CraveOnline: What do you think of the big budget Ouija movie being made now?
Kevin S. Tenney: Well, you keep hearing about it but I haven’t seen anything about it actually being made yet. I think they keep firing the writers and firing the directors and moving to different studios and lowering the budget, so we’ll see. The other Hasbro films have not done that well, so we’ll see who’s really willing to gamble on a Ouija board movie.
Last I heard they are shooting, but I wonder, there’ve been so many movies about Ouija boards, what is the actual value of making a branded Ouija movie?
It’s just because you can call it Ouija. I think there’s two problems with it. The other is that if Parker Brothers is involved, they’re not going to want the Ouija board to appear bad. So you can’t have it like I did, you can’t have it be something that’s played as dangerous and you shouldn’t be fooling around with it. I would think they’re going to want to try to make it not seem so bad and then what kind of movie do you have if your Ouija board is not evillllll?
You got to make a Witchboard 2. Did you get to do what you wanted to do with that sequel?
In a lot of ways I did. We got more money because the first one had been such a big success, we got a lot more money. But the problem was everyone was so concerned, because I originally wrote a drastically different Witchboard 2 script that was way different from Witchboard I, went on a different tack, different location, different kind of story and nobody wanted to do it because it was too different. They wanted Witchboard 2 to be pretty similar to Witchboard I so we have another love triangle, we have the one kooky character like we had Zarabeth in the first one. We have the landlady played by Laraine Newman in part two who’s stuck in the ‘60s.
So my brother and I, when he was scoring it, one time we were sitting around working on it and he said, “Basically we got paid a lot more money to make the same film.” And I said, “Yeah, that’s kind of how it feels.” But I got to do a lot of neat stuff that I’d wanted to do in the first one and we couldn’t afford, like the car chase and much more elaborate spirit POVs going through a moving car and that kind of stuff, again all done practical.
You had a lot of behind the scenes footage on Witchboard. Were you shooting a lot of that yourself?
I wasn’t but Jeff Geoffray, the producer and I, had gone to USC Film School together. Video was just coming out and they weren’t doing extras on videos. We had no idea of course that DVD would come along and extras would be a big thing. We just thought it would be nice, just for posterity, we should have [a record]. We got some other film students who were still film students at USC and said, “You guys come out and shoot” and they did. Being filmmakers ourselves, we just always thought that way. Let’s have some behind the scenes stuff get shot while we’re making the film. Then when DVDs came out 20 years later and everyone said, “Oh, do you have any extras?” We were like, are you kidding? We have tons of extras. But just pure luck.
Did you not shoot that on Demons?
You’re right, we did not on Demons and I don’t know why. There was a lot more tension on Demons. Even though it was a funner shoot and a funner film, there was some politicking going on and butting of heads with different people, so I think the camaraderie aspect, Jeff and I just never thought to do it again. But then we did on Witchboard 2. We realized, hey, we should start doing this again.
You have a producer credit on the Night of the Demons remake. Did they ask you to be involved?
I actually was the one that got the project put together. I went to Jeff and Walter [Josten] who own the original rights, got the remake rights from them and then I took those to Seven Arts, and got them on board to finance and distribute the film. They had just done a film with Adam Gierasch and Jace Anderson who they really liked. So they asked me to meet with them and I did, and Adam was a huge fan of the original film. I just felt like this is the kind of guy you need doing the remake, not some guy that the studio thinks is hot off of rock videos. Here’s a guy who’s actually a fan of the genre and we talked a little about what his vision was for it. I just thought yeah, this guy’ll do a great job so we hired him and then I gave script notes of their script, each draft of the script and then gave them notes in post on the edits and all, basic producer stuff.
Does the remake have a following as well?
It has a pretty good-sized Facebook page, 35-36,000. Not up there with studio films but pretty good for an independent horror film. I personally think it turned out really well. I know I’m biased but I think it’s one of the best remakes in the last decade. When you compare it to other remakes of other horror films, I think Night of the Demons is much better.
Which of your other films would you like to have a Shout! Factory Blu-ray edition?
I would love to see them do something with Peacemaker. It’s a sci-fi action film, I guess the closest you could say is it’s kind of like Terminator only you don’t really know who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy until the last third of the film. We keep you guessing along with the lead female who’s stuck between them. She doesn’t know who she should be helping and who she should be thwarting because it keeps going back and forth as to who is and who isn’t the good guy and bad guy.
I remember that. That played on cable a lot.
Yeah, but it was the R-rated version and that’s all that got released on video and laserdisc. The unrated version has never been released in the U.S. and it’s never been on DVD although it is on DVD in the U.K. and it is the unrated version. So I would love to see the unrated version get released here in the U.S.
How significant are the differences?
About five scenes where some of the blood was toned town. Maybe we shot someone six times and we had to cut it down to three because it was just too many squibs going off or something, which was really annoying because we had to make those cuts and then I went and saw Total Recall and the first scene where he’s shooting people 100 times, I thought, “Yeah, Jack Valenti at the MPAA is always claiming they treat all the films the same, but they don’t.” The studio films get a lot more leeway than the independents because honestly, any one scene in Total Recall had more violence than the five shots they had me trim in my film.
You had a great cast in Peacemaker too. Robert Forster.
It’s funny because I love Robert Forster. I grew up watching him on TV and I really wanted him and the studio didn’t think he was worth it. They didn’t really think he was that big a name, and the producers and I really had to fight to get him. Now of course he did Jackie Brown and boom.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
