Jackal rebuffs Edmund’s attempts to stop his nightmare with a loaded gun.
D i d you deliberately choose the horror genre for your first feature project?
Yes! I didn’t feel that I was going against my own
grain, because in the shorts I had done, I knew there had been absolutely no sense of humor. A sense of Gothic bizarre was actually what marked them. 1 thought, “Well, why not take your present state of mind, which is toward the Grand Guignol and the bizarre, and do a horror film?” It seemed to me that the shorts, in their own way, were horror films even though they dealt with contemporary subject matter. I should mention that the shorts were marked by very contrasty lighting, strange effects, unjointed shadows, so the transition was natural. While by no means was I an expert in fantastic cinema, I had been influenced by the likes of VAMPYR, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, DEAD OF NIGHT, also THE UNINVITED which starred Ray Milland, Tod Browning’s work. Fritz Lang, too, had always been a favorite. As you know, he always bordered on the edge of the surreal. So I wrote a very long treatment of my original dream, which I called THE QCIEEN OF EVIL.
How did you attract your financing? Right after film school, I went to work on a low
budget New York City film called SUGAR 36
COOKIES (1971), which had an X rating. My credit was Associate Producer. I met two young guys who were also on the film, Jeff Kapelman and Garrard Glenn, and I brought my nightmare and my screen treatment to their attention at that time. I had previously directed, they wanted to produce, so we formed an alliance. They put up the seed money for the film. Actually, it took from November 1971 to,
roughly, September of 1972 to raise all the money we needed to make the film. To be honest, we never really raised all of the money; we were never fully funded. We raised $90,000 in NYC from various investors, including our own personal friends. We were able to raise that $90,000 because the people we gave the script to were not our relatives; they were business­ men, and we presented them with the fact that— even if we made the worst film in the world (and our track record was nothing to boast about), even if the film sucked—the medium was doing well. A horror film could be played off regardless of quality, as long as it had enough blood, so their investment was actually pretty safe. As you’ll recall, the horror business was doing well in 1972. Cinerama had various films, AIP was in the midst of a horror film boom, and these facts
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