If the above image doesn’t make it abundantly clear, director Scott Derrickson brings a rather bloody, violent segment to V/H/S/85 with “Dreamkill.”
Derrickson, who needs no introduction, recently directed the horror blockbuster The Black Phone for Blumhouse and previously helmed horror favorites like The Exorcism of Emily Rose. With “Dreamkill,” Derrickson and writing partner C. Robert Cargill evoke the gritty horror of their nightmarish feature Sinister. It fits right at home with the grainy textured horrors packaged in V/H/S/85, one of the most cohesive installments of the popular anthology franchise yet.
That’s not a surprise to the director, who spoke with Bloody Disgusting about V/H/S/85 after the film’s Fantastic Fest debut.
“I think it’s inevitable that the film as a whole would come out looking the way that it does because you’re talking about VHS materials at the very early stages of its consumer usage,” Derrickson points out. “Those cameras were very low resolution and had a lot of glitches and problems and tracking marks, all of that. That was what was interesting to me and to my director of photography. We shot only on early eighties cameras, so we shot on the lowest, sort of the earliest workable cameras that we could actually find.
“I find those images really, really wonderful, especially when they’re projected the way we’ve been able to see them here. We integrated, of course, Super 8 footage in it as well. So you could shoot all that. You could design everything to be neon. It’s not going to look like that, just given what the medium is.”
It wasn’t just the format and period that contributed to that cohesive look but the universal commitment by all who signed up to push the boundaries of horror.
Derrickson explains, “We didn’t know what each other was doing, and obviously everybody took it to heart. This is a graphically violent franchise, and if you’re not into doing that, then you shouldn’t direct it. That was a reason to do it: to be extreme, with no one being concerned with how extreme you’re being. But I think the cohesiveness was a little bit of coincidence, but ultimately, because David [Bruckner] came in with the wraparound, saw everything that we were doing. He and Evan Dickson created something to tie it all together. It probably has more cohesiveness than ones in the past because of the order in which things were made.”
Derrickson uses the grainy VHS style to his advantage to introduce a supernatural tale of murder, which he worked on with sons Atticus Derrickson, who composed the score, and Dashiell Derrickson, who plays Gunther in “Dreamkill.”
“I started out of interest of being able to mess with the medium within the VHS found footage idea to try to push the boundaries of what could be done,” Derrickson says of the segment’s origins. “I started with the idea of having Super 8 film footage on a VHS tape. That was the starter. Then, I wanted to work with both of my kids, which I did. But when I came up with the idea that what’s on the tapes are dreams that come true, then it was about whether these are extremely, not just extremely violent movies, but interpreted points of view with soundscapes. We used the Throbbing Gristle song, ‘Hamburger Lady,’ which is the most disturbing song ever recorded. Then it started to take on a really deep darkness that I thought was, again, I don’t know that I would want to make a feature film that was aiming that dark.
“But what’s great about this franchise is you can be as violent as you want; you can be as dark as you want. It’s encouraged. And then to do all of that in a way that’s hopefully artful and interesting and gives the audience a compact experience that they’re not going to get any other way. That was what was interesting to me about doing it.”
V/H/S/85 is now streaming exclusively on Shudder.
The post ‘V/H/S/85’ – How the Anthology Segment “Dreamkill” Allowed Scott Derrickson to Get Extreme [Interview] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.