Generation Terror is the last doc to screen at FrightFest 2024 but its also one of the best. We chatter to its co-directors Sarah Appleton and Phillip Escott.
NYX: Where did the idea for Generation Terror come from?
SA: For me it was an broader look at the era I grew up with, the horror I grew up with, as well as a culmination of the work during this same era that sparked J Horror and Found Footage as well.
PE: There has been so much written and said about horror from the 70s and 80s, but we are a quarter of a century away from the late 90s and the millennium and it felt odd that there hasn’t been much discussion about how interesting and important this era was to the genre. So hopefully the film will help fans look at the period in a new light.
NYX: The movies covered here pushed the envelope in violence and gore, do you think it reflected what was going on in the real world?
SA: The whole world was in turmoil during the early 00s, whether it was the fear of technological advancement, or actual wars and war crimes going on, the horror films of course reflect that, sometimes very purposefully and specifically and sometimes on a more subconscious level.
PE: I do, it reflects what happened in the 1970s with Vietnam when horror became much darker, bloodier and realistic during that war. It happened again with Iraq and Afghanistan, only this time the horrors weren’t contained to just the evening news, it was all over the internet so available at everyone's fingertips so I think it impacted the creative community in a profound way, as it did to us all.
NYX: Do you have a favourite movie from this time?
SA: Wrong Turn, Final Destination 3, Wolf Creek, and even Jeepers Creepers. Also a film I forgot about until recently is Monster Man (2003) – that’s a great fun film; it’s like wrong turn but with a monster truck.
PE: There’s way too many! Ring, Audition, Final Destination, eXistenZ, The Blair Witch Project, Ginger Snaps, 28 Weeks Later, High Tension, A Tale of Two Sisters, May, Devil’ Backbone, Session 9, The Eye, Trouble Everyday, Dog Soldiers, Creep, In My Skin, Shaun of the Dead,The Descent, Severance, Eden Lake, Wolf Creek, Saw, Frontier(s), The Mist, The Orphanage, Lake Mungo, Inside, The Strangers, Martyrs, Rec, House of the Devil… I could go on and on.
NYX: Do you agree that many of the movies released were flavoured with the exploitation pics of the 70s?
SA: Not really, I think of course remakes such as Texas Chainsaw and Hills Have Eyes were throwbacks to those times, but we were in a very new era, and people wanted to see new movies.
PE: I do think that the emerging filmmakers of this period were inspired by the nihilism of that era, the 90s were such a bloodless period in comparison to what had come before it, so once these creatives were able to make their own films I think that 70s spirit crept in and we saw the violence and sense of hopelessness that was so prevalent in those films back in the genre. Hollywood studios however were a little more clueless, so just opted to remake the films from that period, thinking it was what audiences wanted.
NYX: What is your directing process, for example do you have a list of interviewees and split them into half?
SA: We both work on everything together, so no we don’t split things in half. With the interviews we will both write questions together and attend interviews together or on zoom. Editing wise we both jump into the edit at different stages to improve it along the way. It’s pretty easy working together we don’t often disagree!
PE: Yeah it’s very much collaborative and as we’ve worked together for a number of years now, we’ve developed a nice shorthand that makes everything run smoothly!
NYX: Was there a creative who you didn’t manage to interview?
SA: For me I always say Eli Roth, as he was rather prolific during this time. As the creator of Hostel I think he would have had some interesting insight into how and why torture porn came up when it did and what specifically motivated him.
PE: For me it was James Wan. Saw left such a huge impact on the genre, but his career really struggled in the success of that and the films he made after it both failed to re-capture Saw’s popularity and I think it was due to them entering the studio system - which was truly lost when it came to horror during the 2000s. Once he left it and went back to indie productions, with Insidious, the magic was back.
NYX: I feel this could have been much longer, how much material ended up on the cutting room floor?
SA: With documentaries there is always a lot of footage that doesn’t get used. We interviewed approximately 24 people and their interviews are about an hour long. So in theory the film could have been 24 hours long!
PE: Yeah, we had some topics we wanted to discuss, such as the importance of DVD and the rise of streaming - but those are such broad themes that they didn’t really feel at home in a horror-specific documentary.
NYX: What do you think will be the next big horror genre?
SA: Not sure, maybe eco horror will come back with a vengeance!
PE: Well, given that Longlegs has just made a crazy amount of money at the box office, I can foresee a slew of Silence of the Lamb-esque thrillers in our immediate futures.
NYX: Will you be nervous when it has its world premiere at FrightFest 2024?
SA: I am always nervous to see how people react to this kind of documentary, but we will have the lovely Neil Marshall, Christopher Smith, Amber T, Zoe Smith and Ariel Powers-Schaub joining us for the premiere which should take the pressure off.
PE: Yeah, it’s always scary showing something to a bunch of people that you’ve been working on for so long. But I hope it’ll go down well with horror fans, as it’s what we are and we make these for like minded people, so where better to debut it than at FrightFest?
NYX: So, what are you working on at the moment?
SA: I have written a feature film, but you know how difficult it is in the UK to find funding, so we will see what happens with that one!
PE: I’m working on an Italian horror documentary that’s been in the works for a little while now. We have so much footage but we’re finally starting to work through it all. I’m just back from Rome - where it was hotter than hell! - and given the amount of footage we have, it will likely be a series rather than a one-off documentary. I’ve also been busy working on a documentary about a film that gets mentioned in Generation Terror, which has taken up the last year or so of my life, as it wasn’t just a documentary I was putting together, but more will come out about that in the next few weeks or so!
NYX: Sarah Appleton and Phillip Escott, thank you very much.
