It was a perfect arrangement for me, because I love the Dark Castle brand and the way it’s kind of comfortably nostalgic now for horror fans of my age.
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It was more like they were the LA producers who would give me notes, but I would ultimately be responsible for figuring out how to get in on budget, on schedule and such. They specifically wanted to work with a filmmaker who had experience because they weren’t really going to be on set. They didn’t have a studio output deal, and were now trying to get into more independent, smaller horror films, the kinds of things that A24 and Blumhouse have had a tremendous amount of success with. I was really interested in Dark Castle, but they let me know that this was a new kind of company. Joel Silver had left the company I’ve only been in the same room with him once, when I went to an advance screening of THE NICE GUYS! So it wasn’t the Dark Castle of my youth, when I saw every one of their movies in theaters: HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, GOTHIKA and ORPHAN, which Alex Mace came up with the story for. Right around that time, I guess, Dark Castle was kind of regrouping with Hal Sadoff, Alex Mace and Kelly Gallagher. But we needed a domestic partner–not a distributor, but someone who would agree to be responsible for a certain chunk of the financing. They and Ingenious Media were willing to come in for a small piece of it, knowing it was a much lower-budget film than THE GUEST and therefore less of a risk for them. Russell Ackerman, Dutch Deckaj and John Schonefelder were shopping it around, and we got a commitment from Hanway Films, who had helped finance YOU’RE NEXT and THE GUEST and were willing to take another shot on me, but not for the whole budget. That came about through my producers at Addictive Pictures, who were basically the hands-on producers on SEANCE. You got some heavy hitters behind the film, including Dark Castle Entertainment. And then it took me five years to get it financed! I wrote the first draft of SEANCE right around the time THE GUEST came out, and before we did BLAIR WITCH, I believe. But now that Adam was moving on to other projects, I needed to be doing the same.
After we started getting real budgets, and Adam began moving on to bigger things, that’s when I began thinking that I’d been kind of putting off my own creative goals for a long time, since that partnership was so productive and satisfying and fun. There was so much to be done as a producer on those films that I was basically working 20 hours a day alongside Adam on the sets.
Then, when working with my good friend Adam Wingard, whom I continued to collaborate with on a lot of projects, I didn’t ever feel like only the screenwriter–at least not initially.
Yes, I did, though I should note that I wrote DEAD BIRDS back in 2002 specifically intending to direct that, and my career just went in a different direction. Camille becomes drawn into the killing spree while bonding with classmate Helina (Ella-Rae Smith), which adds an emotional underpinning to the rising body count.ĭid you write SEANCE specifically intending to direct it? Their extracurricular activities include dabblings in the occult, specifically attempts to draw out the resident ghost, and seen their rituals begin leading to further deaths on campus. Now he has taken his own place at the helm with SEANCE, and spoke in depth with RUE MORGUE about how he conjured it up.Ĭoming to theaters, VOD and digital platforms this Friday, May 21 from RLJE Films and Shudder, SEANCE takes place at the distinguished Edelvine Academy for Girls, where new student Camille (Suki Waterhouse) quickly gets on the bad side of the resident mean girls.
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Throughout the 2000s, Simon Barrett has scripted a string of imaginative and frightening features, from the supernatural Civil War chiller DEAD BIRDS to a series of collaborations with director Adam Wingard that included A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE, YOU’RE NEXT and THE GUEST.
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