Happy All-Hallow’s Month! In anticipation of Halloween — which, let’s face it, we’ve been anticipating since last Halloween — Daily Grindhouse will again be offering daily celebrations of horror movies here on our site. This October’s theme is horror sequels — the good, the bad, the really bad, and the unfairly unappreciated. We’re calling it SCREAMQUELS!
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Call him Deputy or Former Deputy, but don’t call him stupid.
In his role as the ostensibly clueless but fiercely dedicated Deputy So-And-So, James Ransone was the single shining ray of light in SINISTER, the 2012 roller-coaster ride into the heart of Hell which proved to be one of the most original and depraved horror movie to come out of mainstream Hollywood in years. Case in point—when the electricity went out the night I unwisely partook of a late-evening showing, I drove several miles to a 24 hour burger joint and sat there in the blessed glow of humming fluorescents rather than stay home in the pitch dark. It was a breath of stagnant air for a fanbase worn out on formulaic flicks and the tired meta-culture which developed around (indeed, defined) horror for a significant part of the 90s and 2010s.
While most of the main characters of that film perished, the good Deputy was able to enjoy the ignominious reward of being the sole survivor of the massacre that ended SINISTER. SINISTER 2 picks up with the perhaps obvious revelation that the events of the first film left the deputy with a butt-ton of survivor’s guilt and enough knowledge to try and stop the ancient, child-eating demon Bughuul (Nicholas King), who seduces children into ritualistically murdering their families on video camera before offering themselves to him for consumption. When the Deputy plans to seal off Bughuul’s access to the world beyond his infernal abattoir, he finds himself entangled in the life of a resourceful single mom (Shannyn Sossamon) who’s unaware that her sons are already being groomed as Bughuul’s latest snuff tape auteur. Sitting down with Ransone, I found him to have a particularly keen insight not only into his own character, but into the great and steaming beast which you and I call horror cinema…
Daily Grindhouse: How’d you find out they were doing a SINISTER 2?
James Ransone: A few months after SINISTER premiered, Scott Derickson called me and said they were gonna make a sequel and said they were gonna bring me back and that I was gonna be the anchor of the movie. And I said, “Oh? That’s really flattering.” And then I thought, “Oh my God, how’m I gonna turn this comedic thing into an hour and a half worth of watchable material?”
DG: Was the sequel developed around your character?
James Ransone: It was just a sort of perfect storm of circumstances. People liked the Deputy, and then everyone else died. And I don’t think that Fred Thompson appeals to seventeen year olds, y’know, unless there’s a bunch of seventeen year olds that are Republicans and like horror movies that comprise some audience test group that I don’t know about. [Laughs] But, no, honestly: It did come down to between me and Fred Thompson to lead up a SINISTER 2.
DG: The first SINISTER is probably one of the most morbid mainstream horror movies in a long time. What do you think appealed about it enough to want people to see a sequel?
James Ransone: Something’s happening culturally with Youtube and the violence available through media that taps into a fear that parents have of what their children are being conditioned to watch, that’s outside of their control. SINISTER is all about what their kids are watching when they’re not around.
DG: You went from being the comedic relief in the first movie to the protagonist of the sequel. Was that challenging?
James Ransone: It was hard to find a balancing act. How do you go from being the comedic relief to being the fleshed-out hero? My only entry point was that the character is the audience. The audience is smart enough to know not to go upstairs. So I had to think, “O,… but, he HAS to do it anyway.” Because the audience in horror movies is always smarter than the characters on the screen. And anybody in the audience who was placed in that situation would be, “No way, I would run out the door.” So, [to make him serious], the character had to have fear in him, because he knows better.
DG: Do you enjoy horror films, outside of making them?
James Ransone: I do, but, I’m not a big modern horror fan. I like old stuff, when it didn’t’ necessarily have the same sort of genre associations to it. I like horror movies from the 70s that were really good movies that also happened to be horror movies. I think that, over time, there’s become a big differentiation there…
DG: What’re your favorites?
James Ransone: Well, y’know, there’s the real obvious ones like THE EXORCIST and THE SHINING and I really liked POLTERGEIST. But then as you go into the 80s, I really loved HELLRAISER, and I think all of John Carpenter’s catalog is really great. I love John Carpenter. I think he’s an underrated genius. I think it’s weird he isn’t put up there on the same level as Spielberg. I like Sam Raimi’s stuff a lot… One of my favorite more recent horror movie is DRAG ME TO HELL.
DG: When we were talking earlier, you elaborated on the idea that cinema has gone through periods when horror has been strictly genre bound and when it’s become more of a mainstream, “literary” genre. When and why do you think those shifts happen?
James Ransone: It’s difficult to pinpoint… Even in the last decade, take, uh, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY. There’s this idea that you can just make a horror movie really cheaply and then enjoy this humongous return. So it becomes this aggressive sort of thing, and a studio is like, “OK, every horror movie we’re gonna make should be cheap, because our rate of return will be so high.” And I hear people talking about nothing but [profit]… And I think what happens is genres go through cycles. I think the next one we’re headed towards is Westerns, and then I think it’s gonna be sci-fi. And Hollywood is doing this all the time. I feel like we’re actually coming to the close of the low budget, independent horror movie… Then what’ll happen [after] is in the next couple of years someone will make a movie that the budget is much bigger on that’s scary…
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