything from the beginning credits to the end of the first kill, that section in the airport and the ride through, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve just pulled up Suspiria streaming or thrown in a DVD and just watched just that section. [Slim laughs] Because it is the greatest study you can have in the effective, atmospheric, mysterious, scary filmmaking, you know, gorgeously made. I always think about that incredible shot where the car, you know, she’s just in the car driving through the airport, and we cut to the forest outside the car and there’s a lightning flash and you see that figure sort of reflected in the tree. It’s so terrifying and so evocative and so mysterious, all those things at the same time.
GEMMA It’s such a great setup. There’s a—I mean, there are many, many reviews on Letterboxd of this film, most of them are obsessed with Dario’s use of the color red. But proftonks who watched it recently, writes just this week: “The shot composition and floating camera movement is so immersive. One of the skills I realized Argento is so well versed at is controlling where you’re looking, which leads to some terrific misdirection. You expect the ball to go left, but nope, there may not even be a ball.” [Slim laughs]
SCOTT Yeah. I love it. I love it.
SLIM It does feel, like that first twenty minutes, it feels like you’re on drugs when you’re watching the first twenty minutes of this movie. [Slim laughs]
SCOTT It really does, you are ushered into another universe.
GEMMA Have you—I mean, in the number of times you’ve watched it, have you in your films gone, like what are some colors or shot movements or treatment that you’ve gone, ‘I’m just gonna, I’m just gonna borrow and homage to that in this scene.’
SCOTT Oh, there’s some really strong direct visual references in The Exorcism of Emily Rose. I had Tom Stern, who has done most of Clint Eastwood films. He was the director of photography on that and he just finished shooting Million Dollar Baby when he came on to onto [The Exorcism of] Emily Rose. And I had him watch a couple films, I I had him watch Ordet for the opening scene, the tone of the opening.
GEMMA Oooh...
SCOTT And then I said, “The main movie I need you to watch is Suspiria.” And I him coming back and saying, “I really don’t know what to make of that movie.” [Gemma & Slim laugh] He’s like, “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.” And I said, “Here’s the thing, Tom. We’re making a European drive-in movie.” [Slim & Gemma laugh] That’s literally what I said to him. He said, “Okay, I understand.” And so I would reference it sometimes and it would do my heart so much good. I just being on set at one point, and we were in there and he said, “Let’s do a little Argento thing with this window up here. Let’s put a lavender light behind that.” I’d be like, “Hell yeah! This is great.” And I , there’s one scene in [The Exorcism of] Emily Rose when she’s, you know, in her nightgown running across the campus, and she runs across this giant, orange, bright saturated orange wall. And I when we were scouting, and I said, “I think we should have her run across this part of the campus.” I said, “Look at all this concrete.” I said, Let’s put really saturated orange light up here, and Tom laughed. [Gemma laughs] And I said, “No, I’m serious.” He goes, “You’ve got to be kidding.” I said, “Suspiria, Tom! Come on, Suspiria!” He’s like, “Oh, okay, alright.” So that’s what we did. So the saturated orange light on that wall and the saturated strip of orange light in the hallway where she first walks out of her dorm room at the onset of her possession, you know, those are things that were directly taken from the kind of saturated set-light that Argento would use in in Suspiria.
GEMMA I love it. Where do you think that Ethan Hawke directly took his voice from in The Black Phone?
[clip of The Black Phone plays]
THE GRABBER Yes, sir. I am a part-time magician. Would you like to see a magic trick?
FINNEY Yeah. Are those black balloons in there?
THE GRABBER Yeah!
SCOTT You know, here’s the thing, Ethan’s voice is always like that. [Gemma laughs] I mean, part of the thing I really love about Ethan’s—I didn’t write that role for Ethan, and the way I sort of came around to offering it to him first was after writing it, I just thought, ‘God, this guy’s in a mask the whole time. I gotta get somebody with an amazing voice.’ And you know, Ethan’s got this way where sometimes he talks with the really high, he’ll be in a really high and then his voice becomes very gravelly and very deep, you know, and he’s that way even when you’re just chatting with him. And I’ve always thought that he has one of the most distinctive voices, and I’m surprised that he hasn’t like played lead animation characters. I feel like it was a secret I was carrying, that his voice is instantly recognizable, and highly versatile and so expressive. So that was the starting point for me in thinking, ‘Well, why wouldn’t it be Ethan? He’d be great in this.’
GEMMA I just have to say, it’s unfair to girls of my generation to make Ethan Hawke a serial killer. [Slim & Scott laugh] Just putting it out there. Just putting it out there...
SLIM So The Black Phone we’re talking about, it’s actually available on Peacock as well right now. So not just video-on-demand. So if people are subscribed, they can fire it up right now. And props to everyone involved, almost 1.5 thousand fans on Letterboxd right now. So a lot of people have this in their four faves themselves. “Thirteen-year-old Finney Shaw is abducted by a serial killer and trapped in a soundproof basement where screaming is of little use when a disconnected phone on the wall begins to ring. Finney discovers that he can hear the voices of the killer’s previous victims.” And full disclosure, I’m usually pretty trepidatious about movies with murder maybe involving kids, like I just watched Speak No Evil, which I feel like you might love, Scott, have you seen that yet?
SCOTT I have not seen it.
SLIM Holy moly, add that to your watchlist. But what I loved about The Black Phone, is the vibe that I got that this was almost like a young-adult version—and I know that this is from a short story from Joe Hill. Cargill—we mentioned also—and you wrote this. But I loved the vibe that there was almost a treatment of respect for the kids in this movie. Whereas another kind of horror movie that wouldn’t come across as well, fills it maybe with gore, maybe distaste for these kids. But I appreciated that I did get that young-adult vibe from these kids. Like if this was the short story version, I feel like young kids would want to read this, they want to see kids take over and win, you know?
SCOTT Oh man. And the audience that’s really finding the movie now and just making it their own are like, adolescent kids, you know, preteen kids and early teenagers. All of the kids in that movie have become social-media rockstars. I mean, they have like, a million followers on Instagram, each one of them now.
GEMMA Wow.
SCOTT I’m not kidding.
GEMMA Mason, who plays the main kid Finn, he is an incredible find—your casting team did, what a job they did to find him.
SCOTT Yeah, that kind of raw talent is really rare in a kid, you know, and you can’t teach it. He just has that ability to really emotionally process every beat of every moment when he’s on film, you know, in a truthful way, and it’s quite a thing he does, the way he carries the movie.
GEMMA I mean, he has just been a large part of the movie in a basement by himself and this is a kid who’s never been a feature film. So what do you—how does that process work? When you meet him, how much rehearsal did you do? How much time and space did you allow between, you know, what you put in the script and the time you allowed on set? Because the other thing is you’re shooting under Covid, it’s a Blumhouse movie, so it’s not a massive budget. So I’m imagining that you’re tight for time, but—
SCOTT We were, yeah.
GEMMA You’ve got all these kids that you’ve got to work with and they’re all so, you know, amazing at what they do. That’s a lot of pressure.
SCOTT I did something with him that I didn’t do with anyone else, which is I did several read-throughs of the scripts with—I hired an actor friend of mine to do Ethan’s part via Zoom while he was still I think in Texas where he lives. And my friend, a friend from Los Angeles and I was in pre-production in North Carolina. And we just did a Zoom and read all of his scenes, did all of the scenes that were with Ethan and talked through each one of them and talked through very specifically the beats and what his character would be thinking, and I think he’d really absorbed all of that so well, and he took notes. So by the time we got to shoot, I think he understood in of, you know, emotional state and emotional intentions, he understood exactly what he was doing.
GEMMA Yeah, he did a great job. I got to jump in and read you a couple of reviews because I don’t know actually that hiring Ethan was the best choice given the reactions that are coming through from Letterboxd. Abbie writes, “They have Ethan Hawke sitting there shirtless with a belt in hand and I’m supposed to be scared?” [Scott & Slim & Gemm laugh] And Alex also writes: “If Ethan Hawke kidnaps me, do NOT prosecute him, he caught ME slipping!!”
SCOTT Oh that’s great. [Gemma laughs]
SLIM Very thirsty on Letterboxd for this movie.
GEMMA Oh my god, yeah.
SLIM I love this review from jude: “a movie about the two scariest concepts known to man: getting phone calls and middle-aged magicians.”
SCOTT Yes!
SLIM I did see a couple of reviews of people that said they just wouldn’t have answered the phone and they probably would have died and the movie would have been over. [Scott & Gemma laugh]
GEMMA I just love—I do have one other—I love, again, we’ve got kids on bikes just, you know, in this town, but man, it’s so violent. The kids in this town are really violent to each other, so much beating up of each other and belts and things.
SCOTT That’s my childhood.
GEMMA This is your childhood? Wow.
SCOTT Everything in that movie is taken directly from my childhood. Everything that isn’t from Joe’s short story. You know, what I started with, in fact, was I was thinking about making a movie about my own childhood because I lived in this working-class, very violent neighborhood and a lot of violence in my own household and there was a big serial killer thing in the air—Ted Bundy had just come through Denver and was caught and then escaped in Colorado and the Helter Skelter Manson murders were pretty fresh in the air. The whole Satanic Panic was starting to happen, but mainly the ‘stranger danger’ thing was huge, you know. And I mean, just to give you a—I didn’t put this in the movie, but I was eight years old, when my friend next door, knocked on our front door at night, I opened the door and he was sobbing, and he said, “Somebody murdered my mom.”
SLIM My god.
SCOTT And his mother had been kidnapped, had been abducted and raped and strangled with phone cord and thrown in the local lake. And it was like the idea of the killer could just snatch you out from anywhere and snuff you out was a very real thing, you know? So I grew up, I was Finney’s age in 1978, in North Denver, and part of the—I sort of was taking my own attempt to recreate that time and place, and what it felt like to me, and kids that I knew—the Robin Arellano character is directly taken from a kid that I knew, and the same with the Vance Hopper character and, you know, blend all that with Joe’s short story. That’s really what the movie is.
GEMMA Wow. That almost feels also like every film I watch lately—or not every film I watch—but it’s almost illegal to not have characters talking about other movies in movies these days. And your characters talk about [The] Texas Chain Saw Massacre and there’s also what is that black-and-white horror film on the TV with the blood?
SCOTT That’s The Ting—William Castle movie called The Tingler which was also taken from my own experience. I was younger than Finney, I think I was only like five or six-years-old, and I went down into our den of the TV room in our house in North Denver and and I was watching that movie by myself and I just the shock I felt because it’s a black-and-white movie and suddenly all this blood shows up red in the movie, and it wasn’t until I was you know, in my 20s I think that I figured out what it was that scene.
SLIM Well if you have a fear of blood don’t watch Carrie, our next movie, from 1976, Brian De Palma. [Gemma laughs] 3.9 average and 3,000 fans, so only a little bit more than The Black Phone, more props for The Black Phone. “Carrie White, a shy and troubled teenage girl who is tormented by her high-school peers and her fanatically religious mother, begins to use her powers of telekinesis to exact revenge upon them.”
GEMMA Absolute classic.
SLIM Is that the synopsis? Or was that a Gemma synopsis?
GEMMA No, no, no, that’s the synopsis—
SLIM That was legit?
GEMMA Oh yeah, that’s legit.
SLIM When was the first time you saw Carrie?
SCOTT I believe I saw Carrie in a theater also. I might—you know, the one saving grace of my family was we did see a lot of movies, especially at the drive-in. I mean, sometimes we would see a matinee and then grab McDonald’s and then go to a double feature at the drive-in. We would see like three movies in a day.
GEMMA Ah, that’s awesome. And was that the whole family in a car together? How many of you? Who was leading the movie charge?
SCOTT My dad, and that’s how we saw, I saw a lot of rated-R movies when I was kid. I’d be in the backseat, me and my brother and sister, I was the youngest, and whenever the really R-rated parts would come out, my dad would say, “Okay, get down, get down.” [Slim laughs] So we would have to crowd behind the seat. And then you’d hear either like moans of ecstasy in a sex scene or you’d hear people screaming. [Gemma & Slim laugh] Which is, just the audio I think was more effective on my imagination than actually seeing the sequences. I mean, I saw Death Race 2000 at the drive-in when I was like... I must have been seven.
GEMMA Oh, wild.
SLIM Amazing.
GEMMA So, we’ve got the Greatest American Hero in this film, we’ve got the prom to end all problems in a film scene. Noah in a recent Letterboxd review writes: “The scene of Tommy and Carrie dancing while the camera spins around them is one of my favorite shots ever. It starts off genuinely romantic and sweet and then the longer it progresses, the faster they spin to the point where the sweetness fades to discomfort and foreboding. Between that shot and the one in Blow Out, I guess De Palma has taught me that I love when the camera spins around for a long take.” [Gemma laughs]
SCOTT Yeah, and you know, that shot has been often imitated and never matched. I’ve seen it done plenty of times in other films, and none of them have the power of the original, you know, which is often the case. I just think that Carrie, I think it’s the best Stephen King adaptation. I think it’s one of the best-directed movies ever made. And I think that, you know, it’s not even my favorite De Palma film, that would probably be Blow Out. But I think that what that movie was in its directorial ambition and originality, really was a watershed event in the horror genre. I kind of have similar feelings about it that I do Suspiria, you know, which is that it brought such high artistic ambition to that genre. And it was a very different kind of film and I really love that, you know, the empathetic quality of that movie, for the oppression. I think it’s a movie in a lot of ways about, you know, about social oppression and religious oppression and the oppression of the crowd, whether it’s the popular kids at school, or the religious hysteria of the mother and all of that and filtering that through in the most empathetic way to a girl who’s not, who’s an actual homely kind of teenage girl, who’s the kind of girl who would get made fun of at school—as opposed to the teenage starlet who’s dressed down to look homely, you know?
SLIM Right, right.
SCOTT I just think that there’s something about the truthfulness and the meaning of that movie that is so profound and and the violence that erupts at the end is so overpowering. It’s just a brilliant film. I absolutely love it.
SLIM Yeah, we talked about the first twenty minutes of Suspiria, I mean, the last 40 minutes or so of this movie...
SCOTT Oh yeah.
SLIM Are electric. It’s so cool. It’s so powerful. Every time I watch this I feel like I forget and that her date is actually in on it, like there’s no way this guy could just be nice, right? Like something else is about to happen. [Slim laughs] Like, no, you moron, you just forget what happens in this movie. And then, you know, he looks up, he gets knocked on the back of the head, he gets knocked out. What a finale.
SCOTT Yeah. And is there a more evocative and powerful and memorable and iconic image of any character in a horror film than Carrie drenched in blood?
GEMMA Ah, yeah.
SCOTT It’s just, you see that image, it just strikes something very emotional in you and you feel the power of that movie, the scariness, the disturbing qualities of it. And again, you know, she had been pushed to the point of defending herself, you know?
GEMMA LilJake writes on Letterboxd: “That final act features every single one of Brian De Palma’s trademark filmmaking techniques.” I think he’s right, you know, there’s the split-screens, there’s the neon lighting, there’s... ah, yeah, the incredible camera moves that he employs. What is it about—I’m just gonna ask the stupid question in the whole world. What is it about horror and teenage girl, teenage women protagonists? I met your mate Cargill last week at Fantastic Fest—we ate barbecue next to a roasting pig, Leonard Maltin and Alice Maltin were sitting on a bench next to us. And we were talking about the fact that on Letterboxd, that particular week, the five most popular films were all horror or horror-related in all with female, strong female protagonists—Smile had just had its world premiere, I think we’d both seen it the night before. And yeah, it’s just such a—it’s the same thing with Suspiria, right. It’s a career-making genre for actresses, like no other. I just love it.
SCOTT Yeah, for sure. And you know, Carrie gave us Sissy Spacek, one of the great actresses in cinema. So yeah, I think it does the same thing, you know, and has historically has done the same thing for a lot of directors. A director like Robert Wise, who doesn’t get enough respect, because he didn’t have his own unique style, he sort of put his style on different movies that he made, but he made the two of the best musicals of all time, The Haunting, one of the greatest horror films ever made.
SLIM Oh yeah.
SCOTT But his career started making these lower-budget horror films and they allow directors to demonstrate what they can do. So a lot of great directors have had some early dabblings in horror also, in the same way that they’ve that they’ve given birth to some of our best actresses, they’ve given birth to some of our best directors.
SLIM The Curse of the Cat People from Robert Wise, maybe that’ll be in a future episode in someone’s four faves, you never know.
SCOTT That guy made one of the best sci-fi movies ever made, one of the best submarine movies ever made, two of the best musicals ever made, one of those horror films ever made. Over 80 Academy Award nominations in his career for his films, you know?
SLIM Sheesh.
SCOTT And you rarely hear him mentioned with Hitchcock and Scorsese and Godard, you know, the great directors, and he was definitely one of them.
GEMMA I mean, you’re all of the things. You’re the writer, the director, the producer—I’m not going to ask something as stupid as, “what’s your favorite part of the process?” because I know that each part of the process has its own tricky parts and its own good parts. But can you talk through a little bit of, I guess, the emotional-energy roller coaster that is going into production, being in production, going into post-production, seeing the first cut without music and thinking you’ve made an absolute piece of shit and then finally all the bits come together and meanwhile, you’re out taking meetings to try and get money for the next thing. How do you live this life? Like how do you look after yourself and set yourself up for the natural ebbs and flows of this ridiculous art form that we’re all somehow involved in?
SCOTT Well, historically, the answer would be alcohol. [Slim & Gemma laugh] But I have been off the—
GEMMA Off the sauce?
SCOTT On the wagon for about nine months now, so—
GEMMA Good for you!
SCOTT …feel good about that. But yeah, it’s a hard road. Filmmaking, and a career in filmmaking, even was tough for somebody as blessed as I’ve been, in of what I’ve been able to do and how long my career has lasted—it’s great, I’m very grateful for it, there’s nothing else I would rather do. It’s not fun most of the time. It’s hard work, it’s anguish, you feel a lot of anxiety and frustration and, you know, the reward ultimately has to be just the work itself, you know, giving birth to something that you think has value and is good. When that happens, it’s very satisfying and worth it. But in of the process, writing is my least favorite part. I think it’s the most creative part, you know, that’s really where all the major creativity and innovation takes place. And it’s really great to work with a writing partner for that reason, because you’ve got somebody in the trenches with you, which is very helpful. My favorite part is editing. I really love the editing process and shaping a movie in post-production and watching it all come together and finding the right music and finding the right tone of the score and all of that. I find that part incredibly satisfying, I enjoy myself immensely in the post-production process.
SLIM This will be the second time I bring up on the show, but have you watched Light & Magic on Disney+? That documentary on ILM yet?
SCOTT I have not, I know about it. I am gonna see that one for sure.
SLIM There’s a lot of Lucas talking about editing, and his editing process during the original Star Wars and how just—it just cracks me up because he’s like, even back then in the ’70s, he’s like, “Why isn’t this easier? Why can’t we just have the film at the ready? There’s got to be a digital way for me to edit this effing [movie] at that point.”
SCOTT You know, on the DVD commentary for The Godfather, Coppola tells a great story about Lucas and says that he believes that Lucas’s greatest strength as a filmmaker is in editing. He thinks that’s where his greatest talent lies. And he tells a story about the scene when Michael Corleone goes to see his father and finds that all the guards are missing. And he would cut the scene and it just wasn’t working. It was like, there just wasn’t enough tension. And George was working in the same building and he just gave it to him and said, “Can you just see what you can do with the scene?” I think he went to dinner or something. And he left and he came back and all those really wonderful scenes that really build attention to that sequence of the empty corridors, cuts of the empty, of just showing how vacant and the echoing footsteps as Michaels running through the hospital and you just see the emptiness of the space, there’s no one anywhere around, that wasn’t anything Coppola shot, those were all short-ends, the end of a shot, that were from the shots that he shot of Michael running through the frame. And Lucas took just the pieces of the empty corridors and cut them all together and place them in such a way that it doubled the tension of that scene.
GEMMA Wow.
SLIM Sheesh.
SCOTT Coppola really credits the effectiveness of that particular sequence to Lucas’s editing.
GEMMA And that’s what George Lucas and Slim right here have in common—great editing. [Slim laughs] Every week, every week—
SLIM Thank you, Gemma.
GEMMA Takes the show and snips out the bits of me just telling some long, boring story about eating barbecue with C. Robert Cargill—
SLIM Not boring, get outta here. [Slim laughs]
GEMMA Slim, also does the hard yards. So I hit a wall this week in of what I could possibly take in for my psyche, being that I’m on the road away from my family. When it came to your fourth of your four favorites, I felt, Scott, like Carol Anne in Poltergeist when she just looks at the door and says, “No more.” [Slim & Scott laugh] That was me when it came time to watch I Saw the Devil. So... I am going to hand over to you gentlemen for this final segment of this episode, because I could not do it—‘did not finish’ as they say at university. I couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t do it.
SLIM Well Gemma, you gave it the old college try, we always appreciate that on The Letterboxd Show. This is a 4.0 average, one and a half thousand fans on Letterboxd. [This is] about a dangerous psychopath who kills for pleasure and the secret agent who is on his case, really for revenge for what he did to his fiancee. So this is one of the reasons why I suggested Speak No Evil to you, Scott, because I got the same kind of dark vibes, really, from this film. So I had never seen this before. What kind of a find was this for you? Where did you come upon this? Did someone recommend this to you? What was that experience like seeing this one for the first time?
SCOTT Well, I had seen several other Kim Jee-woon films, and like most filmmakers, I went through a pretty long period of time where I discovered, ‘Oh the best filmmaking in the world is all coming out of Korea.’ And so I was doing my best to find all the good Korean films that I could find and all the interesting directors. And I think I’d seen [A] Bittersweet Life first, I think that was the first one of his films that I’d seen, and seen a few others. So it was just kind of like, I had no idea what I was getting into when I watched it. And it is my favorite horror film of the last few decades. I think it is so disturbing and unflinching in its portrayal of that psychopathic, sociopathic killer. It’s an incredibly scary and disturbing movie. But what I really love most about that movie is that, you know, horror has has a—horror and thrillers in particular, same for Westerns, same for every Tarantino movie, you know, there’s this relationship that American cinema has with revenge. And I’ve always—the number-one reason I’ve turned jobs down that have been offered to me is because of the ethics of revenge that they present. And, you know, we’re really addicted as Americans to the ethic of revenge and setting up a villain as being as awful as possible and then the satisfaction over giving them the worst possible ending, you know, at the hands of the hero. And there’s something wrong with that, in my opinion. I think that I believe strongly in justice, like everyone else, and I love Tarantino’s movies in particular, I’m a fan of everything he’s made. I think that there’s something about the way American cinema traditionally, and currently, really works hard to build up an appetite for violence in the audience toward the villain, and then satisfying that, in the most powerful way, isn’t the most healthy thing in the world. Justice? Yes, I believe in justice. I’m very pro-justice, and I like justice in movies. But justice and vengeance are two different things. And the idea that vengeance destroys the avenger is really what I Saw the Devil is about. The thing that blew me away about that movie is that I’ve never seen a film that put more of a thirst for vengeance in me than that movie does in the beginning. I’m just like, ‘I want this guy to die the worst possible death. I hope that this kid, this cop finds him and just eviscerates him,’ you know, the bloodlust was boiling. And then as the movie goes on, he’s feeding off of his own vengeance and sort of stretching it out to torture this guy. And suddenly, collateral damage starts to occur, innocent people start getting hurt, you know, innocent people get killed. And by the end of the movie, he himself has become a kind of monster. And I think it’s Nietzsche who said, you know, “be careful when you fight a dragon that you don’t become a dragon.” And I think that the best revenge films are by definition anti-revenge films. And there was something—to me, I Saw the Devil is the greatest anti-revenge film that I’ve ever seen and really does a good job of playing into all those tropes, and then making you question, ‘Wait a minute, why do I feel, why am I feeling the way that I’m feeling?’ And starting to deal with the complexity of vengeful acts. And, you know, this ethic is what has gotten America into so much trouble in the last few decades. It was the vengeance that we all wanted and felt after 9/11, is what ultimately led to the justification of the invasion of Iraq and the destabilization of the entire Middle East and a lot of our global problems right now are the result of it. So I feel like it’s an important subject. And I feel like for a horror movie to tackle something as important as revenge and to do it in such a powerfully effective and critiquing way, makes it a remarkable movie.
SLIM Well said, because it gives me a different interpretation of my own viewing of the movie, where it is the most realistic telling of that story. You know, you’re right, you see these American revenge movies and you’re like, ‘Hell yeah, blow that dude up, murder him.’ And then he blows up. And then you see collateral damage, really, in an action movie, but it’s off-screen, or there’s no attention paid to it. In this movie, all of that happens, but it seems real. It’s like, this is making me so uncomfortable seeing it that maybe I don’t like this anymore... [Slim laughs]
SCOTT And I just think the ending is so profound, you know, when you see that character at the end of the movie, you just realize, ‘Wow, he just... he’s lost. He did the very thing that I wanted him to do and it cost him his soul.’ And he had his opportunity to enact justice, but that wasn’t enough for him. He wanted a deeper vengeance. And I think that it’s just that subject and the distinction between those two things, is not something that is very often taken seriously in American cinema, but is often taken very seriously in Korean cinema, you know, because there’s a revenge ethic in a lot of those movies, but the revenge movies that come out of Korea are mostly anti-revenge movies, you know? And I find that really fascinating also.
GEMMA You brought you brought Nietzsche to this party. A Letterboxd reviewer named Supreme Lemon has an important literary reference, they ask, they write of this film: “Someone has finally dared to ask, what if Tom and Jerry was a Korean revenge movie?” [Scott & Slim laugh]
SCOTT Yeah, that’s a pretty good, a pretty good summation of I Saw the Devil, I suppose. [Gemma laughs] But the movie’s also... I think the movie is also a lot of fun. I mean, there are moments in that movie where I was screaming at the screen, just being like, “Oh my god!” And the cannibal guy that shows up in the middle of the movie was one of the most awful things I’ve ever seen.
SLIM Brutal.
SCOTT It’s just such a daring, bold, audacious movie that has something important to say.
GEMMA Yeah, and in the words of James on Letterboxd: “Awesome! I will never be watching this ever again!” [Scott laughs] I know it’s late 2022, you’ve got The Black Phone out, which is awesome, people should watch it, it’s a lot of fun—Ethan Hawke shouldn’t be a serial killer, but that’s okay, I’ll just put that little complaint to bed. But what can you tell us about your—if anything—about your next film with Miles Teller, which is called The Gorge...
SCOTT I can’t say anything about it, but there will be an announcement soon...
GEMMA Oooh!
SLIM Oooh! Okay...
SCOTT I’ll say that.
GEMMA Like in about one minute, right here on The Letterboxd Show, exclusively? [Gemma & Slim laugh]
SCOTT Probably not that soon.
GEMMA Aw man. Okay, then different question. In 2022, what have been a couple of your favorite watches?
SCOTT Oh, the best movie of 2022—and I say this not having finished the year—when the year ends, the best movie of the year is still going to be Everything Everywhere All at Once.
GEMMA Ohhh...
SCOTT That is one of the best motion pictures I’ve ever seen. I think that movie is state of the art. It’s just an extraordinary film on so many levels. I’m blown away by that. And I tweeted that right after I saw that. I was like, “I won’t see a better film this year.” And it’s a great year for movies but nothing is going to beat that.
GEMMA I just, I did TÁR, it’s definitely not Everything Everywhere All at Once, it’s not even anything like it. But for me, they’re now first-equal this year. I think Cate Blanchett is incredible. But Everything Everywhere All at Once—I mean, who doesn’t want to live life by the philosophy that you should just stick googly eyes on everything? [Scott laughs]
[The Letterboxd Show theme music Vampiros Dancoteque by Moniker fades in, plays alone, fades down]
GEMMA Our guest today was Scott Derrickson—you can watch The Black Phone on Peacock if you’re a subscriber or rent or buy the film on digital platforms right now. Be sure to listen to Weekend Watchlist too, that’s our other weekly podcast where Mitchell, Slim and Mia explore the latest releases in cinemas and on streaming every Thursday and sometimes... special guests pop up. [Slim laughs] I’m not talking about me, I’m talking about Cate Blanchett this week and Todd Field.
SLIM Todd Field calling in, an amazing moment, he just decided to call in, right?
GEMMA He just decided to call in.
SLIM Call us anytime, Todd. Thanks to our crew: Jack for the facts, Brian Formo for booking and looking after our guests, Sophie Shin for the episode transcript, Samm for the art, and to Moniker for the theme music. You can always drop us a line at .
GEMMA Somebody did drop us a line this week, Slim.
SLIM What?
GEMMA Yeah, a nice person called John Anderson, who wrote, “Love the show. I listen while I do the dishes.” Thank you.
SLIM Oh my god.
GEMMA Thank you, John Anderson for doing the dishes... and for listening. [Slim laughs]
SLIM Your marriage, if you’re married, if you so chose to be married, probably is very healthy right now because you’re doing those dishes.
GEMMA Oh yeah.
SLIM Just a marriage pro-tip for anyone out there listening. If I can help you do the dishes, if Gemma and I can help you in audio, then what more can you ask for, really?
GEMMA Aw...
SLIM The Letterboxd Show is a Tapedeck production.
GEMMA Hey, Slim, you didn’t touch your apple cake... [Slim laughs]
SLIM How ’bout that steak in Poltergeist?
GEMMA Oh my god!
SLIM That gross steak.
GEMMA How ’bout the steaks in The Black Phone and then the steak in Poltergeist?
SLIM Gross.
GEMMA I forgot to say the Poltergeist steak maggots, but it’s already on my list.
SLIM It’s so foul. It’s so foul.
[clip of Carrie plays]
Do you?
Hell no. If you win, all they do is they put you up there for a school song and a dance and then some guy takes your picture for the yearbook so that everyone can see we look like a couple idiots. Anyway, it’s the last year, why not?
[Tapedeck bumper plays] This is a Tapedeck podcast.