By SHAWN MACOMBER
On a practical level, the tale of how writer/director Quinn Armstrong and a trusty band of collaborators managed to produce a diverse trio of crackling, inventive horror films—THE EXORCISM OF SAINT PATRICK (pictured above), WOLVES AGAINST THE WORLD and DEAD TEENAGERS (now in release from Cranked Up)—in under a year begins with the same call to adventure all great stories do: A conversation at the Ohio Film Office about stackable tax incentives. Dig a little deeper, however, and you’ll find a man on a quest to stoke the fires of a genre that may very well have saved his life.
“When you’re a kid growing up in a tumultuous household the way I was, you look for ways to make it normal,” Armstrong tells RUE MORGUE. “You look for ways to make yourself feel strong. You look for allies. And depending on who you are, you might seek those allies in the dark rather than the light. That’s what I did. I would see the monsters in movies and think, ‘I want you on my side.’
“My most prized possessions are these posters created by a French artist of all the Universal monsters,” he continues. “I absolutely adore them. And one of the things that’s interesting about those Universal characters is there’s really only one monster—the Invisible Man. The others are just creatures trying to eat and survive and love in the ways that they understand to be correct but end up being monstrous in the context of everybody else or the moral framework of humanity. Sometimes I felt that way—like, ‘I don’t know how to be a person in this world. I’m in the wrong place. I am wrong in some way.’ Sorry if this is a very esoteric answer, but in a scary world, monsters gave me comfort. They spoke to my heart.”
From conversion camp comeuppance to a rampaging pack of heavy metal “beasts” to teens turning the archetypal “cabin in the woods” scenario on its head, RUE MORGUE goes deep here with Armstrong about raising his own celluloid hell.
So, how many years did making three movies in less than a year take off your life?
You know, I had a blast. We were out shooting at a Christmas tree farm in rural Ohio, staying in these nearby university dorms. I had all these resources and no one telling me “No,” so I was perfectly happy to be out in the muck doing whatever crazy thing came to mind.
And to think it all started with a call to the Ohio Film Office.
Well, I pitched them stuff and pitched them stuff and pitched them stuff for a long time. And then I called them up randomly one day and said, “Hey, what if we do three movies instead of one?” A little bit to my surprise, they said, “Oh, great–that will work with this tax incentive we’re planning. Can you send us the scripts in the next month or so?” And I said, “Uh…sure. I can absolutely do that. They’re totally all written.”
Your tone is giving SPOILER ALERT vibes…
Well, the truth is, I have a backlog of hundreds of scripts. I write every day, just as a manual practice—the same way normal people might go work out at the gym. Most of those are profoundly terrible, but I was able to put together ideas and pieces of that work into three screenplays.
So the kernels existed.
It was a mix. DEAD TEENAGERS already existed. That’s the oldest script by quite a bit. THE EXORCISM OF SAINT PATRICK existed in a very different form: It was originally a straight drama–just 90 minutes of a pastor and this kid going through conversion therapy on a hike. Which would’ve been a great sleeping aid, probably. WOLVES AGAINST THE WORLD was cobbled together from a few different things, like growing up going to death metal shows in machine shops and other weird venues.
I bought my first H.P. Lovecraft book because it had the same cover as Obituary’s CAUSE OF DEATH album. There’s a lot of conversation between those two worlds.
Yeah, so you know that in that scene, eventually, around 1 or 2 in the morning, the Nazis show up and everybody fights the Nazis. That’s the tradition WOLVES draws on [laughs].
As you got deeper into the process, did you discover any unifying themes between the three that maybe you didn’t recognize at the outset?
Yeah, definitely. Partially, there’s the unifying genre theme—these are horror movies. There’s going to be violence. There’s going to be death. But on a deeper level, all three movies revealed themselves to be concerned with the question of evil–like, all capital letters EVIL. Why do people hurt each other in these ways? We know it happens, but it’s still a mystery because it’s so antithetical to human nature. For example, soldiers have to be trained to actually shoot at people because if you have a gun, the human instinct is overwhelmingly to shoot high. Most people will typically avoid hurting each other if they can. We’re social creatures. Yet, hurt happens. Why? What are the impulses–beyond just survival and subsistence–that push us into committing these horrible acts?
The press materials describe how your approach to these three films “lovingly harkens back to the Hammer Horror or Roger Corman model of shooting films on a small budget back-to-back, each film with its own unique aesthetic and cleverly interconnected elements between them.” Which makes me curious about your own path into genre fare.
In the early 1990s, Playboy created a series called INSIDE OUT that was their attempt to do THE TWILIGHT ZONE. It’s amazing, because Alexander Payne [SIDEWAYS, THE HOLDOVERS] wrote and directed one, and [THE DARK KNIGHT and INCEPTION cinematographer] Wally Pfister shot one. Basically, they were sci-fi/horror stories with sex in them—which I wasn’t particularly interested in at that point. I was probably around 7 years old. But what I was interested in was the weirdness. Like, there was one segment where a guy falls from a building and flattens this girl…and then carries around this cardboard cutout of her flat body. I remember watching it being like, “Oh my God, she’s still alive.” It just stuck with me—all these forbidden things coming together and getting snarled up in each other.
That’s a pretty good on-ramp to the Hammer highway as well.
Hammer is interesting. I came to that later. By today’s standards, Hammer may not seem like the most shocking stuff, with that bright pink blood and all that. But, man, to me those first few Terence Fisher entries are so lean and economical—especially THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, which is probably the best telling of that story I’ve ever seen.
I remember being in my early 20s, watching the Hammer movies, and being completely wrapped up in them…but also nervous to show them to friends because it felt like a lot of people might find them boring–the specialness might not connect. But yeah, maybe that’s me in a nutshell [laughs].
When did you realize that you wanted to go from observer to participant as far as film goes?
I’ll be honest: I did theater for years and years. That was my background. And then when I was around 26 or 27, I started dating a girl who wanted to be an editor. So I started directing shorts for her to edit. Then she applied to AFI and got in. I thought, “OK, maybe I’ll apply to USC.” I got in…and, of course, our relationship fell apart the second we got to Los Angeles. Which is to say I don’t have one of those “I was born with a camera in my hand and never wanted to do anything else” filmmaker origin stories.
So your love of moviemaking developed once you got into film school…
Well, I dropped out after about a year [laughs]. I had gotten what I needed out of it, and it’s so expensive. To anybody younger who is reading this, stay in school until grad school. If you’re in grad school, feel free to drop out anytime!
Spike Lee has said his generation went to film school to have access to equipment, basically. And now that has been democratized in a way where you don’t really have to pay tuition for it.
You’re paying for connections. And the connections you’re paying for are your classmates, which is invaluable. I still work with and connect with people I met at USC. But at $70,000 a year or whatever, you don’t need to go the entire time. You can easily make a feature for $70,000.
Is that what you did?
Actually, I worked and volunteered in domestic violence shelters for years while scraping together money for my first feature, SURVIVAL SKILLS (2020), which is sort of an Adult Swim-style take on those experiences. And I thought that was going to be it for me, honestly. But it went around to festivals, did well, and…lo and behold, now there are three more.
In productivity theory, there’s Parkinson’s Law, which states, “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” Did you find the time constraints useful? A more condensed, lightning-in-a-bottle creativity?
That was part of the goal with the way we structured this project. There were ways it worked, and ways it didn’t. I was balancing the need to create and the need to be inventive. Like, we were shooting three different movies—they had to be different. So in EXORCISM, for example, there are a lot of daytime scenes because we were doing a bunch of nighttime stuff for WOLVES and we don’t want them to feel too same-y. There were times when the exhaustion level was rising, and we’d had a big day and just needed to get a shot and move on without thinking about it too much. But there were a greater number of situations where we came to set and were forced to be inventive, and those really took us to unexpected places and added cool and different elements that might otherwise have not been there.
That offers a very human counterpoint to the CGI approach to making films, which threatens to be hyper-charged and mutated by artificial intelligence—the happy accidents and “necessity is the mother of invention” path, rather than this fast-rising “rendering” algorithmic approach.
AI is an interesting thing. It definitely has the potential to be hugely decimating for the business of making movies, but I don’t find it the least bit worrisome as far as the art of making movies is concerned. Maybe there’s this sort of purification coming, in which a lot of the aspects of modern big-studio filmmaking are potentially going to get swallowed up by this machine that just spits ’em out. I know people who will lose their jobs and have lost their jobs, and that is serious–it’s a big deal. I want to acknowledge that. But AI—which right now is really more machine learning than true generative AI—is ultimately an averaging machine: It takes the keywords you give it, cross-references them against this massive data available to it and averages those two out. So it can’t really, by its nature, replicate what a human brings to the table, because at our best, a human artist’s goal is exploration, not reproduction.
I like that! Especially as someone who looks at the rabbinical Judaism concepts of the age of revelation giving way to the rabbinical age of interpretation, and worries AI is pushing the arts more toward something resembling the latter. I still want revelation in my film and art, you know?
Well, it’s interesting that you bring up the tenets of Judaism, because one of the defining aspects of horror specifically is that it is treated more like folklore than most other genres. You have this mass of individual commentary around a few central stories. Which is very rabbinical, right?
True! I hadn’t actually viewed it from that perspective–and probably should. It’s more optimistic, for sure.
I can only speak for myself, but as far as the art of filmmaking goes, I’m going to be out here doing weird stuff in weird places, regardless. And I know at least 100 other filmmakers who feel the same.
Is it heartening to see the interest coming back in more organic, humanity-centered horror?
Yeah. There’s this ongoing dialectic in horror that goes back to the Greeks between violence and tension. Twenty years ago, we swung hard toward violence, with slashers and torture porn. And that’s fine; I have no issue with that stuff. But I also have no problem with these swings back toward more Gothic mystery that Mike Flanagan helped bring to the forefront, or–as much as I hate the term “elevated horror”–A24 stuff or that Blumhouse style. I could go on and on, but the point is that horror endures. I’m not worried about the genre in general. Do we need more weird trash? Probably, yeah. I think this is a really cool moment in horror, and I’m happy to be part of it.
