We caught up with directors Adam Egypt Mortimer, Dennis Widmyer, Kevin Kölsch and Sarah Adina Smith whilst at Tribeca to talk all things Holidays, the latest horror anthology.
Holidays premièred recently at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film is a brand new horror anthology with nine different director’s each taking a turn at turning your favourite holiday into a living nightmare. The film whips through the whole holiday calendar from Valentine’s through to New Years, getting progressively darker and more sinister. It’s a film that genre fans will adore and comes highly recommended from us (read our review here).
THN were lucky enough to grab time with four of the team to talk about the project. Adam Egypt Mortimer directed one of our favourite films of last year’s Frightfest Some Kind of Hate and, in addition to directing the New Year’s story, also produced the movie. Also pulling double duty on the project are Starry Eyes directing duo Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer who wrote Mortimer’s segment as well as their own Valentine’s Day chapter. Sarah Adina Smith dreamt up the Mother’s Day portion and is the anthology’s solo female director.
The group were in high spirits and we happily chatted about how Holidays came to be, female characters in horror, and how important it is to have friends in the industry.
How did you all get involved in the project?
ADAM EGYPT MORTIMER: So this project was created by a guy called John Hegeman who has had a long career, and is brilliant film marketer and studio exec. I had done a lot of work for him over the years in short films and had always heard about Holidays. He happened to be finally putting the film together after all these years at the same time as he saw an early cut of my movie Some Kind of Hate, and he asked me to be a part of this crazy holiday thing he was doing. I immediately started talking to him about filmmakers who I really liked who I wanted to also be part of the movie, which happens to be all three of the people that I’m sat in this room with.
EVERYONE: Awww
AEM: Actually when I went to Fantasia showing bits and pieces of Some Kind of Hate I saw the movie Midnight Swim. I walked out of that movie theatre and said ‘I’ve gotta meet this director, I’ve gotta do something with them.’ It was just at that same time that we were talking about Holidays and I asked Sarah to be a part of it.
What’s the appeal of an anthology for you as directors? Is it that it’s a shorter time frame and you can get it out quicker?
KEVIN KÖLSCH: Yeah it takes a long time to make a feature film. It takes about a year and you take it home with you every night.
DENNIS WIDMYER: But there’s something really refreshing about doing something shorter and stretching your chops as a filmmaker and getting better at your craft. Trying things that you wanna do, but don’t really fit a feature film. It’s good to work with other filmmakers and getting to do the festival thing. For us we liked the idea of doing something in between whatever our next feature film is going to be.
SARAH ADINA SMITH: For me its the first time in my life that someone has actually been like ‘here is a chunk of money, would you like to make something?’ Of course I’m going to say yes to that because that’s just a really cool feeling. It’s a wonderful chance to experiment and try some things that I might not have otherwise had the chance to try. But making a short film is also – we were just talking about this yesterday – it’s almost as much work as making a feature in some ways. It’s not actually easier, you work a lot harder.
AEM: One of the things that I think is really nice about the anthology thing, the appeal for me, was this idea of being part of a community of filmmakers. You know, somehow being involved with other people whose voices and point of views you admire. With a film like you this you create a micro-community for a moment and what worked out with Holidays it has a kind of a feeling the whole way through even though it wasn’t directed to have a feeling the whole way through. Somehow all nine people working on this thing found a way to be integrated unconsciously. I think that did something really exciting. Before my first movie I didn’t know a lot of filmmakers and then the process of making that movie, and especially with Holidays, I feel I’ve been able to get to know people that do the same thing and hang out with them. It was important to me making my segment New Year’s that Kevin and Dennis wrote it. It was another way to have an expression of community and playing with ideas together. It’s something I’m always looking for.
KK: Basically he wanted some friends so he produced this movie. (All laugh) Now he has friends, we all hang out.
The stories predominantly focus on women, Sarah you were the only female director, do you think that gave you an edge in terms of getting inside the heads of your characters?
SAS: I didn’t really know what everyone else was going to do. I don’t think any of us did, we all worked pretty independently and they gave us a ton of creative freedom. It was a surprise to me actually how many of the segments had female protagonists. But I don’t know if my female parts gave me an edge or not. I’ve never had other parts so I don’t know what it would be like.
AEM: It was really interesting when I saw the whole movie come together, because you’re right, most of them have female leads, but isn’t that usually the case in horror?
SAS: Do you think that’s because it’s more acceptable for us to see women be afraid than to see men be afraid, and so they like having female protagonists?
DW: I get that too, but I don’t know if it’s in this movie. I don’t think it’s the Holidays ideology though. The female protagonists in Holidays aren’t really being scared in the traditional sense of like a slasher movie – there’s a girl running around screaming, being chased by a killer. I don’t think that’s what’s happening in any of them. A lot of them have women interacting with each other. Gary’s is women interacting, yours Sarah is women interacting, even Kevin Smith‘s is the three girls working together. I think women are just more interesting to write for. It just feels refreshing and different. Kevin and I liked twenty scripts and our first fifteen or ten were male-centric, and then we just woke up and the last like eight things we’ve written or directed have been female driven.
SAS: I’m in post on my next feature now, it has a male protagonist and that’s been a lot of fun probably for the same reasons.
Along that topic, Kevin and Dennis in Valentine’s Day – you mange to perfectly capture the dangers of teen obsession. How hard was it to channel your inner teenage girl?
KK: Well we’ve never grown up really so it’s not hard. I think it’s sort of the same everywhere. I think that even as an adult people obsess over things, maybe not in the same way or to the same dangerous level. I think when you’re younger you don’t realise the consequences of things, there’s more potential for things to go dangerously bad because you’re not really thinking things through. You’re acting more emotionally then when you’re a quote unquote ‘responsible adult’. Just because you don’t act on things doesn’t mean that you don’t think them. Even as adults we still have these obsessions and these dark thoughts. It’s still there, it’s just a matter of embodying that and how they’ll act it out.
As with Starry Eyes’ Erin, Heidi is a hugely unlikable mean girl, but also very real – how do you manage that?
DW: I think we respond to characters that feel like outsiders, a good drama is complex. There’s something very fun and appetising about a good villain. The irony is that Savannah, she’s beautiful, she’s a model, she can act and we got her on set and it was actually kind of arduous to get her to bring that [bitchiness] out. She’s the sweetest person, she was bullied herself and it’s the type of thing where she actually responded more to Max the bullied instead of the bully. We really had to direct her to become a bully. It was a fun and challenging experience. She really had to learn how to see the good in this person. If you write them correctly and you understand that most of what that bully is going through is insecurity. She going after this other girl because she herself probably wants the same thing that this girl wants. She has the same obsessions as that person, but she’s just externalizing it in a different way.
I really enjoyed the Mother’s Day segment and would have liked to have seen more, what motivated the decision to cut when you did?
SAS: Well when I make a short film I try to make it feel like its a slice of the feature, a slice of a bigger world. In terms of when to end it (laughs) – budget. We barely got that movie shot, we had three days of filming but I guess I wanted to end on an interesting and mysterious point. If we’d have gone beyond it’d have gotten difficult and expensive.
You want to know the mythology? I actually shot my segment first in December 2014. I looked at when Mother’s Day was falling, it was something like 10/5/2015 so I looked back in history to see what happened on this date 10/5/1520. And Moctezuma II was around and their was a lot of mystery around how he died. It was around that time and I found out about this cult who believed he was going to come back again. I thought that was really interesting. I wanted to combine that with this idea of the primal horrors of motherhood. Before the advent of contraceptives, women could just get pregnant any fucking time and would die in childbirth. It was a mostly horrific experience of having no control of your body. So why not go back to that notion and that fear of a woman that keeps getting pregnant and can’t stop getting pregnant.
Adam, you got to direct Lorenza Izzo, an actress well on her way to becoming a scream queen. How was she to work with?
AE: Lorenza was awesome. She was super excited about playing the part once she read the script and saw what she’d get to do — I don’t want to give too much away but she was VERY interested in the aspects of the story where she got to get aggressive and destroy things. It was also a lot of fun to have her play such an awkward character. We gave her a delightfully terrible outfit, but of course no matter how sort of tasteless and unflattering it was meant to be, her natural charm and beauty emerged to create a hybrid style that was quite unique. She’s just so funny in that awkward date scene, she and her co-star Andrew really brought that scene crackling into life. And of course once the blood started flying, she was completely all-in. I cast her because of the ending of Green Inferno, where she was such an insane badass in the jungle and I knew she’d be brilliant at all the physical work in New Year’s.
New Year’s is the last thing that audiences will see, how important was it to go out with a bang?
AE: New Year’s was totally structured around having an insane action sequence timed to the countdown to midnight, so that was always going to have to have a big ending on it’s own. When I first picked that holiday I thought it would be FIRST, so I was thinking of it in terms of kicking off the movie (and the year) with a kickass kind of feeling, but it turned out that the ending really served the overall feature and made for the perfect end.
The stories all go to some extreme places, which one were you most shocked by?
AEM: I don’t know if I can say which one shocked me…
SAS: I think St. Patrick’s Day surprised us all in how absurd and hilarious it got.
AEM: Yeah, it had the most tonal surprise.
DW: I think they all have shocking scenes. The brutality of the fight scene in Adam’s is very shocking, it just goes for it. I think that they all have something very special about them.
There’s been a few anthologies released recently, what makes Holidays different?
AE: All our directors approached the material in a thoughtful, weird, unexpected way. There was an overall focus on production quality, visual storytelling, and unexpected twists on what each Holiday story can be about. When people initially think of a Holidays-themed horror anthology, they might be expecting Santa with a chainsaw sort of films, but you look at what Gary Shore did with Saint Patrick’s Day, or Anthony Scott Burns‘ poetic and tense treatment of Father’s Day, and those things are completely defying expectations while being all about mood and visuals and cinematics. In some way I think this is because there have already been a number of other anthology movies, and the directors in Holidays were aware of that and wanted to defy the trends in some cool ways.
Holidays is available to watch now on digital platforms everywhere.
