By BILL REICK
I connected with Joe Dante’s team under the guise of speaking about the 1955 creature feature Tarantula’s 70th anniversary. However, I have to admit that I was much more interested in his career and his movies. Dante has given us countless iconic horror moments, so I don’t know why I was so surprised to learn he was also incredibly giving with his time. I can’t lie here. I was extremely nervous to interview the legendary director. Dante’s legacy is peerless, and I felt out of my element sending his team a Zoom link so I could conduct an interview. Luckily, I also learned that Joe Dante is a really nice guy.
It was a real privilege to connect with this horror legend, and I wanted to honor his time by speaking to him about parts of his career I didn’t know much about. Everybody asks Joe Dante about Gremlins, so you won’t see too much about it in this interview. The same is true of The Howling. Instead, I wanted to learn about what prepared him to be the filmmaker who directed those movies, as well as all the others. I did some serious research, and hopefully (despite my nervous stammering), I asked a few questions you might have if you were in my shoes. Here is part one of my conversation with Joe Dante.
Kind of the setup for this conversation is the 70th anniversary of Tarantula, a movie that you covered on Trailers from Hell. What was it like asking your dad to take you to see Tarantula? Did he go to a lot of movies with you back in the day?
Filmmaker Dante.
Well, my dad was a golf pro, and he spent most of his time getting up really early and coming home really late. So, I didn’t go to the movies with him that often. But, in our local theater, which was the Colony in Livingston, New Jersey, they would run pictures usually from Wednesday to Saturday and then Sunday through Wednesday, but sometimes, they would run pictures only on Wednesday and Thursday, and they changed the bill on Friday. Unfortunately, Tarantula was only playing on Wednesday and Thursday, which meant that the only way I could see it was if I could get my father to take me to see it on Wednesday or Thursday night, which meant that he would have to come home from his hard day at the golf course and then take me to see a giant spider movie – which is like the last thing that he was interested in seeing. But he was a great dad, and he indulged me whenever he could, and he was nice enough to accompany me to the double feature of Tarantula and Running Wild, which was at least a crime picture, so that he got to see something that he could relate to.
I was so embarrassed because I was so scared by the movie that I spent most of my time in the lobby pacing, and he was sitting there watching a giant spider movie by himself.
So, was this one of the first horror movies that you saw in theaters?
“THEM!” (1954).
No, no, no. I’d seen Them before that. And Them was… Well, Them was scary as hell. I mean, I had nightmares. I imagined that the tree branches that were hitting my window pane were actually antennas from giant ants, of course. And the crickets sounded like ants! So, that was a particularly scary movie, especially when the ant came out of the ant hill carrying a skeleton of a human torso. That was pretty heavy stuff for an eight-year-old.
I think we’ve lost something of the shared experience of everybody seeing a movie at the same time. Comedies and horror movies are so much better when you see them with a group of people.
I agree. They really only work best when there’s a crowd; They’re audience-participation movies. The thing that was sad to me about the demise of the Saturday matinee was that it gave kids a moviegoing habit. My generation started to become habitual moviegoers because they spent so much time at the movies and had such a good time, and they wanted to come back! So, today’s kids don’t have that kind of experience. There are so many other things competing for their attention. We only had radio and TV and records and sports. That was kind of all there was besides movies. And so, there weren’t that many things to choose from. Now, of course, there are so many other things.
Also, I’ve been reading lately that young people tend to be turning away from standard filmgoing and going more into YouTube and going into curated homemade videos and things that are much more to their actual experience than watching movies made by adults.
When you and I were emailing back and forth, we were talking about how willing your parents were to let you go to horror movies. Were they, like, “No, it’s going to give you nightmares, there’s no way we’re going to that”?
Well, they would say – particularly when I saw them and I had nightmares – “Well, these movies make you have nightmares, why do you go?”
And I said, “Because I need to see them! I relate to them. They do something for me. They’re not things in real life. They’re not part of my real life, they’re fantasies.” I was very heavily into fantasies. I was a big Disney kid, and anything that was out of the ordinary was interesting to me.
So, they were very supportive because I wanted to be a cartoonist. They didn’t pretend to understand me, but they supported me. And then I got polio, so I missed school for like a year.
That was in 1954?
1954, right. Right before the soft vaccine, unfortunately, and I didn’t get it. So, of course, I never learned multiplication tables, which makes it difficult even for me to make change these days.
I did a lot of thinking and a lot of drawing and a lot of reading – Classics Illustrated comics, because [those were] the only comics they had in the hospital. Luckily, they were unaware of how many of them wouldn’t pass the Comics Code of the day, because they were all drawn in the ‘40s. I managed to make the best of it. I could only compare it to people’s experience with COVID, maybe, these days, because COVID has been a lot more influential than people think. It’s really changed the landscape quite a bit – all the roaring tensions and arguments that came out of it. Whether we’re going to mask, or they’re not going to mask, or they’re going to tell us what to do, or let us do what we want. That’s actually snowballed into the politics we have today, unfortunately.
Joe Dante’s “THE SCREWFLY SOLUTION.”
I was just thinking of how prophetic some of your projects have been. I watched “The Screwfly Solution” from Season 2 of Masters of Horror, and it’s damn near a documentary.
Hopefully, that hasn’t actually happened. But, the things that are depicted in that movie, you know, guys jeering at women and the incel theory thing, which you can see on this new Netflix show called Adolescence, which is phenomenal. There’s a lot of stuff in this group evolution about men and women and the way they relate to each other that is still pretty pertinent.
Misogyny is rampant!
Yes, misogyny is us.
I wonder how much more positive creativity would have come out during COVID if the internet had been knocked out at the same time, and we weren’t all too busy yelling at each other online. Maybe we could have come up with some good stories, not to say that there was no good art that came out of it. We’re still in a wave of stuff people were writing during COVID. I think, if we weren’t all so tied up in the politics of “he’s wrong, she’s wrong, they’re wrong,” we could have had a much more productive period.
Well, the internet has certainly changed things, probably for the better in some ways, but in a lot of ways it’s much worse than it was before. We’re much more divided, and there’s much more rancor. There’s more hate, frankly. A lot of it emanates from the people that we elect – or at least the people we elected last time.
It becomes clearer every day the purposeful division that they’re stoking.
It works! That’s the key to their success. If you pit people against each other, and hit them with so many repellent things that they don’t even have time to respond before you send them another repellent thing. And then, they get all confused, and then, they start infighting about details, which is not the way to do it.
There’s a rampant change going on in this country, and it’s not for the good. I think there are a lot of people who didn’t know what they were voting for and now have discovered that maybe they’re not going to have a farm that they thought they were going to have. They’re not going to have some other things that they thought they were going to have because the people they voted for actually don’t want them to have them, and they don’t care about them. All they care about are rich people who don’t have enough money, apparently, and need more. And they need your money out of your pocket.
What really needs to happen is people need to come back into the workplace or school and go, “You know what picture I saw over the weekend? Tarantula.” Did you feel part of a rank of kids? Were there a whole bunch of kids going to see these movies that you’d go to?
Yeah, I went with my friends, and we would talk about the movies, but that wasn’t as pervasive later as TV was. I mean, when the Twilight Zone and [Boris Karloff’s] Thriller and The Outer Limits and all that kind of stuff came out, those were things people actually talked about. In school, it was like, “Did you see that?!” And even when they ran the Universal horror pictures… I mean, Shock Theater, those were all things that none of us had ever seen because they weren’t in our purview. They were from long before us. There was lots of talk about those kinds of things and lots of school bus chatter and all those kinds of things.
Then later, when I went to college, it was sort of a water-cooler chatter … You go to the movies, and then you’d order a pizza and talk about what you just saw. That was the era of movies from Europe and all sorts of interesting stuff that was going on, even in Hollywood, in the ‘60s. That was the era of the film magazine and people taking movies seriously and writing about them. There were places to read about them and stuff like that. Now, all of that has moved to the internet. There are no film magazines. There are maybe a few, but for the most part, they’ve disappeared, and the things that used to be written in film magazines are now basically put up online.
But, there’s so much material online; It’s not going to the magazine stand and picking the magazine you want. There’s just so much stuff that unless it’s curated by somebody, you’re going to miss most of it. [That] is why I started Trailers from Hell! It was just to get younger people interested in movies that they might not even know existed if it wasn’t for the fact that somebody else has made a movie that they might recognize, and says, “This movie influenced me, and I think it’s really interesting, and you should see it.”
It’s been very rewarding having people come up and say, “I never knew about that actor. I never knew about that director until I saw it on Trailers From Hell!” So, that’s been a worthwhile endeavor.
Leo G. Carroll as Prof. Gerald Deemer in “TARANTULA” (1955)
One of the things that I love about Tarantula is that it’s a little subversive for that era of giant monster movies. It’s not atomic; It’s not even an evil scientist. The guy’s a good scientist. He’s trying his best to end world hunger. It subverted my expectations, and that’s one of my favorite parts about many of your movies – the way that you subvert expectations. You set up a slasher movie, and… Boom! It’s a werewolf picture. Where did that anarchic spirit come from growing up?
Subversive is the word, yeah. A lot of that came from Mad Magazine. I was a real Mad Magazine kid. All the things that they made fun of in Mad Magazine were all things that our parents took very seriously. There were always little gags in the corners. If you read it again a couple of times, there would be something in the background you hadn’t seen before.
I’ve always tried to do that in my movies because I have to watch them over and over, so I always try to put little bits and pieces of things in there for myself.
Tarantula is based on a Science Fiction Theater episode called “No Food for Thought,” which is about the creation of artificial food, which is exactly the basic plot of Tarantula. [A scientist] is trying to grow all this big stuff. Even in Beginning of the End, they’re trying to grow giant vegetables. They’re always trying to grow something big, and then the wrong things get big. That’s what happens in science fiction movies.
That is kind of a thread in a lot of your movies. The powers that be haven’t a clue…
Well, there’s a certain strain of anti-authoritarianism in my movies, no doubt about it.
I watched Matinee, and I fell for the “Rah, rah, rah, let’s get ‘em!” with the helicopter at the end, only to then read that you chose that particular helicopter because it was the kind that a lot of those boys…
It’s a Sikorsky, those are the ones they used in Vietnam, and that’s where half the cast of that movie is going to end up.
That broke my heart. That was sad!
Well, that’s what happened! American Graffiti ends the same way. They’ve got those little cards that tell you, “So-and-so became an insurance salesman; So-and-so got killed in Vietnam; “So-and-so…” That was the first time I think I’d ever seen that done.
As if to say, like, Oh, you thought the nuclear threat was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet, Bub.
Well, you know, Lawrence Woolsey is telling his girlfriend that everything’s going to be fine; The kids are going to be alright. You think it’s a happy ending, and then there’s this harbinger of the future, which is that this rather ominous-looking helicopter.
William Castle, master of cinematic gimmicks.
Speaking of Lawrence Woolsey, when you were going to William Castle pictures at your theater, did they do all the gimmicks?
No, very, very few of those gimmicks were actually done in theaters. The gimmick in The Tingler, which is the seat buzzers, was a very complicated thing to do. I think outside of major cities, they really didn’t do it. That’s why they didn’t wire every seat, because it was very expensive. [They used] these leftover World War II motors or something that they stuck under the seats. But, as you see in Matinee, you could be electrocuted if you do it wrong. And there’s a huge manual that came with the movie that explains how to install the “Percepto” seat buzzers. We read it before we started the movie. It’s like, Holy crow, how many people actually could have done this?! Because if it wasn’t a big chain of theaters, then I just can’t see Mom and Pop theaters in Minnesota taking out the screwdrivers and going under the seats to make this work.
The same thing with the skeleton in House on Haunted Hill. Half the time, it didn’t work. It was supposed to come out, off the off one edge of the theater, and then it would come down. But then, even when it did work, kids would throw candy boxes at it and stuff. It was a great gimmick, but that was kind of silly. But this one [in The Tingler] was actually a great gimmick because they didn’t wire every seat and because people whose seats weren’t wired were looking over at people who were screaming and moving and, like, Oh my God! Then, they would go, “What’s wrong with them?!” Then, it would become pandemonium, because all the lights are out, which is something we could never do today. They would let you turn all the lights off.
Don’t make a move, Monster Kids! Part two of our exclusive chat with Joe Dante is coming soon.
