ending, and I had a notion about how I could maybe use the front section and the ending and grab a few things from the middle. While I was reading it I’d gotten to know Paul Giamatti. We were trying to mount a sequel to Bubba Ho-Tep, and having some dif- ficulty but I immediately saw a role in John Dies he could play – journalist Arnie Blondestone – that would be the glue that holds the story together. So then the only challenge was to track down this David Wong and see if I could convince him to let me make a movie of his book.
John And Dave’s Excellent Adventure: John (Rob Mayes) jumps to another dimension, and (below) Dave (Chase Williamson) on the Soy Sauce.
gree here. When meeting their favourite filmmakers, horror fans are often taken aback by how seemingly irreconcilable these people are with their best-known work. Wes Craven, for example, is charming, well-mannered and unfail- ingly articulate, qualities often attributed to his background as a college teacher, while Tobe Hooper is a soft-spoken, dif- fident, gentle soul who’s also a veritable walking film encyclopedia. Coscarelli himself is another example; the man be- hind some of our beloved genre’s most bizarrely plotted films – frequently laced with graphic violence and pitch-black humour – is an affable, funny and utterly unpretentious guy who truly appreciates his fans, and whose sublimely twisted imagination isn’t always immediately evident, although it’s never far away if he feels the need to call upon it. So is he secretly batshit crazy? Maybe batshit crazy like a fox – you be the judge. For a guy who freely admits he’s
had many crushing disappointments in recent years, from an agonizing se- ries of near misses getting a final Phantasm chapter financed despite massive public demand, to the more recent collapse of a promised Bubba Ho-Tep sequel, he’s very upbeat and confident about his newest film, and with good reason. Rue Morgue got in touch with the filmmaker, who was clearly relishing a rest from all the road-tripping while counting down to the Jan 25 release of John Dies, to ask him, just what the hell are you on?
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How did you first encounter John Dies and what was the appeal? I got an email from a robot at Amazon. It said that if I liked the last book I’d ordered from them, then I’d like John Dies at the End. So then I read the logline, and it was amazing: this street drug called Soy Sauce, travel between dimensions, a silent otherworldly invasion – and the heroes were two college dropout slackers who couldn’t hold down jobs, and the fate of humanity fell to them. Plus, it also had, in my opinion, the greatest title of any piece of lit- erature or film that’s ever been. So I clicked “Buy,” paid eleven dollars, and even the first couple of pages started off like an epic adventure in a really cool modern way. I thought David Wong’s dialogue was fantastic. The char- acters’ voices seemed so contemporary to me. The first chunk of it was al- most a movie in itself. Then it took a left turn when they went to Vegas and it became insanely unfilmable, but then it came around to a very interesting
And did he take much convincing? No, not once I got him on the phone. At the time, he was running his own comedy website called pointless- wasteoftime.com. Subsequently, he was hired by cracked.com, and he’s now the senior editor. But I tracked him through his original comedy web- site, and got no response. Another email, no response. I was like a thor- oughbred racehorse in the gate to start and the gate’s not opening! The guy’s not calling me back, and I was flipping out because I thought this could make a great movie. Why won’t the guy call me back? Then I finally got him on the phone and said, “Why did it take you so long?” And he told me that he was a big fan of Phantasm and Bubba Ho-Tep, and he thought one of his friends was goofing on him and that the emails were pranks be- cause I was saying that I thought [John Dies] was the greatest book ever written and that I was eager to talk to him. But he’s a very cool guy and he quickly agreed to let me take his baby and make a movie from it, which was a really wonderful leap of faith on his part. And I’m glad that I haven’t disappointed him.
So he’s generally been happy with what you did? Yes. I invited him to join us onstage at the Sundance Film Festival. He launched into about a ten-minute talk and about halfway through I’m think- ing, “Does he like the movie or not?” But eventually he said that he gen- uinely liked it, which was a fantastic relief, because that was the second real adaptation I’ve done of an author. On Bubba Ho-Tep, I was extremely gratified that Joe Lansdale was satis- fied with the result.
Given your long-standing insis- tence on autonomy, was the suc- cess of Bubba Ho-Tep a game changer for you, or had you always