One of the potential treats of the Halloween season is the Spirit Halloween movie, directed by David Poag and starring Christopher Lloyd among others.
We caught up with David, to spill the beans on the Halloween store-turned movie.
Can you tell us how you got involved in Spirit Halloween?
I had done a fair amount of work over the years with the producers at Hideout Pictures, all in the music video and commercial realm, but had formed a solid working relationship with that team, primarily Shannon Houchins and Potsy Ponciroli.
When the script came across their desk they reached out to me to see if I would be interested in taking on a feature. Potsy had a lot of enthusiasm for the script but had just finished his film “Old Henry” and already had his next project in development. I think they knew it would be a fun-spirited but challenging production at this low budget level, and there would be a comfort level in working with me vs an outside director.
It’s important to note here that this film was not birthed out of the Spirit Halloween store franchise trying to produce a movie. Billie Bates (screenwriter) had written this script way back in 2016, honestly inspired by her kids’ fascination with the store and her own fascination with Halloween in general. She grew up in Australia and many of her impressions of the holiday and genre came from watching American movies as a kid. She had won some festival awards with this script over the years and shopped it a bit before it finally found its way to Hideout. Spirit Halloween [the store] had no idea any of this was transpiring.
I never could have guessed “PG Halloween” would be the genre I’d be tackling for my first feature. But the more I considered it, the more I grew excited about the script and the subject matter. It is not a period movie, but it had the classic sensibilities and charm of the movies that I grew up enjoying. I am a Dad now, and it has been super fun to show my kids movies that I loved when I was growing up. So the idea of making one of these films, that could potentially be loved and revisited over the years, was very appealing. Most of my trepidation in accepting the job came from the crunched timeline (it was already late Summer and they needed to begin filming that Fall) and the very limited budget. On the page, this could have easily been one of those 30 million dollar PG blockbusters. We would have to tackle it with a “Little Indie that Could” mentality. I’m a working DP most of the time, and saying yes to this movie also meant immediately pumping the brakes on all upcoming projects, diving in headfirst and devoting a season to this thing. There were many unknowns. There was no cast attached yet, no locations locked in, etc. We had no idea if we were going to be able to partner up with Spirit Halloween and piggy back off of their store and merchandise or if we were going to create a generic Halloween store from scratch, which is a huge difference in scope.
Ultimately, I decided that despite the challenges ahead, it was an opportunity I would be foolish to pass up. And when I was able to convince my longtime friend and collaborator Andy Kugler to DP the film, I told them I was in. It took a few pitch meetings and conversations to get the other entities on board with a first-time feature director, but they all agreed and we were off to the races.
People in the UK (such as myself), may not understand how big a deal Spirit Halloween is in the States, was there any pressure adapting this franchise into a horror film?
Again, the script was inspired by the store, but we jumped into this not knowing for sure if Spirit Halloween would want to be a part of the film. So in the beginning, any sort of pressure of catering to the existing fanbase of the store was lost on me, I was just trying to plan a good movie. We had a very rapid and condensed prep so I was knee deep in casting and scouting non-store locations while the producers were having the conversations with Spirit Halloween. Their team was attracted to the idea and responded positively to the tone of the script, but really had never done anything like this. Ultimately they got behind us and were a huge help during the production, but it took quite a bit of discussion and hand-holding to explain what they were truly signing up for.
It was important to the story that the “pop-up” Halloween store moved in to an abandoned retail space over night, which is exactly what the Spirit Halloween stores do. They rent (some say “haunt”) an existing space for the season, packing in over night and leaving as quick as they came when it’s all over. Die hard Spirit Halloween fans enjoy this aspect of the stores, and the sometimes grungy interiors of the abandoned, low-rent spaces.
As we started to collaborate with the corporate team at Spirit Halloween, there was a bit of a disconnect with this element at first. Their natural instinct with a movie lens suddenly pointed at them was to provide a perfectly polished “flag-ship store” environment. We had to win them over to the idea that this was not a commercial, it was a story about some kids that try to stay the night in a creepy halloween store, and it needed to be rough around the edges. Once we were all on the same page about that, I think the Spirit Halloween team members really started having fun with it.
Would you consider the film gateway horror, in the same vein as Goosebumps?
Yes, I would consider this film gateway horror, as in we worked hard to create a PG experience that was still quite scary at times (for the target age). There is no gore or real violence, but it was important to us that a kid watching this is truly afraid that the kids in the movie might not make it, that their lives are at stake.
Kugler and I spent a lot of time discussing scary movies of all kinds, but especially some of the classics in the genre from the 70s and 80s. Halloween, Evil Dead, the first two Poltergeist films, Gremlins, Monster Squad, The Shining, etc. As well as many of the classic Spielberg/Amblin PG adventure films like E.T., The Goonies, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, etc. I think this era before sophisticated digital VFX came into play is simply more satisfying to watch and study. The films feel more handmade and the techniques are grounded in artistry and basic cinema. We talked a lot about creating suspense and tone in general, but also the point of view of watching some of these films when we were too young to be watching them. What were the elements that were most terrifying to our ten year old minds? What stuck with us? The rating system was certainly different. The 1982 Poltergeist is rated PG, and that movie is waaayy too scary for kids! Nightmare city.
We knew that we weren’t going to be able to make a film as scary as that, but from a style/tone/filmmaking approach we were both much more interested in coming from those places, than we were in the more recent PG horror franchise theme park rides like Goosebumps, Haunted Mansion, etc. I think where we landed was somewhere between the two. And as I’ve been showing early cuts to kids I have access to in my orbit, it has been interesting to see their reactions. One surprise to me that must be a generational thing, is the very idea that these kids [in the movie] have essentially lied to their parents and travelled across town alone on their bikes to sneak into this store, has produced a base-level of anxiety that I didn’t expect. I think there are far fewer latch-key kids with free time on their hands than there used to be. Kids in America are more supervised than ever, with so much of their time structured and accounted for.
I think youth in the 8-13 range will get the most thrill and enjoyment out of this film. And I believe their parents will enjoy the charm and old-school handmade feel of this little movie as compared to the mega-budget multilayered productions that have become the norm in family entertainment.
Were you given free rein with a superstore or did you use a set for filming?
We shot in a real store, which was challenging but the best fit for the story and budget by far. There was a desire to shoot in Georgia for their tax incentives, and we settled on the small town of Rome, GA, which ended up being a huge asset to the film. The town itself had an existing Spirit Halloween location inhabiting an old big box toy store, and also gave us the character of a quaint mid-America town that we were looking for, as well as the aging industrial warehouses and abandoned factory aesthetic on the edges of town. There was an enthusiastic film community there of people who were very helpful to the production.
The interior of the store had to be modified a good bit, and the Spirit Halloween team was pretty flexible in helping us do that and embracing the changes. We created a custom layout of the store to make everything work, and our production designer Ruby Guidara did wonders on designing set pieces to serve the mechanics of the story that fit with and elevated the existing Spirit Halloween store set pieces. A big portion of the story takes place in the store after dark, with the power out. We were in a huge department store building that only had windows up front so Kugler and I had to work out a store layout and scene blocking that played into the photography and how we would motivate lighting, etc. It was all a big puzzle and the trickiest thing about this budget level and schedule is that it was all coming together in real time as we were shooting.
Another big task on our side was adapting some of Spirit Halloween’s existing animatronic characters into costumes that could be worn by performers when the animatronics get “possessed”. This was a full collaboration between wardrobe and special effects and was much harder than we expected. The Spirit Halloween team also brought in this engineer/macgyver type fellow named Thomas May in to be our animatronic technician, and he quickly became indispensable to us.
Tell us about putting together the cast?
Casting was quick and stressful, taking place mostly over three weeks of online auditions, video-call rehearsals, etc. We had a great casting team (Barbara Stordahl and Angela Terry) who cast a wide net and I was watching auditions from all over the country.
I’m really proud of our cast. Many working actors today in this younger age range are already so slick and over confident, or too baked in to sitcom style rhythms, etc. I was really looking for the unrefined quality that I remember about being this age (middle-school) and finding 3 boys that felt like they could actually be friends, that kids at home would relate to. We had them come to town a week early so they could rehearse a bit but more importantly so they could just hang out and ride bikes and find a comfort level with each other, and I was so pleased that they immediately hit it off and became the trio of friends that they are in the movie. Marissa Reyes who plays Kate, the older sister, just nailed her very first audition and was perfect for this, and her character really gets put through the wringer here. She was a trooper and I dare say she enjoyed it!
It’s a well known business model with movies of this size to try and lure a couple of known actors to the project to give the film more weight, even if we can only afford to have them on set for a few days. We could not have been luckier in my opinion to get Christopher Lloyd, Marla Gibbs, and Rachael Leigh Cook involved. Lloyd is a legend, I’ve been watching him in movies since I was a kid, and it was surreal to meet and work with him. We had several long conversations on the phone about the script and the part before he came to town, and it was obvious how much he cares about what he does. I feel like he had fun with it. Marla is also an American legend, she is 91 years old now, and there was this undeniable air of grace about her on set. We had to bring her (basically carry her) deep into a real cave for a scene at the end of the movie, and she had this stoic smile and twinkle in her eye the whole time. Rachael was great, and brought a lot of positive energy to her time on the project. She told me she was excited to play a part in a film she can enjoy with her kids.
How long did filming take?
I believe we had 22 shooting days in total. Our schedule went through Thanksgiving and Christmas, so there were a few breaks in filming, which gave us a chance to catch our breath. In the last week of filming I went down hard with Covid, and due to talent schedules they had to press on and shoot the last three days of the movie without me. That was one of the most depressing and stressful things I’ve been through, but our DP Andy Kugler and our producing team stepped up to lead the charge and I’m grateful to them that they kept it on the rails, as well as to our cast for rolling with the punches.
What was the collaborative process like with Billie Bates?
I had always assumed that my first feature would be a script of my own development, and being tasked to bring someone else’s story to life was incredibly stressful, just the pressure of doing justice to someone else’s creation. Billie had written this script a full five years prior, and it had gone through numerous rewrites as she had shopped it, all long before I had ever seen it. So she had very clear thoughts about what the movie was, and now there were several more companies involved and myself, all trying to reinterpret this film into what it could be within the very real constraints of budget, timeframe, etc.
As change requests and discussions started flowing in our preproduction meetings, I was so impressed with Billie’s ability to take it all in stride, and constantly strike the balance of creative solutions to the change that still served her story and characters. And then as we started settling into real locations, and opportunities that Kugler and I would see and discuss, Billie and I began emailing back and forth quite a bit in those few weeks leading up to the shoot. I also think those conversations between her and I built a trust in that she felt I “got it” and had the story’s best interest at heart. As we got further into the production it became a constant puzzle of logistics and schedule and what was possible and what wasn’t, and there simply wasn’t time to talk about everything as it shifted in real time. Me and the first AD spent many late nights working the evolving script over each night after a new parameter would change things.
Billie and I hardly talked at all during the actual shoot days, I just told her the movie was taking on a life of its own and I was doing my best. She was encouraging and positive about all of it. I got to show her a final edit of the film last week, and I was very proud to hear that she was quite happy with it, and that despite certain changes and compromises, it still felt like the movie she had seen in her head while writing it.
Do you think there is scope for this to become a new Halloween series?
Haha, I refuse to speculate on that, I just hope that kids enjoy the ride this film takes them on and get something out of it. If one kid decides to revisit this movie as part of their Halloween ritual, that will make me very proud. Is the possibility there? Of course.
Bloody Flicks 