Balancing a family drama with Jersey Devil folklore, the film stars True Blood‘s Stephen Moyer as a dad who takes his wife and kids on a camping excursion in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens. As their trip goes on, his demeanor takes a drastic turn and something lurking in the woods begins to make itself known, leaving a trail of bodies in its wake.
Head inside for our discussion with the writer and director…
Shock: What was the driving force behind wanting to do a creature feature? Did you feel the Jersey Devil had not been properly executed on screen?
Darren Lynn Bousman: I knew that I wanted to do somewhat of a monster film, however, that being said, I wanted to do a monster film where the monster took the backseat to the story itself. In this case, it was a dysfunctional family, but I wanted to do a movie about basically a guy losing his shit. The movie was about a dysfunctional father set against a monster story, not the other way around, which I think couldve been done, which is a monster movie, but had a dysfunctional father in it. To me it was all about – if you can remove the gimmick, the movie still has to work. So, in the case of something like Repo! [The Genetic Opera] if you take Repo!, if you remove the singing – the gimmick – does the movie still work? Is there still a story there? In this case, if Im going to do a monster movie, can I remove the monster? Can I take the monster completely out and the story and characters still work. And then, trying to find a cryptozoology creature that would work for that. I dont feel that the Jersey Devils been exploited as much as Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster or Chupacabra or any of those other films. The Jersey Devils still kind of an untapped resource. So, I thought that wouldve been a perfect one to kind of set this story against.
Shock: Were there other cryptozoological creatures that you heavily considered before you settled on the Jersey Devil?
Shock: With the SAW films you directed, and the musicals, you established a certain visual style for yourself. What did you want to do different here?
Bousman: Do something thats a lot more simplistic, a lot more small. And the fact that Ive done Repo!, which is, you know, some other-worldly futuristic rock opera. Ive done Mothers Day, which had 15 characters in it and each character is pretty much a lead. And I wanted to do something in this which is a lot smaller in scope. Its four actors basically in the woods. And its all outside. Everything Ive done up to this point has pretty much been on sound stages, and I think that this is the first completely location shoot that Ive ever done. I think that that was its own set of challenges. Shooting the thing was a f**king nightmare. We shot the whole thing outside, and we were plagued by anything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Rain storms constantly causing us to stop shooting, the weather itself was freezing outside. You have characters running around with next to nothing getting in and out of water. I mean, it was horrendous. I think to me, it was just expanding my scope of what my knowledge base.
Bousman: He was great. I think that Moyer…I have tremendous respect for this dude. He is such a f**king awesome, awesome guy. Hes one of those kind of actors that after you yelled cut, he wouldnt go back to his trailer. He would sit there and want to be on set as much as humanely possible. I think that that to me is a great trait in an actor. He was there not only for the job, but as a team player in this. He was not one of those prima donnas, I think. I guess that my perception was that heres a guy on True Blood, one of the most popular TV shows, on the front of magazines and all over the place. I didnt know what it was going to be like working with him and he was awesome and he really responded to the material. I think that he saw it as well for a chance to do more than he gets to do on someone like Bill Compton, who is just this vampire guy and all of a sudden here he is, playing this father with extreme emotional range.
Shock: Talk about designing the Jersey Devil itself…
Bousman: You know, thats a harsh question in the fact that a lot of – I want to say this is a spoiler for those that havent seen the movie… One of the problems that we ran into is, this is probably the lowest budget film Ive done, and definitely the one Ive shot in the quickest amount of time. When it was all said and done, we shot the movie in 16 days. We were very limited to what we could actually afford and get away with. One of the things that I wanted to do to make it practical, I didnt want to make a CG monster. And, given our time constraint, we never saw the Jersey Devil until the day it showed up on set.
Shock: Wow.
Shock: You just recently tweeted that youre writing something new?
Bousman: Yes, I have two new things. Ive started to write a lot more, and Ive sold a couple of screenplays, which is exciting. The one that Ive just finished, that we just sold is not a horror film at all. Its a paranoid thriller. Its like, very much like The Game or The Firm or Parallax View. And thats called Bystander Effect, which thats done and thats finished. Thats really exciting, which we hope to make next year. And then, Im writing another movie. I cant go into a lot of detail, but again, its a new movie that Ive never done before and a new style of filmmaking, which Ive never done.
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