Friday the 13th might be unlucky for some but for me it is a very lucky day indeed as I was able to chat to Writer, Director, FX genius and horror fan Anthony C. Ferrante about his directorial debut BOO!

It was an extreme pleasure to interview yet another one of my idols and I hope you all enjoy reading the interview as much as I enjoyed conducting it.

For how long have you been a fan of the horror genre?
I’ve been a fan of horror films since I was a kid. My mom loved horror films and I think she passed that on to me. I know I really liked the Abbott and Costello monster films at a very young age and that led me to the real Universal monster movies later. Werewolf films were my favourite and I think I was the Wolf Man at Halloween for several years in a row.

When did you get to the stage where you became obsessed by it?
I think it was always with me, though I picked up my first FANGORIA at an early age and that really got me into the gore side of things. I lived in a small town, so they were pretty lenient about letting me into R-rated horror movies as long as I had permission from my mom. So I really got to see some amazing stuff as a kid. HALLOWEEN was re-released over and over again and I finally got to see that as my first official horror movie by myself. It scared the crap out of me. It was probably the single-most influential horror movie moment for me, because from that moment on I wanted to be scared the way I was scared by HALLOWEEN and I’m still waiting to be scared by a movie, but sadly that milestone is long gone.

What are some of your favourite movies?
I’m a big John Carpenter fan, particularly all his earlier stuff. Halloween, Assault on Precinct 13, The Fog, The Thing. I love many of the old Val Lewton produced horror films from the 1940’s like The Cat People, Leopard Man and Curse of the Cat People. They were very atmospheric and I saw them on the big screen for the first time about ten years ago and for being these old black and white horror movies, there were moments that had me on the edge of my seat. I watch Diner every year because I think it’s a great coming of age movie and an incredible first time feature from writer-director Barry Levinson. I love Eddie and the Cruisers (the music, the story etc. though I’m sure others may beg to differ) Cronenberg’s the Dead Zone is fantastic. I like the entire Evil Dead trilogy and the Phantasm movies always spooked me. I didn’t see Phantasm until I was older, but the commercials and video box for Phantasm always freaked me out. Raiders of the Lost Ark is still one of the best action adventure movies ever made. And Valley Girl is one of the best teen comedies of the 1980’s hands down.

And your favourite directors?
Carpenter, Levinson, Cronenberg. Steven Spielberg is a god, mainly because he’s managed to find a career both as a popcorn filmmaker and as a serious filmmaker as well. He gets to do what he wants and tell whatever stories he wants in whatever genre, and that’s very enviable. I would love to be able to have that kind of opportunity to follow my muse and experiment in different genres. I also think Tim Burton is a fabulous filmmaker. Big Fish was one of the best films last year and deserved to be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. I think John Sayles is very underrated as a filmmaker. Baby, it’s You, Lone Star, Eight Men Out, and The Secret of Roan Inish. This guy is incredibly versatile. I also admire Quentin Tarantino for mixing so many of his influences into a unique world all of his own. This guy made it easier for film geeks like me to have a chance in the Hollywood system.

Did you want to be a writer initially or did you always see it as a way of breaking into the industry?
When I was 11, I knew I wanted to make films. I remember the moment and time it happened -- it was on a playground in elementary school and I was looking in a newspaper at the movies opening on Friday and that was it. Before then it was like, hmmm, tractors are cool. Coming from a small town in Northern, California, it’s hard to understand what to do with that desire to make movies. So what I did was the next best thing, I wrote about them. We had a class paper in sixth grade and I became the film reviewer. I continued doing that throughout junior high and high school. I also started my own fanzine in high school on movies. I did interviews and reviews for that as well. In high school, there was a night time course at the local community college for video filmmaking. It opened up my world and I started doing shorts from that point on. So in tandem for many years I did both journalism and my own film projects and since journalism was writing about movies and interviewing my idols, I was getting an education from the masters to boot. So it was an ends to a means. I never thought being a journalist would be an entry into the industry, I thought of it as an education into learning about the industry. Then by accident, it eventually opened doors for me that I would have never expected.

Like most horror fans, I have been aware of Fangoria since forever, but it was not always readily available here in my City, even now you are lucky if you find 5 copies in total. When did you begin to write for the magazine and how did you get the job? Is it true that you met Tony Timpone at a Fango convention and asked for a job?
Good research. How did you know that? [laughs] There are many people I am indebted to for giving me a chance when they didn’t have to and Tony and Brian Yuzna are the two biggest. I always wanted to write for Fango, and my fanzine, FILM WORLD, focused heavily on horror films. I was also writing for the local newspaper at the time as well. I ran into Tony at one of those conventions and told him I really wanted to write for Fango. He told me to send him clippings and I kept pitching him articles until I got an assignment. Since then, I’ve been part of the Fango family. In fact, when I was hired as editor-in-chief of Cinescape, one of the conditions I made with the publisher of the magazine was that I was still allowed to freelance to Fangoria because of the history I have with them and because I still love writing for them. Our publisher understood and I’m still allowed to do both. Fangoria inspired me as a kid and I feel that by writing for it, I’m hopefully providing information that will inspire someone else in the same way. That’s the same thing I’d like to do with my movies. I’d like to give back to the movies and to the next generation, what these movies gave to me.

Do you feel it was an invaluable way of making contacts and showing them your multiple skills and varied knowledge of the genre?
Knowing about the genre has benefited me both as a journalist and as a filmmaker/FX guy, etc. There are so many journalists out there, but there are very few that can specialize and write about the genre. Most people have disdain for horror and sci-fi. What I found out with other mainstream publications I solicited to for work, I would generally get assignments for genre stuff, because no one else cared or knew enough about it to do a professional job. As a magazine editor myself, I find it very hard to find qualified genre writers. In the U.S., the best people either work exclusively with one of the main genre magazines or freelance to all of them. It’s a small pool of incredibly talented people and we all know each other really well.

What is your favourite Fango article that you have written?
Hands down, the Halloween retrospective. I think I wrote it in 1993 or something. I was a big fan of the movie and Tony asked if I could turn it around quickly. I don’t do anything easily, so I did tons of research and hunted down just about anybody that would talk to me. Debra Hill even got Jamie Lee Curtis on the phone which was amazing. Tommy Lee Wallace was great too. He drove me around Pasadena and Hollywood and showed me all the locations that they shot at. For a movie that was so influential to me, this was one of the most enjoyable experiences and I think one of the best articles I wrote for Fango. I have some other pieces I’m fond of though. Around the same time, I had the opportunity to follow the making of Clive Barker’s LORD OF ILLUSIONS from beginning to end. It was a massive undertaking and it also educated me even further about the making of the movies. It wasn’t just hey, I’m visiting the set and then I go home. I was able to hang out for a long period of time and really understand the monumental undertaking making a movie was. The articles turned out real interesting too and Clive Barker is still one of the coolest and nicest guys I’ve ever met.

Anthony: "The weird part about it, it was really no different from the short films I did".

You also went to film school. Do you feel that you learned far more on sets than you did at school? (I'm feeling like that at the moment)
Exactly. I went to San Francisco State, and I had already learned more making my own short films and going out to sets than I did at school. There were a handful of classes that were beneficial. I enjoyed some of the film history courses. We did a hands-on making a scene class where everyone got to be a director for a day. I did a scene from a script I wrote called WAVE OF MUTILATION about a mime kidnapping some woman. It’s one of the weirdest scripts I’ve ever written. And in another class we shot a scene from an existing movie. Mine was from John Sayles BABY, IT’S YOU. Instead of watching the movie again, I just got the script and I shot it cold. After it was done, I went back and watched the movie and realized how some of my choices were very similar to Sayles, and some of them completely different. It was a good exercise. And there was the screenwriting class where I developed WAVE OF MUTILATION. Generally though, Tony would assign me articles in Los Angeles to cover film sets for Fango, so I would cut a class or two, take a five hour drive down to L.A. and get a better education sitting on a film set. I started to realize the only way to learn is to do and observe. If you want to be a filmmaker, you need to be where films are being made and that was Los Angeles, so I moved here.

Despite some early rumblings in the movie world, it was not until 1996's 'The Dentist' that you got involved in a full-length horror feature film. How did you become involved?
The first movie I worked on in Los Angeles was re-shoots for Necronomicon. I was hired as a production assistant and I showed the Line Producer a short film I did. It had tons of FX in it and he said, “Hey, do you want to be our slave and also coordinate the FX?” Since I knew the FX guys from interviewing them over the years, it was a no brainer. So my knowledge of this stuff and the genre really helped and I got a crash course in filmmaking. When Brian did his next film The Dentist, I asked if I could be a full-time supervisor. I always thought I would be doing making-of videos to break into the business when I moved to Los Angeles. Instead, I got to play with fake blood and monsters. I think it was a much more beneficial avenue to take. Brian took a big leap of faith and put his neck on the line to hire me. But Brian and I both loved the genre and when I was doing my short films, we had no money to do things. With a film like The Dentist, they had very little money to do things, but the money they did have, I was able to utilize and stretch even further because I came from no-budget filmmaking.

Was it a dream come true to turn up on set everyday?
I think when I was doing Dentist, to me, it was this satisfaction that I was doing what I always wanted to do, to be involved with movies. It was a gruelling experience, but I got my Roger Corman training working for Brian and I learned stuff that has stayed with me to this day.

Was the process what you had expected?
The weird part about it, it was really no different from the short films I did. Working on a movie with money is the same exact thing. You’re working long hours, with little money except the only difference is you have more support. You have a bigger crew and people are required to be there. They’re not your friends who promised to show up and bailed. It’s a job, but it’s the same aesthetic. The bigger the budget, the more toys you have to play with. And you still don’t have enough time and it still isn’t perfect.

Where did you learn about make-up and effects? Had you done training?
I always tell people, I’m a Make-Up FX Supervisor, not a make-up artist. My job is to work with a budget, keep it on budget, hire the best people, come up with ways of doing the FX creatively and later on, shoot the FX on second unit. I learned most about make-up from watching people do it on set, writing about it and making the FX happen on my short films. I do throw blood though; I’m a good blood thrower.

You did a great job and returned to the post 2 years later for the sequel to The Dentist. Was it harder or easier second time around?
It was so much easier. J.M. Logan was hired as a utility FX guy on The Dentist and ended up doing almost all the set work and additional stuff we needed on the movie. This guy is one of the best make-up effects artists around. I met him in Texas working on a film called Space Marines and we have been great friends ever since. To me, he earned the job to do everything when DENTIST II came along and Brian agreed. Having one person handle everything, instead of the two or three shops we used on the first movie made things easier. Plus, we knew what worked and what didn’t regarding the oversized mouth on the first movie. J.M. for me, did some of my favourite all time make-ups in both of those movies. He did the Goldfarb jaw break in the first Dentist and he did the make-up on the girl who has her mouth gutted by Corbin. He’s an incredible artist. The Dentist II was one of the most enjoyable shoots I ever worked on. And Corbin Bernsen is one of the coolest actors to be around and was amazing to work with particularly with all the FX stuff we had to do with him. He was so gracious and supportive of what we did. I would have loved to do more Dentist movies with him.

In 1999 you worked on Progeny. How was that shoot?
I think we shot Progeny in the fall of 1997 I believe, right before the Dentist 2. It was a tough shoot. Brian, Screaming Mad George and I really wanted to create aliens that no one had seen before. The X-Files had been doing some great alien stuff, with a bigger budget, so we had a lot to live up to. Unfortunately, what we wanted to do and what we were able to do were two separate things. George’s aliens look great in the movie, but they were supposed to work in tandem with some interesting optical visual effects techniques we were coming up with. It being a low budget movie though, it was too cost-prohibitive to do as many visual effects at the time. So we ended up doing some cool things with lighting and such. Nowadays, all of that would be done CG, and not surprising, our practical aliens would still look better than straight CG. It was a very tough shoot. There was so much stuff to do and the aliens needed to have five or six puppeteers. It was way too ambitious, but we pulled it off and that was a testament to George and his team. It’s one of Brian’s more unique movies because it’s so radically different from anything else he’s done. He doesn’t get enough credit as a filmmaker and I think if you look at Progeny, as a director, some of his most amazing directorial work was done in that film.

The same year, you worked on Wishmaster 2. What was the project like to work on?
That was my first major movie that I didn’t do with Brian but everything I had learned working with him, was put to good use on that project. Director Jack Sholder is a really nice man and they let me do tons of second unit work on that film. I ended up doing some sequences I’m really proud of. Most of the deaths we shot second unit and the transformation. Jack had his list of thingshe needed from us and told us if we could get that done, we could shoot whatever additional FX stuff we wanted. So when there is chaos in the casino at the end of the movie, we were coming up with down and dirty make-up gags left and right. I had tons of fun on that as well.

The effects sequences were very ambitious and worked well, was it really hard to pull the sequences off properly?
J.M. Logan and SOTA FX were on board and they did a bang up job. You have to remember, the first Wishmaster was a $7 million dollar movie and the FX budget was huge. Wishmaster 2 was shot for around $1 or $2 million. We probably had less than the catering budget on the original film just to do the same amount of FX. What really helped was Jack trusting us to design these sequences to work for the money. We storyboarded stuff and showed him what we were thinking and he put a lot of faith in us to be able to shoot it right. I’m really proud of the work we did on that film.

In 2001 you worked again with Brian Yuzna on 'Faust' and Jack Sholder on 'Arachnid'. Is it nice to work with the same people?
It’s very easy. You know what they expect from you and what they want. I remember on Dentist II, there was a scene in the script where a cockroach is in someone’s mouth. It’s the Dentist’s delusional POV. And I looked at Brian and said, “what if he takes the dental pick and impales the cockroach, looks at it and the patient is staring at him like he’s crazy”. He loved it, and then I realized how much I was thinking along the lines of the stuff Brian liked. In fact, there’s one moment in Boo! that we came up with on the spot where this ghostly/undead person kisses a living person, and I thought it would be cool if there was an exchange of slime and blood. When they pull apart, this slime trail and blood sprays out of their mouths. After it was over, I was like “this is a total Brian Yuzna moment”. So working with Brian definitely was a college course unto itself and whenever Brian needs something, I try to help out whenever I can.

In 2002 you were asked to handle the special make-up effects on 'Scarecrow'. How much time did you have to prepare for the 8-day shoot?
None. I knew Emmanuel from working with Brian and Emmanuel and I get along really well and have the same sensibilities. We knew there was no money to really do anything spectacular, so we tried to come up with FX and sequences that were simple and cheap to do. The money really went into the Scarecrow design and mask and Todd Rex who also played him did a great job. So the movie was very blood oriented and tons of in camera tricks. I really like the scene where the teacher gets killed with the pointer stuck through her head. I knew from the Dentist that anything to do with the mouth disturbs people and so I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if someone was impaled on the head, the pointer comes through the mouth and goes through table and she’s pinned. It’s disturbing and cool and the actress who played the teacher was a trouper. At one point we needed to put the pointer through a fake head and we couldn’t afford fake hair, so she let us drape her real hair over the fake head, she hid off to the side and we did the shot. That’s what I call a professional.

Were you pleased with the end result?
That was another great experience and I’m proud of most of the stuff in that movie. I really liked Todd’s scarecrow design. He did a really creepy scarecrow. The only thing I think I wished we didn’t have to do was have the Scarecrow toss off one-liners. Emmanuel and I warned the company he shouldn’t speak, but they didn’t realize that until they did the sequel.

Anthony: "This was a chance to do something small, intimate and scary".

You returned again for the sequel, was your job any easier second time around?
It was easier in the sense that the director wanted to do more visual FX and less practical blood FX but some times on low budgets like this, it’s easier to do it practical and then enhance it later. There are some really nice things in that movie too but I don’t think we spilled nearly as much blood as we did on the original. I really liked the blood scarecrow mural on the wall that Sam Greenmun did. That was pretty creepy. Scarecrow 2 was hard physically because it was all night shoots. I had never done that before and it was very hard getting used to that kind of schedule and then being able to be coherent and be creative at the same time.

Which of the two films do you prefer?
I like both of them, though Emmanuel’s is by far the most fun of the two. It has this insane, no-holds barred, let’s kill everyone attitude about it that horror movies forget is key for a good time. Director David Latt did some nice things on SLAYER too. The sequel is a darker film and it has the benefit of not having a talking Scarecrow.

Will you be involved with any of the future sequels?
No. The next one just came out called SCARECROW GONE WILD but what’s the point. My feeling is they should have taken the Scarecrow concept and done SIGNS with scarecrows in a cornfield for the third one but instead they decided to do some spring break thing. They didn’t even hire Todd back to do the Scarecrow. He IS the Scarecrow. They redesigned the mask and it looks terrible like some sort of knock-off Halloween drug store mask of the original thing.

Most recently you made your directorial debut on the feature film BOO! which you also wrote. How long did you have the project in development?
I wrote the film when I was working on PROGENY and felt it would be a great first feature film. Everything else I had written up to that point was "big and expensive". This was a chance to do something small, intimate and scary and I had a better chance of someone handing me $1 million to do a movie than $20 million.

For those not in the know could you give us a brief synopsis please?
BOO is about a group of people who end up at an abandoned hospital, get trapped and the ghosts start playing mind games with them. It’s also about the failing of the medical system. And we have clowns. Okay, just one, but let me tell you, our clown is pretty scary. I am still amazed that the one thing people comment on after they see the movie is that the clown scared the hell out of them --- and the clown is barely in the movie.

Emmanuel informed me that he had tried unsuccessfully to set the project up for you and then Graveyard Filmworks stepped in. How did they get involved?
I never stopped trying to get Boo made. Though some people thought the title sounded cheesy, I kept reminding them so did SCREAM and look how successful that film was. It’s all in the marketing and I’m surprised no one had used the title before. Emmanuel had shown it around, but I was adamant about directing the movie and people were like “you haven’t directed before”. All the second unit and short films don’t matter to people in this town. Now if I was a music video or a commercial director, Boo would have been made years ago with Paramount Pictures for $20 million and starring Julia Roberts.

Anyway, I had known Kismet’s David E. Allen for years and we had talked about Boo a few years back. Then he and Brian Patrick O’Toole contacted me because they were starting up a low budget film division Graveyard Filmworks and wanted to work with me. They talked to me about Cemetery Gates that Brian had started writing, but it wasn’t completed yet and they wanted to get into production quickly so I brought up Boo, they read it again, I took them to the location and we were filming a couple of months later. All these years and people were saying “but you hadn’t directed before”, and here was someone so great and generous like David who said “let’s do this”, without ever once going “but you haven’t directed before”. He had complete confidence in me and I will always be grateful to him for giving me my first big break as a director.

Are you allowed to say how much of a budget you had?
That’s a David question, but it was a nice budget to work with as a first time filmmaker. I was able to envision the script I wrote on screen with very few changes.

Did you shoot on 35mm?
Yup! It’s the only way to shoot a horror film. And our D.P. Carl Bartels did some great work with shadows and light that only could be accomplished with 35mm. We wanted it to be spooky and atmospheric and most ghost stories feel like you’re on a set. We shot at an actual abandoned hospital, so we threw some blood on the wall, lit it spooky and you feel like you’re in that place. In some ways, it’s like the first EVIL DEAD movie. They shot in that cabin and you FEEL like you’re in that cabin with those kids and I hope people get the same feeling watching BOO.

How did you find your cast who despite being relative unknowns are reportedly excellent in their roles?
I wrote the villain ghost role for M. Steven Felty. He’s worked on just about every short I’ve done since high school. He started off as a D.P. for me and I discovered what a great actor he was and kept putting him in my movies. He’s one of the funniest guys I know but it’s a testament to his incredible acting that he can do comedy and drama on equal footing. If you saw him goofing around in some of my comedy shorts and then saw him in Boo! you would know what I mean. He’s also the guy that turns inside out in WISHMASTER II in the casino sequence. When he came in to read, everyone agreed he was Jacob. I also worked with Nicole Rayburn on Scarecrow 1. The rest of the cast was through the normal audition process. We lucked out and found some really great up-and-comers. Trish Coren is our lead Jessie, Jilon Ghai plays Kevin, Josh Holt is Freddy, Michael Samluk is Allan, Dig Wayne is Baines aka Dynamite Jones and Rachel Melvin is Meg. And Happy Mahaney is really funny as Emmett. People who have seen the movie tell me he reminds them of a young Tom Hanks. I needed to give them some plugs. Remember those names! You’ll be seeing more of them.

You also managed to get Dee Wallace Stone back for more horror. How did that come about?
I knew Dee from the journalism world and I really wanted her to play Nurse Russell. I didn’t think we had a chance, but she wanted to read the script. She read it right after Christmas, said she loved it and wanted to do the movie. She’s one of the sweetest women I’ve ever met and she really upped the profile of our movie by agreeing to be in it. And she’s been in all these great genre films E.T., THE HOWLING, FRIGHTENERS. She’s worked with all my idols and now I got a chance to work with her. Very cool.

Are you aware that people are saying that Mel Gibson has a cameo in the film?
Yeah. It’s interesting being on the other side of Internet gossip. It makes you wonder where this stuff comes from. Though, we do have a Mel Gibson connection in the movie. Our Special Make-Up FX artist Kevin Wasner and Visual FX Supervisor Michael Shelton had both worked extensively on Gibson’s THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST. So maybe someone got confused along the way. It’s a pretty big stretch to think he would be in our film. We’d be promoting it like crazy if it were true. But hey, maybe we should make an official invitation to Mel right now to come over and stand in front of a green screen and we’ll composite him in as a doctor or something somewhere in the movie so the guy who started the rumour will feel vindicated. We’ll unlock the print for you Mel. Come on down and make an Internet fan happy.

The location is reportedly actually haunted and is said to be a character all in its own. Would you agree?
Definitely. When David saw the hospital for the first time, we went to lunch afterwards and he was like “let’s make this”, because he could see the movie I wrote on the page right there at the hospital. I’m sure the hospital is haunted, but I was so busy making the movie, I didn’t get to see anything out of the ordinary. It did make me nervous walking around in the boiler room by myself though, but I’ve shot in haunted places before. If there are spirits or ghosts there, if they don’t want you there, they’ll let you know. Since people film there all the time, I’m sure they’re used to film crews by now.

Early word is that the film is genuinely scary would you agree?
The goal with the movie was to make a truly scary movie. I was so frustrated by horror movies not being scary and building up to scares that I wanted to prove it could be done. I think BOO has scares and then some. In fact there are so many scares; I’ve noticed when we’ve viewed the movie as a whole that it’s pretty unrelenting. There aren’t many instances where we let the audience rest and we use tons of tricks. We have things lurking in the shadows, people falling apart, ghosts walking around really creepy, a haunted elevator from hell. And a clown. Yes, we really do have a clown.

Were there a lot of pranks happening on set or was it hard work all the way?

For me, I didn’t have a chance to breathe. Thankfully, I knew the script well and had rewritten over the years, so I knew the characters and the geography of the movie by route. The script was pretty tight and polished going in, but it was 100 percent focus from the first day to the last. But it was so worth it because this was the first time on a real movie where I was focused on my vision as opposed to interpreting another director’s vision via FX or second unit.

When will it be done?
We just finished it; it’s done and ready for show.

Any ideas about who will distribute?
We’ll know in a few weeks. Kismet is talking to the studios right now. This movie is a distributors dream. We have a great title, a cool tagline “You don’t have a ghost of a chance”, and a truly creepy movie that will have people in theatre seats in droves on opening day. People like to discover the underdog horror movie from BLAIR WITCH to CABIN FEVER to SAW. SAW opened at $17 million and cost $1 million. Pretty great investment. Same with THE GRUDGE, I think that cost $10 million and has made over $100 million. And three horror movies in two months have been number one and made nearly $20 Million a piece opening weekend. People are making a mint off horror movies. And studios are always looking for anything special and unique and I really believe we’ve come up with something special that will appeal to general audiences and horror fans alike.

Any potential release dates?
Once we have a distributor, I’m sure they’ll make the final decision. The way horror movies are going these days, you can pretty much release one any time of the year and do well though BOO is set in the fall, so a fall release would make sense.

What about a rating?
Probably R, but you never know. THE RING and THE GRUDGE are pretty intense for PG-13 films and BOO is tonally along the same lines, but it’s up to the MPAA.

What do you have lined up next?
Regent St. Claire and I wrote a gothic horror script called CANDYAPPLEBLACK several years ago and he just adapted it into this fantastic comic book. Check out the website www.candyappleblack.com. For years we were looking at other directors that we thought would do a great job on the movie and nothing ever panned out. I would love to make this movie now. The producers who have had the option on it for the past couple of years are really excited about Boo and feel it would make sense to have me attached as director as well. It’s a perfect film to follow-up Boo! It would be great to work with David and Kismet again and I’m also up for a couple of other projects that are still in the preliminary stages. I also co-wrote NOMAD for Emmanuel Itier to direct. It’s an action-horror movie. Very fun stuff. My horror films tend to be a little on the dark side, but NOMAD was the chance to add a little humour and action to the mix. Emmanuel is another one of those guys who has had great faith in me and he’s one of the easiest people to work for. Seeing his directing-style on Scarecrow really made me aware of what you need to do to make your crew and cast feel comfortable and happy so they can do their thing.

I’m also excited by the fact that every studio has some kind of horror film or remake they’re developing, so I wouldn’t be adverse to directing one of these remakes as long as you could do something different with it. I’ve heard some people are upset about EVIL DEAD being remade, but I’m the biggest fan of those movies and I think a remake could actually be pretty incredible. It’s all about the execution. You have to hit a few beats that are familiar -- the cabin, the woods -- but Sam Raimi never really had a ton of money to explore the limitless possibilities of the surroundings in the original. There are some great elaborate suspense sequences that could happen in the woods and even in the water that can take the franchise one step further and still be true to the original. The first EVIL DEAD is absolutely terrifying, the concept is simple but it really works. An EVIL DEAD remake really makes a lot of sense and just like the recent TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE remake, it won’t take away anything from the original, it will just bring more fans to the original.

"Thank you ever so much for taking part in this interview Anthony C..
And we wish you the very best of luck in the future."