Four Questions with Craig DiLouie
A StokerCon highlight from this year was getting to chat with author Craig DiLouie, who is as gracious as he is brilliant. I was lucky to have him join my Four Questions series when his book Episode Thirteen was released, and I’m thrilled that he’s back to talk about his latest—How to Make a Horror Movie and Survive.
Click here to read the previous “Four Questions with Craig DiLouie.”
Tamika Thompson: Your latest book, How to Make a Horror Movie and Survive, pays tribute to 80s slasher films. What do you think is the ongoing appeal of the slasher films from that era?
Craig DiLouie: When writing the novel, I wanted to examine our relationship with horror both as an emotion and a genre. I simply needed a lens. The 1980s slasher era proved perfect for several reasons.
The experimental and artistic auteur filmmaking era of the 1970s was coming to an end. In the 1980s, blockbusters ruled. Think formula, big budgets, plenty of explosions and special effects, and big stars. Horror bucked this trend. Halloween, John Carpenter’s lightning in a bottle film, showed you didn’t need big budgets to make a great horror film. You simply needed to deliver horror. Following that movie, the floodgates opened for funding a wave of productions that developed a successful formula while constantly pushing boundaries. Everyone asking, how do we improve on this and make it even scarier?
As a writer, I enjoyed diving into the era of analog filmmaking. I loved the tactile feel of the film stock, the bulky cameras, the hot lights, the chaotic sets. Perfect fodder for a story about filmmaking. I found these slasher films to be the ideal backdrop for a story about why we love horror—an emotion that in the real world we do our utmost to avoid—and I wanted the novel to replicate the experience of catching one of them in the theater. The tension, the gasps, the laughter, the overall sense of fun.
The era was a great starting point for How to Make a Horror Movie and Survive’s Max, a successful slasher director, to see the trend starting to wane and begin an obsessive quest to make the perfect horror movie, one that truly horrifies its audience. His opponent will be Sally, an actor who longs to be a Final Girl, and together they will act out an ancient script of predator and prey, darkness and light, the monster the proxy for the director, the Final Girl the proxy for the audience.
The ongoing appeal? These stories are just plain fun. There is a formula, yes, but people enjoy having their expectations fulfilled. The characters are young and do dumb things and have plenty of flaws, lending a sense of justice to their deaths, and we see the Final Girl get knocked down but come back swinging, the living embodiment of fear but also the courage to overcome it. In the end, the villain is vanquished, giving us catharsis, but the villain survives again and again, ensuring the cycle will repeat. This is horror at its simplest, gawdiest, campiest, goriest, and it all adds up to what makes horror so much fun.
Craig DiLouie is an acclaimed American-Canadian author of literary dark fantasy and other fiction. Formerly a magazine editor and advertising executive, he also works as a journalist and educator covering the North American lighting industry. His fiction has been nominated for major awards, optioned for screen, and published in multiple languages. He is a member of the Imaginative Fiction Writers Association, International Thriller Writers, and the Horror Writers Association. He lives in Calgary, Canada with his two wonderful children.
