News

Interview: ‘Scary Stories’ Documentary Director Cody Meirick

Published

5 years ago

July 22, 2019

One of the first things that Cody Meirick would like you to know is that he, in fact, did not direct the big screen adaptation of Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

That film is produced by Guillermo del Toro and directed by André Øvredal.

Meirick, on the other hand, spent the last five years of his life creating a documentary called Scary Stories about the the trilogy of books that opened doors for an entire generation to the world of things that go bump in the night.

When he first decided to begin work on Scary Stories, his first full-length documentary, he admits he wasn’t entirely sure how to get from point A to point B. He only knew that it was going to be a lot of work and he was ready to commit.

“I had a background in producing web content that had to do with children’s literature,” he said. “I could see that this [Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark] was a title that had a huge following. People talk a lot about the books, but I could see they didn’t know a lot about how they were created. They also didn’t know how much the books were challenged in the 90s. When you juxtapose those things, that’s a great story!”

How to go about telling that story was the real task, and he admits one of the challenges was to not over-simplify it. He also freely admits that it’s not a totally balanced film.

“A percentage of the documentary is a celebration of the books,” Meirick pointed out. “I also wanted to point out that books, in general, are still being challenged. It’s something that’s still going on and we should be talking about that.”

To spotlight the challenges that this particular set of books faced, Meirick went back to the 90s and one particular case that made national news.

As a final element, he also began to reach out to artists, musicians, and other creatives whose work had been inspired by the books and who continue to create based on Scwartz’s storytelling and Stephen Gammell’s illustrations, and he says that this was one way that stretching the project out over five years actually aided him.

“I really started building an audience on social media from the beginning,” he said. “People have followed the project. They’ve reached out to me about it. They’ve shown me their work. I really got to know my audience, and I was able to naturally frame the story of the documentary with three things: the illustrations, the stories, and the controversy.”

It was also during this process that he contacted Shane Hunt to create animations for the documentary, though he wasn’t sure at first what to animate. There was no way for him to fully animate the stories, and he wasn’t sure that shorter animations would benefit the film ultimately.

The spark of inspiration finally came when he heard a story from a particular librarian whose school had asked her to remove the books from the library’s shelves, a decision which she disagreed with wholeheartedly.

“Telling that story was pertinent to telling the story of the documentary,” Meirick explained. “And I suddenly thought we could animate her story! So, we segmented it out and it turned out to be a great way to give our audience a story that they probably didn’t know that was still important to the project.”

Hunt’s animation perfectly evokes Gammell’s illustrations with creepy overtones to what might otherwise be straightforward storytelling making those animated sequences compelling and tonally perfect for the documentary.

With all the pieces in place, Meirick was able to create a documentary that is more balanced, I think, than even he realized.

Scary Stories is currently streaming on Amazon Prime, and is also available finally on DVD. CLICK HERE to order a copy and get ready for the journey into Cody Meirick’s brilliant documentary.

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Movies

‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

Published

6 hours ago

April 26, 2024

Timothy Rawles

It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.

We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.

“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”

That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”

Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:

^{High Desert Hell}

^{The Gemini Project}

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Movies

‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening

Published

8 hours ago

April 26, 2024

Timothy Rawles

Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.

Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.

^{Happy Sad Confused}

Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.

Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.

The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.

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News

Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date

Published

10 hours ago

April 26, 2024

Timothy Rawles

Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s in ‘Presumed Innocent’

Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.

These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:

According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”

Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.

Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.