So I guess that’s simply my definition of fun. It was young women, and I thought, “There’s a not-fun way to do a slasher set among young women in a boarding school.” I wanted to go the different way, where the only characters who die bloodily are villains, so you can embrace the narrative and enjoy the humor on that level.
With You’re Next, I was quite fond of some of the characters, but they still needed to bloodily die onscreen for the narrative and humor we were going for.īut with Seance, I thought it was different. And you treat that with the kind of respect due, given the tone and themes of the narrative. But overall, I think it’s whether you’re taking your characters seriously enough as individuals that you care about their outcome. But that’s an extremely personal reaction. It’s easy for me to say that some horror movies are sadistic toward their characters, but it’s a very specific sensibility.įor example, I think the film Napoleon Dynamite is sadistic to its characters, to a point that it makes me feel viscerally uncomfortable watching that film. I think it’s a “respect for the characters” thing. But for me, it comes down to the film’s relationship with its characters, and how it treats them. Yes, that’s an important thing to examine. I was trying to do something a little more sedate and cheerful than what I felt the current vibe in horror is. When I became interested in movies, I translated that to slashers. I was trying to do something that felt very much like the young-adult kind of content I consumed, which were mostly Agatha Christie and Georgette Heyer novels, and the Baby-Sitters Club and Sweet Valley High books. I trying to go for a very corny kind of old-fashioned romance. I realized I was inherently thinking in such a corny direction that the film would have to be inherently old-fashioned and timeless.
I wanted to do something a little less cynical, and a little more hopeful about humanity. Certainly The Guest is as well, though they’re both very silly movies. You’re Next was kind of a feel-good horror movie, but it’s quite a cynical film about relationships. I don’t know that it was ultimately the right creative decision for me, given the way Seance has been received - it kind of feels like people are a little bit, “Why would you want to sincerely do this anachronistic thing?” But I did have this notion that I wanted my first feature to be a feel-good horror movie. Was reaching back to an older trope potentially part of that? You’ve talked about wanting to make your directorial debut a fun horror movie, as opposed to something heavy about current anxieties. I’ve never participated in one, and I have zero real-world interest in the supernatural, but I love it in fiction. I just always thought they were really cool. I’ve always loved these types of narratives, particularly Oujia films and the seances of it all. I think there’s inherent atmosphere in those situations and devices that you can play off of, and then ideally set up for surprises. Simon Barrett: I’ve always loved this kind of ritualism, leading to a haunting. Seances are such a 1980s Satanic-panic horror trope. Is this a ghost story? A slasher story? A revenge story? Or something entirely different? It’s such a satisfying and unusual way of telling a familiar story that Polygon thought Barrett would be the perfect capper for our Trick or Tropes horror week, exploring the roots of horror movies and the question of why horror returns over and over to re-interpreting the same images and ideas. Seance is consistently surprising, and it’s a tease throughout, luring viewers down a couple of different paths by using conflicting tropes. They lure the new arrival into a seance to summon the dead girl, and events fall out from there. When a student’s suicide leaves room for a new girl at the school, she promptly runs afoul of the same bullies who abused her dead predecessor. 2014’s The Guest was something entirely different: A 1980s horror-movies pastiche that’s smart, scary, and memorable enough to help make Dan Stevens a major star.īarrett also directed horror shorts for V/H/S’s V/H/S/94, and he made his feature directorial debut with 2021’s Seance, another throwback horror feature set in a remote girls’ boarding school. Projects like 2011’s Autoerotic and You’re Next, along with their segments for V/H/S, The ABCs of Death, and V/H/S2, earned them a reputation as clever, self-aware horror creators who weren’t afraid of the genre’s nastier side.
Seance movie series#
Starting with 2010’s A Horrible Way to Die, director Adam Wingard and screenwriter Simon Barrett made a series of horror films together that turned them into one of the genre’s most reliable duos.
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