Ben Sottak’s HALLOWARRIOR arrives on Shudder as a sweet treat for horror lovers this spooky season. Simple and engaging, this debut feature stars Milly Shapiro (Hereditary) as Pumpkin, the last girl on earth after an apocalyptic outbreak decimates the population and the food supply. Alone on Halloween night — her fourth without a family to help carve the jack-o-lanterns — she contemplates a death of despair before a group of ominous trick-or-treaters arrives at her door, all dressed up with nowhere to go and sharp-toothed mouths to feed. This all-in-one-night haunted house caper is warmly lit and nostalgically dressed, a blend of after school and afterlife that mixes a number of different subgenres like candy in a bloody plastic bowl on the front porch. To celebrate the film’s release this week, RUE MORGUE joined the director and star to talk about independent filmmaking, Disney Channel, and the joys of haunted houses.
What was the first time you ever went to a haunted house?
Milly Shapiro: Yeah! My first experience with a haunted house was in my hometown of Tampa, Florida, with family. We got to the front of the line, and I went, “No, no, we’re good. My dad was like, “No, we’ve committed!” He picked me up, and I was like, “I’m gonna kill someone!” and was super horrified. I don’t know what it is about me, but I always get personally targeted in haunted houses, ever since I was a kid. I think it’s because I keep accidentally making direct eye contact with people, so they’re like, “Oh, you…” and I’m like, “No, please!” So I was making crazy jokes and bantering the whole time with my eyes closed, like “Soon they’ll take me, goodbye!” [Laughing.] That was my first experience, but now I like them. It just took me a couple of years to get used to it, I guess.
Ben Sottak: I was not a horror kid. I loved it, but it would freak me out and I would wouldn’t be able to sleep. The first haunted house I went into was a community one that was set up in my neighborhood. I braved it, and the first couple things were like monsters, which I was okay with because I found monsters cool, but the last person was made up really well –– it was actually my friend’s dad –– as a burn victim, and he was just screaming in pain, and that freaked me out. It was so realistic and kind of put me off of haunted houses for a long time.
Milly and I went to Halloween Horror Nights together last Sunday, and which was a great time. It was great having Milly there, because she just steers through the crowds and haunted houses. We just held on to Milly!
MS: I love dragging people through theme parks. It’s very entertaining for me.
When did your friendship start?
MS: Well, back in the back in the annals of time in 2020, I was sent this movie. We really didn’t know each other that well, but through filming we became pretty close, and now we hang out all the time. Ben will never escape me. I will come pester him. I feel like there’s something with making things with people: It’s so honest and vulnerable, like, “Here’s my raw, naked self, hope you like it!”
BS: It’s funny to think back. Our first couple Zooms were six years ago, and they were so cordial, like, “Hello, Miss Shapiro, you were in Hereditary! You’re so cool, do you want to do this crazy Halloween movie?” And now you come over and hang out with me and my partner all the time. We watch Frankenhooker. It worked out great.
That’s awesome! Milly, can you talk to me about your first experience reading this script and what drew you to the project initially?
MS: I read so many scripts and have throughout my life that there’s only a few that have really stood out to me, and this was one of them. It had such a specific point of view, which I really liked. A lot of the time, I’ll read a script and I’ll be like, “I have no idea who’s making this,” but with this one, I was like, “I can completely understand who this person is. I can completely understand their vision of the world.” That’s always really compelling to me because it’s so honest.
I felt like it was a coming-of-age story at the end of the day. Yes, it’s a horror movie, and there’s all these horror elements, but it’s a movie about growing up, and I really loved that. You get to see this character grow up in this world that is so fully developed that I could see the entire movie like from the script. When I watched the first cut of it, nothing surprised me, which is really crazy because I was like, “Oh, this is exactly what I expected it to look like when I read it six years ago.”
This movie has so many different kinds cross–genre and sub-genre elements that it plays with. What was the first thing that coalesced for you, Ben, in this story?
BS: I love the “Last Man on Earth,” Richard Matheson archetype and how different filmmakers have played with that. Obviously Romero did it with Night of the Living Dead beautifully, Sam Raimi even brought elements of that into Evil Dead and Evil Dead II, where it’s just one character holed up in a house while evil forces are coming in. I knew I wanted to have my first feature fall somewhere into that archetype, and rereading the original I Am Legend and watching those movies at the time I wrote the script, my little sister was roughly Pumpkin’s age. We were talking about, like, “What would you do if it was the apocalypse?” And she was like, “I’d probably just make it Halloween every day because I love Halloween.” I was like, “I probably would, too!” Then it became, “Well, what if we have this character who doesn’t really belong in a post-apocalyptic movie, who doesn’t even know the rules of life, like ‘No you don’t trust bad people, you don’t let them into your house!’” I used that to drive this sweet but weird but violent coming-of-age arc.
Let’s talk a bit more about that writing process. This is a wonderfully spare, efficient movie, but the world still feels really fleshed out with very minimal exposition.
BS: All my favorite Halloween specials growing up are in that 70-to-80-minute runtime. They’re about simple stories, creating this arc and this atmosphere. Simplicity was always in the DNA, and then when we got to the final runtime, I was like, “This feels like a like a Disney Channel original Halloween movie, with some violence and and darker themes thrown in.”
You always want it to feel that way when you’re young, too. That’s kind of the beauty of a haunted house is that feeling. Milly, how did you start crafting this character?
MS: The first thing I looked was the question of Pumpkin’s mental age. What would it do to someone to have everyone you know and love die at a very young age? I wanted to make sure that you felt her grow up throughout the movie, so it was about figuring out what points are really changing her as she’s coming into her own. I was very anal about prep, too [laughs]. Every day for a month, like at least three hours a day, I was sitting with the script figuring out the heart of this person because I knew that for this to work, she needed to have a very specific type of personality, a very specific soul deep down inside of her. Then I met with Ben with way too much information [laughs]. He was like, “Yeah, that’s that sounds on track to me!” so it worked out.
BS: She did so much prep for this character while I was dealing with all the other fires that come with indie filmmaking. I had complete trust in her that she had done the work, and she was like, “Ben, what do you think about this?” I’m like, “Yes, awesome, you’ve thought about this even more than I have! Now I have to make sure we don’t actually light this house on fire” [laughs].
Can you tell me about some of the challenges that came with production?
BS: During the last two days of shooting principal in November of 2024, there was a huge blizzard in Syracuse where we were, and outside started looking like a Christmas movie and not a Halloween movie very quickly. There’s even – and if anyone can find it, points to them, I’ll send them a Blu-ray – there’s one shot where Milly’s near the window, and you can just see pure, perfect Christmas snow falling outside. So we wrapped principal, but we hadn’t shot those exteriors of like Milly out in the world yet. We had to wait three, four months for everything to thaw. Then we went back and shot all of that stuff in like a day and a half, and I couldn’t be happier with how it went. With indie filmmaking, you have to be patient.
MS: It was funny as well. Ben was stressing out about all that, and me and Ajani [Russell, who plays Wendy, one of the scavengers] were having a snowball fight in the backyard! We’re like, “Let’s make snowmen! Yay!” And everyone else is like, “We’re stuck on set for three more hours because it’s unsafe to drive” [laughing].
BS: Y’all were having a blast, and I was just like this [putting his head in his hands].
MS: That’s the beauty of being an actor: You’re the baby on set.
Let’s circle back a little bit to the visual aesthetic and some of that other genre stuff. I do a lot of work on psychedelic horror film, so as soon as I saw that piece, I was very excited about it. Can I hear about developing that element and what it was like for you, Milly, to do those scenes?
BS: I’m sure that entered the script in 2018 when I saw Mandy. That movie was so mind blowing and game changing, so I was like, what if we threw a little bit of Halloween apocalyptic Mandy in here? This is a Halloween movie that doesn’t technically have a supernatural element to it, also, and I wanted that to be at the core of this. I was like, “How can we put ourselves in Pumpkin’s head and also give a little bit of weird world building lore to these scavengers with their post-apocalyptic drugs?
MS: Acting-wise it was fun to do. It wasn’t something I had done before, so it was fun to explore that. For Pumpkin, this is very overwhelming: she’s just trying to find even footing in a place where she has none. All of her emotions that she’s ever thought or felt are all coming back to the surface in this instance, and it’s a very sensory overload type of thing. It was cool, too, because everything was lit very practically, so it already looked very trippy, which made it very easy to act.
BS: We were all breathing in a lot of smog and fog machine smokes, too, so I think we were all tripping balls while we were shooting those scenes, which hopefully comes through [laughs].
HALLOWARRIOR premieres on SHUDDER October 16th.
