By Krysta Fauria
LOS ANGELES (AP) --With the box office success of "Smile," "The Black Phone" and his "Barbarian" this year, writer-director Zach Cregger says it's clear that "original horror is working right now."
Though the genre has long relied on franchises like "Halloween," "Saw" and "The Conjuring," Cregger says younger filmmakers are finding scary features "creatively fertile territory" for exploring unexpectedly complex themes.
Cregger's solo directorial debut was lauded as a late-summer sleeper hit, making more than $42 million worldwide on a modest production budget of $4.5 million.
Now available on streaming, it tells the story of a young woman (Georgina Campbell) who finds her Airbnb-rented house in a half-ruined section of Detroit weirdly occupied by a stranger (Bill Skarsgård). It goes on to subvert a number of horror conventions, and found audiences outside the traditional genre fans.
"Adults that are craving new and groundbreaking stuff, there's not a lot of places to go," Cregger said. "Studios are only putting money into big IP superhero stuff, which for me as a 40-year-old man, I'm not really like drawn to that."
He struggled to find a studio to back his film. Cregger said he looked up the production companies associated with every horror movie that has been made in the past 15 years, then sent his script to all of them. None agreed to fund the project.
As he was considering selling his house and going into debt to pay for the film himself, Cregger found BoulderLight Pictures, a small production company based in Los Angeles. "They were the first people that read it that were not daunted by the shift in tone," he said.
Another horror directorial debut, "Smile," topped the box office for two weeks after its release in September and has made more than $169 million worldwide. It examines the ripple effects of trauma.
Cregger is optimistic about audiences' growing appetite for horror films that aspire to deliver more than jump scares and gore, a trend he thinks is indebted to films like Jordan Peele's "Get Out" and Ari Aster's "Hereditary."
"You feed somebody Doritos, but then you slip some broccoli in there," Cregger said. "'Barbarian' does not have a social agenda. It really doesn't. But there is stuff in there that I think can start conversations."
"Barbarian" star Justin Long praised horror's often surprising ability to probe deeper questions, citing "Saint Maud" and its exploration of mental illness. And even as an actor, he said the director's themes were woven cleanly into the story.
"There were moments where I felt like, 'Oh, yeah, wait a minute, I think I just ate some broccoli,'" Long said.
Carrie Coon Relishes Being Part Of An Ensemble–From “The Gilded Age” To “His Three Daughters”
It can be hard to catch Carrie Coon on her own.
She is far more likely to be found in the thick of an ensemble. That could be on TV, in "The Gilded Age," for which she was just Emmy nominated, or in the upcoming season of "The White Lotus," which she recently shot in Thailand. Or it could be in films, most relevantly, Azazel Jacobs' new drama, "His Three Daughters," in which Coon stars alongside Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen as sisters caring for their dying father.
But on a recent, bright late-summer morning, Coon is sitting on a bench in the bucolic northeast Westchester town of Pound Ridge. A few years back, she and her husband, the playwright Tracy Letts, moved near here with their two young children, drawn by the long rows of stone walls and a particularly good BLT from a nearby cafe that Letts, after biting into, declared must be within 15 miles of where they lived.
In a few days, they would both fly to Los Angeles for the Emmys (Letts was nominated for his performance in "Winning Time" ). But Coon, 43, was then largely enmeshed in the day-to-day life of raising a family, along with their nightly movie viewings, which Letts pulls from his extensive DVD collection. The previous night's choice: "Once Around," with Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfus.
Coon met Letts during her breakthrough performance in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?" on Broadway in 2012. She played the heavy-drinking housewife Honey. It was the first role that Coon read and knew, viscerally, she had to play. Immediately after saying this, Coon sighs.
"It sounds like something some diva would say in a movie from the '50s," Coon says. "I just walked around in my apartment in my slip and I had pearls and a little brandy. I made a grocery list and I just did... Read More