Director's thoughts

Horror movies ebb and flow not only in popularity, but also in tone. The past few years have brought an onslaught of torture themed films, but I think that we are seeing their popularity start to wane. I think that is a good thing.

Midnight Movie harkens back to the slasher movies of the 80s - A time where the gore was there, but the films themselves had more of a playfulness about them.

Midnight Movie would not be here without the foundation of the movies that came before it. Within Midnight Movie, I certainly pay homage to a lot of classic horror movies. In doing so, Midnight Movie increases in gore as the film goes on.

If the movie’s marquee kill starts the film, it makes it tough because you have little place to go from there. I wanted the kills to get better as we get deeper into the story.

Too many films today start at such a level of gore that they peak with scene one, or set a level that makes the movie kind of plateau from then on. So I decided to set up the kills in the movie to mirror the history of horror. In the beginning, you see just before and just after, like early Hollywood. But as the decades moved on, Hollywood’s kills got more and more gory. So do the kills in Midnight Movie.

And we get all the way to today’s “torture porn” level… And while it is by far the creepiest scene in the movie, there is a surprisingly small amount of gore. Just goes to show you that the mind will fill in the blanks in a far worse way than a filmmaker can.

Ultimately, it isn’t only the gore that makes a film scary. Only when you care about the characters is a movie every truly terrifying.