Welcome to the darker side of AICN! Mark L. Miller aka Ambush Bug here with a special AICN HORROR: ZOMBIES & SHARKS column. This Friday at 5:00pm in Room 29AB at the San Diego Comic Con, I’ll be once again hosting “Reinventing Horror,” which has become a yearly panel at the con focusing on the next step in horror in film, comics, and other media. I have gathered another talented group of up-and-coming horror stars together this year including Radio Silence (filmmakers in anthologies V/H/S and SOUTHBOUND – who I interviewed two days ago here), Mickey Keating (director/writer for POD, DARLING, and CARNAGE PARK – who I interviewed yesterday), Matt Pizzolo (publisher for Black Mask Studios and writer of YOUNG TERRORISTS) and the subject of this interview, Adam Egypt Mortimer.
Adam Egypt Mortimer has been on my “Reinventing Horror” panel in 2013. I first met him when he was writing his new comic BALLISTIC (reviewed here). Mortimer later returned a year later with a film called SOME KIND OF HATE (reviewed here) and stepped into the producer as well as the director role in the horror anthology HOLIDAYS (reviewed here). I had a chance to ask Adam a few questions to help you get to know him before the panel and find out what he thinks of the world of horror. Here’s what Adam had to say…
AMBUSH BUG (BUG): You have experience making both comics and films. Which to you is more satisfying and which is more difficult?ADAM EGYPT MORTIMER (ADAM): The process for each medium turns out to be very different and I wouldn't want to rank any aspect of one or the other, but it is fun to compare the experience. Getting a movie made does feel like the most difficult thing in the world -- i mean just getting someone to finance something and have it not fall through is a miracle. And then maintaining the original vision of the movie through the year or so process of making it is incredibly difficult, i mean it really feels like evil entities are appearing to shred at the thing, constantly testing your intention. But all along the way the collaboration in that form is what's so satisfying. Working with all the brilliant department heads -- you are essentially visually rewriting the movie again with your DP, translating the metaphors through your art department. Working with actors, in particular, is an optimal form of human creative interaction -- building a work together out of a shaped emotional idea. like collaborative sculpting in simulated human experience. it's pretty bonkers. And I've found that sharing a film with an audience is unbelievably satisfying -- hearing/seeing people react to something that you'd been imagining a year or years before -- talking to people who connect to it, who see connections and vibes -- there's so much value in that!
Comic on the other hand satisfying something for me about that has to do with the brain-fizz feeling of pop-art. Of course as a writer, the collaboration on comics -- if you're NOT a one-human cartoonist like Emily Carroll or Daniel Clowes -- is quite a cool thing. I mean, the years Darick and I spent working out the world of our story, the ideas that flowed in conversation with our man Pizzolo (who took on a kind of editor-like role with me on BALLISTIC) -- that's the kind of BrundleFly-esque fusion that turns a few distinct humans into one specific art-entity.
The thing about comics for me that's really important is that there's a kind of feeling you might get when you go to a comic store, or an art book store -- or the comic vendor section of SDCC -- and there's this universe of brightly colored wildly imaginative art objects -- there's a fizzy-brain feeling i get from that, from being exposed to the 2-D hyper world, that i wanted to chase. And having a finished paperback graphic novel in my hand, arranged just so, with screaming colors and super-compressed storyforms -- that returns the feeling in a charged way, making me feel as though I’ve entered into that Idea Stream. There's something incredibly satisfying about that, for me.
Part of it might be that you can put so many IDEAS into a comic -- a movie, being audio and visuals sculpted in time, is not well suited to hold a ton of ideas in each iteration. You are going after feelings, stories, emotions created through visuals -- but a comic, as a written material, that can compress ideas down to diamond-like density. On Ballistic, we were just overflowing with ideas, ideas crammed into each panel, crammed into the words, crammed into the color choices, so much ideas we had to have footnotes maps and just on and on. That comic was about a pure onslaught of ideas, ideas as a kind of multi-dimensional brushstroke. You couldn't do that in a movie.
BUG: What does horror mean to you?ADAM: I think of horror as being in particular a form in which death anxiety is turned concrete or personified. The horror at it's core is always the horror of death -- the horror of its inevitability, the horror of it's unknown eternal experience. there can be a lot of other terrors and themes working through the form (like media-anxiety in VIDEODROME, family pressure in ROSEMARY’S BABY, relationships in Honeymoon, ideologies in The Invitation) but for me its always about death. Or a certain fear taking on the form of death -- in my film SOME KIND OF HATE, it was about your past coming back as a physical thing that could kill you. In my segment on HOLIDAYS, which was more light and fun, it was about turning the intimacy-anxiety of meeting a stranger into an axe-wielding maniac.
I always go back to Mary Shelley, and how she brilliantly conceived of Frankenstein -- and essentially invented Gothic Horror (or at least perfected it after Ann Radcliffe kickstarted the approach) as a late-teen after she'd already lived this crazy life of death and travel and affairs and pregnancies. It's got to be about something lodged deep in us, that's what makes it horror.
Because the emotions are so primitive and direct, horror is well positioned to be cinematic. If you look at PSYCHO, or De Palma's horror like DRESSED TO KILL, or THE SHINING -- you see pure cinema, stories driven by visual motion, imagery, sound, all coming together to create that unnerving feeling that we irrationally love to chase.
BUG: Many talk about the negative effects horror has on viewers. Are there positive effects?
ADAM: You gotta get out the fear, man, or you go crazy. And in it's best form, it allows you to think about and maybe talk about things that might be unspeakable. For us confused flesh-brained self-conscious mammals, that important.
BUG: You stepped in as producer for HOLIDAYS. Yet another hat to wear. What was that experience like?
ADAM: It was another chance to collaborate with different people, in a different way. when you're a film director, you don't get to collab with other directors much. But working on Holidays, which is an anthology film, I got to work with all these different directors, see all their different points of view and ways of working. I think i crave a certain kind of connection to community, something I'm not naturally inclined to know how to find, and in a project like that i get glimpses of it, finding a kind of connection between people who are loosely organized around a goal, and aesthetic. What's wild to me about Holidays is that it has a kind of overall vibe and thematic spine, which was achieved through the most Zen like and invisible of hands. or maybe it was just luck. It was also a cool position to be in as a producer because I was able to see what everyone else did before directing my segment -- so i was able to gauge what the movie as a whole needed. this lead me to do something a little different than what i might have done on my own -- where so many director went cerebral and surreal, I retro-engineered myself to do fun, comedic, action.But the process of helping to oversee what was essentially 8 movies -- that was an insane headache. We're not even done yet with all the boring stuff, but the movie just came to Netflix so that's incredibly satisfying! There's a part of my brain that likes producing -- the creative point of view, the feeling of willing something into being, the problem solving. I think when you work at crazy low budget like i often have, you develop that skill set - -sometimes it can get in the way of directing, so a chance to go full-producer sometimes works for me.
BUG: How do you think people can overcome the challenges horror comics have since they don't have sound and movement to rely on as films do?
ADAM: You need to have really creepy ideas and you need an artist who creates a vibe. From a writing point of view, i think you're probably looking for moments of revelation -- constantly revealing awful things on a page turn, or hiding a reveal in an unexpected place on a page. Josh Fialkov's ECHOES is a really great example of that.
Or the overall unnerving qualities of say Alan Moore's Swamp Thing , there's an atmosphere at play between his words and the surrealist yuck of the art -- you feel like you are looking into the world of a vast nightmare.
BUG: What are you looking forward to the most at this year's Comic Con?
ADAM: After years and year of fanatic attendance, i was only able to come through last year for a couple hours and the year before that i missed it altogether. so I’m excited to be back for a fully immersive experience, to get drunk with people i love, and to eat at the tin fish while watching amazing people stroll by. that last is really my favorite part of the con. Also, I met my wife Amanda here 5 years ago, so it's fun to mark that occasion!BUG: Why is the horror genre important to you?
ADAM: I've still got the Freddy Krueger sweater my mom knit for me when I was a kid. I was disturbed by movies I saw when I was little, I was disturbed by events in the world and in my life as I got older, and I’m on an mission to re-distribute that which disturbs me.
BUG: What's the next project you are working on?
ADAM: I've got a movie that I’ve written with my Some Kind of Hate collaborator Brian DeLeeuw based on his first novel, about a 19 year old kid whose childhood imaginary friend returns. I've super excited about this script, We've been working with amazing producers who you know but i can't yet announce, and i hope the dark miracle occurs once again.
BUG: Thanks, Adam! Look for more interviews this week from the panelists and if you’re at the con, be sure to stop by Room 29AB at 5:00pm on Friday for the Reiniventing Horror panel!
Ambush Bug is Mark L. Miller, original @$$Hole/wordslinger/writer of wrongs/reviewer/interviewer/editor of AICN COMICS for over 15 years & AICN HORROR for 5. Follow Mark on the Twitters @Mark_L_Miller and on his new website collecting posts for AICN HORROR as well as all of the most recent updates on his various comic book projects on MLMillerWrites.com.
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