One can no longer say that Toby Wilkins is an up-and-coming filmmaker—he’s already arrived. Tapped by Sam Raimi to make TALES FROM THE GRUDGE and THE GRUDGE 3, Wilkins recently spoke to us about SPLINTER, the year’s best old-fashioned (yet new-fangled) monster movie. But along the way we also discussed ALIEN, ALIENS, FINAL DESTINATION, 28 DAYS LATER, THE THING and, um, STARDUST…

Fresh off his Best Picture and Best Director wins at Screamfest, Wilkins opened up about the films that make his skin crawl.

Splinter Trailer (2008) from Toby Wilkins on Vimeo.>

Firefox News: One of the things that I like most about SPLINTER is the small cast. It seems to forego the usual clichéd characters in a siege movie: the concerned parents, the comic relief, the grizzled old guy, etc.

Toby Wilkins: Yeah, we were very conscious of not wanting to fall into those trappings. Obviously, the framework for the movie is, as you say, a classic siege movie. It kind of harks back to the movies that I loved when I was growing up.

Sure.

And, yeah, it was very important to me to create, you know, something new and fresh in the movie by not embracing stereotyped characters. And, in fact, wherever possible sort of flipping them.

I noticed that. And paring things down keeps the intensity level up, and you also don’t have the sense that characters are disposable as in other siege movies. No one was disposable here.

Yeah, I think there’s been a push recently towards creating and killing as many characters as you can as quickly as you can—

[Laughs.] Yes.

—which I think ignores the fact that really to find something horrific and to really feel what a character is feeling, you have to have been exposed to them for an amount of time to get to know them a little bit and, you know, see how they react in different situations. Otherwise you can’t tell, really, what their reaction is or how scared they are.

Of course.

Taking a little time, keeping people alive, definitely has its benefits in a horror movie.

[Laughs.] That’s great: keeping people alive has its benefits. Often directors take the opposite tack, you know, killing them as the major benefit. So that’s interesting how you flip that.

Yeah, actually I was on a panel at the Austin Film Festival with Eric Red, who wrote THE HITCHER and Bryan Bertino, who directed THE STRANGERS, and we were talking about exactly this, that a lot of the movies we loved as kids keep people alive throughout the movie. And Eric Red’s new movie, 100 FEET, does exactly that. There’s the entire movie to get to know these characters.

And I think that that helps emphasize, as you put it before, finding the horrific in the story and conveying the horrific. When we have these disposable characters, more often you’re engaging in sort of action-horror for its own sake—“How many set pieces can there be?”—and that’s where the creative energies go. But that’s not at all the sense I got from SPLINTER.

Well, thank you. I’m glad to hear that. I mean, obviously, you know, let’s not knock the great versions of what you just described. Like, I think, there’s certainly a lot of artistry to the FINAL DESTINATION-type of movie where, you know, the deaths themselves are what people line up and buy tickets to see.

Of course, of course. The interesting thing, to get back to the horrific, is to take a look at not just the setup and the use of the heroes and the human characters but the source of the horror itself. Monster movies in recent years seem to more form the bases for horror- comedies or borderline horror-comedies. Even when they’re quite good ones like SLITHER. Did you approach SPLINTER as an opportunity to do an all-out monster movie played straight and have it be refreshing for those reasons?

As straight as any ridiculous situation can ever be played, yeah. I mean, I find that if a character onscreen reacts the same way the audience is going to react to a given situation, it plays as much more believable and much more real. If, in SPLINTER, Dennis is sort of, you know, flabbergasted at the speed of the creature, and Seth is incredulous at the bad idea of a plan that is put forward to get out of the gas station…

Yes.

I think if those are the same reactions that the audience is having, then you sort of win a chuckle from the audience without going slapstick with it. And I feel like those little moments of levity are how I would react in an extremely stressful situation like that, that I would find the whole situation kind of ridiculous and, you know, do the best to improvise our way out of it. But, yeah, I feel like taking a straighter approach is certainly what I respond to. I mean, even my comedies are very dark and fairly serious but they’re still comedies.

But it sounds like it’s about connecting with the audience, not just kind of overwhelming them, if that makes sense.

Absolutely.

I mean, connect and then overwhelm, might be the good strategy—something like that.

[Laughs.] Overwhelm them with a different angle than, you know, just sort of wall-to-wall thrusting things down their throat from the beginning, certainly. I guess it sort of, again, goes back to those movies from the ‘70s and ‘80s where a story is allowed to unfold before it really gets going.

Sure.

And if you can set up a story early on and set up the characters early on and then stay with them, then the audience is along for the ride. And you can create a roller coaster.

Yes. And of course if the audience connects with the characters, great. But a lot of them go into the theatre—obviously the draw is the monster. They don’t know much about the characters, but they’re hoping to meet a unique monster, and it seems that filmmakers and writers in the rush to put the newest spin on various horror archetypes—vampires, serial killers, zombies—all of those, they seem to forget that just building a basic, scary creature might actually allow for the greatest creativity. And also might be very effective with the audience because it doesn’t automatically know what’s coming next when it’s a monster they’ve never seen before. Did considerations like these enter your mind as you approached SPLINTER?

Absolutely. I mean, I feel like I just look at what’s terrifying to me as well. With the creation of this creature we’ve made something that sort of taps into what I find to be terrifying. Which is the idea of not being killed by something—I think being killed by a creature is scary obviously—but being kept alive by a creature that is killing you from the inside is a way more terrifying fate. And so when the “Splinter-creature” sort of burrows inside you and takes you over from the inside and just basically breaks you, while you’re still alive, regardless of whether you’re alive or dead, regardless of how your body normally moves, it’s going to get inside you and has no interest in ending your life, it just needs what you’ve got—

You’re just the host for it—

Yes.

In that sense it does evoke all the, you know, classic monster movies and body-snatcher-type movies going back to the 50s—

But even beyond that. In all of those movies, I’ve yet to figure out—obviously I’ve been answering all these kinds of questions a lot, but I’ve yet to figure out a movie that did what SPLINTER does. [In] BODY SNATCHERS, you’re not conscious that it’s taking you. You fall asleep and you’re replaced by one of these creatures. THE THING infects you and instantly your brain is switched over and you become a host to this thing but you’re emotionally wiped blank and become protective of it. With 28 DAYS LATER, [with] the infection, for a brief window there you know you’re infected before the rage virus really takes hold of you and turns you into one of those crazed killers. But that window is very brief.

Sure. This is off the top of my head but what’s intriguing to me is not in the monster subgenre, but maybe the closest analogy is related to possession when you talk about something taking over the body from within. Not just classic possession, but even look at something like THE EVIL DEAD. You have something much more metaphysical, but the host body then becomes a shell and you’re no longer that person anymore.

Well, exactly, yeah, it takes over your personality, too. You know what just occurred to me is, the closest thing I can think of is the face-hugger concept from ALIEN.

Yup.

Which I don’t think has really been used to its fullest extent in one of those movies, the idea that you know you’ve been infected.There’s the scene in, I think it’s in ALIENS, where somebody gets infected, you know, impregnated if you will. And says, “Kill me.” Or is it in ALIEN when Dallas—is it Dallas?

There may be similar scenes in both movies, I can’t remember.

Yeah. And I think that’s the most horrifying moment. To have someone who knows they’re done for but can’t do anything about it. That’s the horror for me.

I agree. But let’s come back to the idea of coming up with an original creature, an original monster.

Throughout my shorts I’ve oftentimes stepped into existing sort of rulebooks. --where, like DEVIL’S TRADE for example, where the core of that script existed before I got involved, that there was this sort of cursed item and [a question of] how do those rules apply. And certainly with THE GRUDGE SHORTS, obviously there’s a huge canon of work that tells you what the rules are and a huge audience of people who want those rules to be obeyed.But it’s the same with any creature, like if you’re telling a vampire story or a zombie movie or whatever, there are ground rules you can either break or redefine, and I think the most successful movies are the ones that sort of reinvent those classic creatures. Like in the way that 28 DAYS LATER totally threw out all the rules and created a new concept of what has often been confused to be a zombie—

Yes.

But it isn’t.

Because it’s not undead. Yes.

Yeah. So all of the rules can be immediately thrown out just by explaining that this isn’t that, it’s something else, but it’s going to terrify you just the same.

Which makes me really look forward to your future work in the genre with this kind of outlook you’re able to bring to your projects. So do you still see yourself as a filmmaker in general since you have worked in comedy and in other areas? Or now are you starting to see yourself more specifically as a horror director?

My favorite directors, the people who inspire me the most, are directors who are able to genre hop. Directors like Danny Boyle, Ridley Scott…

Sure.

…Darren Aronofsky. Guys like that who can, at the flip of switch, go from one extreme to another, from 28 DAYS LATER to MILLIONS, a comedy for kids.

Yup.

I think there’s a lot to be said for that, and I find that really inspiring. And those guys all really set the bar for me and that’s kind of what, even within the scope of the few short films I’ve done, I’ve done exactly that: hopped from a dark comedy, sort of a romantic comedy like KIDNEY THIEVES to a more psychological thriller like STARING AT THE SUN to straight-up curse-based horror like DEVIL’S TRADE to Japanese-horror-influenced [films] like THE GRUDGE SHORTS. To just keep it varied is certainly what I intend to do. But horror is a huge amount of fun to direct. And it’s great to sit surrounded by an audience who you’re having that kind of effect on. I think there’s no escapism like the escapism that comes when you’re afraid.

I agree.But also please resist the pressure from people like me to categorize you as simply a horror director. I think that’s part of the nature of the industry these days.When you go back to the classic Hollywood studio system, you had folks who were doing—it wasn’t even called genre hopping then because that’s what you were expected to do as a filmmaker. If you were Howard Hawks or someone like that, you’d be switching from a gangster movie to a thriller to a musical to a comedy to what-have-you, and it was just considered a filmmaker’s repertoire of skills to be able to work cross-genre like that.

I will say that even within the various genres that I’ve worked in, I always tend towards darker stories, so I feel kind of like Pynchon does. He goes from one extreme to another as far as strict genre [is concerned], but all of his stories that he responds to obviously are fairly dark and serious stories.

That reminds me of something that Takashi Miike once said. Obviously he works in a variety of genres as well, from fantasy and comedy to the gangster and horror movies, but I read a quote from him that said, “For me if a movie doesn’t have some violence in it, it’s missing something.” So he didn’t say “a darker element,” but to me, it’s similar to what you’re saying now. It needs that darker tinge to it somewhere and that’s what you respond to and look to, so the overarching genre is not as important to you.

Yeah, absolutely. I also find a genre journey to be an interesting thing to do. Like the first act of SPLINTER--out of the very, very opening scene [it] really isn’t a horror movie. Really, it’s an action thriller.

That actually was going to be one of my questions. Like many horror movies, SPLINTER starts with the emphasis on mystery. “What are we dealing with? How can it hurt us?” There’s so much that’s unknown, and the film gradually morphs into more of a thriller structure because the characters have clear objectives and you’re waiting to see if they’ll pull it off. And I know you’ve made other thrillers, so I’m wondering if you see a distinction between horror movies and thrillers or does each need an element of the other to fully work?

I think there is a distinction, but it’s a fairly blurry one. When I think thriller, from my own body of work, I would say STARING AT THE SUN is not a horror movie. Even though, oddly, it’s won horror awards.

Right. That’s the thriller I was thinking of.

But it is fairly absent that element that makes it a horror movie. There’s no real force of impending death or an entity that is deliberately out to cause harm to the characters. And I think the flip side is more often true. There are certainly thriller elements to most horror films. But I think the line is blurry for sure.

Yes. Again, part of the pleasure in a horror film is the mystery and the ominousness, for lack of a better word, of the creature or the monster itself, which is absent from a thriller. So another thing I admired about how you directed SPLINTER—and part of this I know is a function of the editing—is how the audience sees the creature and yet doesn’t quite see it, at least not full-on. That seems like a real tightrope to walk. You need to give that visual payoff periodically, of seeing the creature clearly, or else the movie comes across as stingy or cheap. But you also want the full horror to be obscured a little bit to give people something to look forward to. What were your thoughts on this, both during production, and maybe post-production, on SPLINTER?

My number one film, unqualified, of genre, is ALIEN.

Okay.

It’s my favorite film of all time. The use of showing-and-not-showing in that movie so accurately steers the audience that it’s a real inspiration, if you’re looking at what was in the back of my mind as I was showing or not showing our creature.

That makes perfect sense.

That’s kind of my touchstone. And the fact of the matter is that I knew from the very beginning that I was going to have to convince the audience that they were seeing what was going on without actually being able to show it to them.

Yes.

And that’s obviously something that’s been done over and over again in films throughout the genre’s history.

It was just very effective in SPLINTER, I felt.

It’s certainly been criticized for not having that money shot of the creature, not really revealing it. There is, actually, a money shot of the creature at the very end of the movie.

I saw it.

[Laughs] People blink. But the idea in general is that this thing is a human, a dead human body that’s being manipulated to move in ways that are totally unlike the way a human body is supposed to move. So the image itself of this broken and distorted human body is actually very confusing to look at, and I think that a lot of what I do show is just very hard to understand visually.

But at the same time what’s effective in what you just described is that it taps into the realm of the uncanny. Meaning, when you see something that’s thoroughly recognizable and yet the context or some basic component of it has been altered so that it’s disturbing. So the film has that in the creature itself and then it’s accentuated, I felt, by the movements which recall puppetry and other elements in horror, whether it’s toys, dolls or other horror totems, that are touchstones for the uncanny. It’s a lot creepier to see something recognizable as human, even recognizable as a particular human you know or knew, and yet for it to be altered just a bit, and I felt the film did that very effectively.

Well, thank you. Thank you very much. I’m reminded of a scene from, of all movies, STARDUST where literally we see someone puppeteered during a swordfight, puppeteered by magic, [and it’s] the dead body of one of the earlier victims literally [being] puppeteered. And it’s used to great comedic effect but also to great horrific effect.

It’s disturbing at the same time.

Exactly. Yeah. And it’s just, it’s taking that element, as you say, out of context and making it slightly wrong. In our case we’re taking it obviously to a much more horrific extreme and have the amazing makeup effects to help make it pretty terrifying as an entity.

Well, I felt it worked. But not to be a spoiler for those who haven’t seen the movie, but is it important to you one way or the other whether a horror film ends in a downbeat, no-one-survives manner or an upbeat, human-courage-will-win-out fashion? Where do you stand personally on those two ways of finishing the horror experience for an audience?

That’s an interesting question. It depends on the story, I guess is the answer. I think there are great examples of both extremes.

Of course.

Total annihilation of every member of a story has been done, and quite the opposite has been done. I think it all just depends on the story because there is certainly opportunity for both. Movies that end revealing that even the person you think is going to survive is in immediate and impending danger, I think, is another great way to end a movie.

Well, thank you so much. This has been wonderful talking to you.

It was a pleasure.

And I’m also hoping that we can talk again next year about Ghost House Pictures and THE GRUDGE and all that great stuff when the time comes.