At the intro to his world premiere screening of The Final Girls at SXSW, director Todd Strauss-Schulson said he was inspired to make the movie by watching Drag Me To Hell in the same theater at its SXSW premiere years ago. The Final Girls is a horror comedy in which modern day teens end up inside their favorite slasher movie, Camp Bloodbath. Camp Bloodbath starred Max (Taissa Farmiga)’s mother, who has since died, so she gets to see her again.
In Austin we discussed the film with Strauss-Schuldon, with a spoiler warning. Geeking out over horror movies, we had to ask about things the characters in The Final Girls didn’t try, but that too suggests some mild spoilers for the actual movie.
Check Out: SXSW 2015 Interview: The Cast of ‘The Final Girls’
CraveOnline: Did you have to license the Harry Manfredini cue, the Ch-ch-ch ah-ah-ah from Friday the 13th?
Todd Strauss-Schulson: Oh, no. It really is very much like it. It’s a little bit different, but it’s that. There was some rule that if you only had it twice instead of three times, you can get away with it. Ki-ki ma-ma, ki-ki- ma-ma you can get away with because it falls under, I think, parody law. If you did it three times, that would be too similar to the movie.
Does Friday the 13th exist in a world where Camp Bloodbath is a movie?
I don’t know. I have no idea. The truth is that we’re obviously pulling a lot of inspiration from Friday but there’s this movie called The Burning. Have you seen The Burning? The Burning is crazy and that was even more of an influence. That is real summer camp, a killer on the lose, he’s got these big gardening sheers. That’s his device of murdering. The score is bananas. That was a big reference for us in terms of the textures.
I imagine whatever company makes movie standees makes them in bulk for 1000s of theaters. Who made just one standee for Camp Bloodbath and Camp Bloodbath 2?
We designed it and made it. There was only one. We probably used it multiple times. I feel like there are a lot in that theater. There’s a hilarious tagline on it. “Two times the blood. Two times the bath.” It doesn’t make any sense.
Did you curate the posters of the other movies that are playing at the theater with Camp Bloodbath, like Fright Night, The Deep and the Coppola Dracula?
A lot of them we could license because they were Sony/Columbia movies. We had a choice of lots of them but I love The Deep. I love Coppola’s Dracula so much, visually and I love that movie so hard. Fright Night scared the shit out of me when I was kid. I was such a wimp with horror movies when I was younger. It was cool that our poster actually fit in with those posters. It felt like it gave it a little bit of credibility.
I was the same way. At what age did you start experimenting and finding you could sit through a horror movie?
I mean, 13, 14, 15, maybe 12. Fright Night was really hard. Misery really affected me deeply. I couldn’t watch any of that stuff. And then I think when I saw Dead Alive for the first time, I was able to stomach it because it was so over the top. It was so silly, it took so much pleasure in how gross it was, it’s such energy. That movie is bananas. I loved it so much when I found it. I didn’t even know what it was.
I think that’s when I started being able to watch these movies almost from a technical point of view. I really loved the Nightmare series. I loved three, four and five when they had these crazy commercial directors just doing whatever, full of imagination. So I really loved that stuff and I could start watching it almost from a director’s point of view.
Did you, the writers and the cast go down rabbit holes of “what would we do if we were in a horror movie? Could we try this and this?”
The cast not really. We delivered the script but certainly during the writing process, yeah, we wanted it to be plausible. It’s obviously a pretty crazy idea but we wanted what the kids do to be what we would do. You would think you could escape and maybe you would think that you could save your mother this time. So we wanted all the planning to be logical and plausible and not get too hung up on the rules if you were going with the flow of it.
My super fanboy questions is if there’s a flashback in the movie, did anyone ever think of changing the killer’s backstory? Was there a point where you had to rule that out?
Well, it would’ve unraveled the rest of the movie.
That’s what I mean by rabbit hole.
Yeah, we thought about it. Certainly when we were editing the movie.
As long as you thought about it.
We definitely thought about it. While we were editing we kind of ran into it and we were like, “Yeah, I guess they could do that” but it almost would take the story deep into a geek hole. Which is good but it would maybe unravel some of the more human stuff at the end.
Will you be proud to make people cry in a horror comedy?
I mean, that was paramount. For me really, there was a personal connection with the story for me and the writers. I lost a parent. My father passed away not so long ago so for me I really wanted to tell a story about grief and losing a parent and this wish of being able to be with them one more time.
That was really what the movie was at its core, at the root, but I couldn’t ever make something like Stepmom, a real piece of schmaltz. I couldn’t pull that off, so this movie was this big adventure, roller coaster, crazy concept but really it was that in the center of it. I was confident that the jokes would be funny and the action would be exciting and the visuals would be cool, but I was not sure if the emotion would work. It feels like that is working and that makes me very happy.
Did you set up filming the real world scenes differently than the Camp Bloodbath scenes to distinguish them?
Yeah, color-wise there’s a difference. Camp Bloodbath is really rich and saturated. The first 10 minutes in the real world, there’s almost no green. We’re really trying to get out of green and it’s a lot warmer, almost sepia. One of the ideas was to kind of Wizard of Oz it a little bit and go a little bit more gold in the beginning.
And stylistically, Camp Bloodbath has a lot more flamboyance and movement aesthetically, camera-wise. The camera is flying all over the place once you get into the movie. Things are getting more and more haywire. The style is really pumping, but in the first act, we try to tone it down. It’s a little more basic, simpler coverage, a little more still and static just so that it did feel like there was a separation.
Did you have a surplus of what kind of movie kills you wanted to have?
There were more characters in the script at one point and there was a lot more of that meta/clever stuff. That was a challenge in the writing process. I brought a lot of that meta stuff to the table. That wasn’t really in the script originally and I was really pushing it. There was a point where I think I probably pushed it a little bit too far in that direction. That stuff is fun. That’s the game of the movie. That’s going to be really fun to watch but if you push it too much, it might take away from the human element of the movie, so you wanted it right on the line.
That montage in the movie used to be like The Thomas Crown Affair, a lot of sliding windows. They used to know that they were in a montage. They used to be aware that they were stuck in a montage and they were trying to talk to each other, but they couldn’t yell over the music. It was too loud. So they couldn’t communicate and the [split screens] were sliding all over the place. The killer showed up in the montage and killed someone in the montage and no one could help her because they were being yanked all over the place. That felt like it was maybe a little bit too much, but it was a cool idea.
The ’90s were when horror movies got really meta. Are we now a full generation past that where we’re meta about meta movies?
I do think this is like a Scream 2.0. I think so. What Scream didn’t do was play with the visual tropes as much. It plays with the rules of those horror movies, but looping and cueing flashbacks, all that really clever meta stuff is new.
How did you come up with the Billy costume when there have been so many other slashers?
It’s challenging. That was a tough one.
What is the mask?
We designed the mask. We wanted it to be a totem mask. We wanted it to be taken from those Native American totem designs. We tried to make it really dark because a lot of the movie is in daylight which is not how these horror movies usually function. We have a lot of daylight in our movie. We tried to keep it dark, wooden, totemy and handmade.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
