We used to joke about how scripts would always come back with coffee cup stains on them. You couldn’t help but wonder: Did it end up just being a temporary coaster? Or, if it was all rolled up: Was it a door stopper? You have to make jokes about the rejection. It’s either laugh or cry.
At writing seminars, the top screenwriters say, “Get ready to eat a lot of cheese — because your first six scripts are never going to sell.” I heard Lawrence Kasdan speak right after Raiders of the Lost Ark, and he said the same thing: “Do you know how many scripts I’ve got sitting in my drawer at home? What I’m going to do next is revise all these things that I wrote years ago…” Because once you get the door open, people will start paying attention. So I’m thinking: Does this mean I’ve got to write another script? That I’m never going to get anywhere with this one? Or do we just need to find a better way to make people to see this movie idea the way we see it? Maybe they’re just not getting it…
I realized that I had no credibility as a filmmaker, so I decided to surround myself with people who did have credibility. I went after people who were involved with movies that I really admired…like Halloween. I got a hold of Craig Stearns, who was the set decorator on Halloween and the production designer on The Fog. He’s a really nice guy and I went to his house and we instantly bonded, and I said, “Would you give me a letter of intent, saying that you would be willing to do this movie?” He said, “Yeah, sure.” So I made up some letterhead and he wrote: I believe in Tom McLoughlin and in this movie. And would love to be a part of this. And then I tacked his credits to that letter.
[Makeup designer] Tom Burman, who had worked on Prophecy with me, also gave me a letter of intent. I had an art director, director of photography, production designer…and I got a letter of reference from The Academy of Science Fiction and Horror, which is where I went every Sunday morning to watch horror movies. They wrote a letter saying that they read my script Mausoleum, which was the title of One Dark Night at that time, and they saw it as something in the classic tradition of horror movies, and something that could probably compete for a Saturn Award. So I put that whole package together, attached my own stinky credits and added a letter about the style and look of the movie I wanted to make.
You really shifted into the role of businessman, which is a jump that a lot of writers never make.
You do what you’ve got to do…but a few more months went by and still nothing was happening. So I’m thinking, Shit, what do I have to do now? I went to a seminar on how to get your script made and the speaker presented the idea of hiring an actor who had [lowering voice to sound like a radio announcer] one of those voices, to do a radio spot saying, “It’s the most horrifying thing you’ve seen since…” Then add sound effects to jazz it up. I figured, Okay, it’s cheap. We’ll just record an audio tape and then go into somebody’s office and say, “Here’s what the radio spot would sound like.”
Then Hawes and I thought: We’re going to go one step better. We’re going to do a slideshow presentation! Hawes was a photographer and I knew an actress who looked like the fresh-faced girl next door, so we went to the Hollywood Mausoleum and shot her walking through. We got long shots of the hall, close-ups of her face, point of view shots…Then we took the music from The Amityville Horror because it had a great build. The music went up and up and up, and then…“Mausoleum!”
Of course, that turned out to be ridiculous. We had to continually drag the slide-show projector around with us and project the images on the walls of darkened rooms. But it was better than nothing because I was showing people my vision for the movie. Ultimately, believe it or not, we brought that slide projector and our little tape recorder to Provo, Utah, to meet with the head of a company called ComWorld. We went into this guy’s bedroom, because it was the only place with open wall space — right above the baby’s crib — and we projected this thing and turned the sound way up. Afterwards, the guy said, “I don’t know anything about horror movies, but this looks scary to me.” He represented a group of Mormon investors in Salt Lake City that needed a tax shelter, and they said, “If you can start in three weeks and we can show a cut in the Bahamas a week after wrap (to qualify as a tax shelter), we will give you one million dollars to make this movie.” In the end, they ponied up $850,000. That’s how it happened.
I understand you did a lot of research on psychic phenomena for One Dark Night.
Mike and I, and a number of people that were involved in my life at that time, were really interested in the idea of mind control. After Ron Hubbard created Scientology, [10] there were a number of offshoots of that. One of the offshoots was a thing called est. [11] Est took some of the ideas from Scientology and combined them with ideas from Eastern philosophies. And then there were a lot of little variations on est, like Silva Mind Control. Silva Mind Control was a method of learning how to lower your brain frequency so that you could perceive things beyond the five senses and actually reach out with your mind and cause things to happen just by thinking about it.
A woman named Helen Virginia Bangs had created her own program called Mind Psi Biotics, and she held workshops in Orange County. I can’t remember exactly how we heard about her, but we went to a seminar and she talked about how you can stop bleeding and stop pain through the power of your will. What you do is bring your brainwaves down to a level called theta. [12] In that state there’s an energy that somehow stretches beyond the human body as we know it. That led to our studying Kirlian photography. [13] You really can photograph a person’s energy [moving beyond the surface of their body].
But we weren’t 100% buying the idea that we have psychic powers. We weren’t ready to be converted or anything, but we figured, Why not? Let’s see what happens. She talked us through this process — it was almost like self-hypnosis — and we found that we could do things that were pretty cool. One time while I was in a meditative theta state, someone handed me a wedding ring and I started describing what came into my mind as I was holding it. When I opened my eyes, the other person said: You just described my grandmother. Another time, I was given a name and a city. My imagination seemed to make up what this person looked like. I saw heat coming off of his chest and then I found out that he had lung cancer. It was unbelievable. Everyone in these classes was able to accomplish these seemingly supernatural deeds. Businessmen, housewives, students, truck drivers, anyone. We came expecting to find that this was a fraud, and we became total believers.
Afterwards, I thought: Well what if somebody could do these things, but they used the power for dark purposes? What if they could actually drain the energy off of people? And what if, when they die, that energy still resides in their body? I did some research and found out that, when you die, your hair and fingernails continue to grow. There is still a life energy in dead bodies. When I learned that, I began to think maybe that’s what ghosts are. People say that if you go into the house where the Manson Family murdered Sharon Tate, and you are at all “sensitive,” you will feel this negative energy — because what happened there was so horrific and that dark energy remains. They eventually torn that house down.
I took what I’d learned and put it into our script. In One Dark Night, a young girl (played by Meg Tilly) has to spend the night in a mausoleum to pledge into a high school club. The other members sneak in that night to scare her. On that same day, a Russian psychic named Raymar is entombed there. His body is deceased, but his bio-energy is very much alive, and he scares the girls to the point that their energy helps bring him back to life.
I didn’t want the audience to get too hung up on trying to understand all that, but we needed to explain things somewhat at the beginning of the movie. I thought of it like the Ark of the Covenant speech in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Lawrence Kasdan said that it killed him to interrupt the momentum of the movie with that speech, but it was necessary to explain why the Nazis wanted the Ark. So I hired my acting coach, Don Hotton, to play Raymar’s former associate and explain Raymar’s power. He used these Kirlian phot
ographs that we got from a well-known parapsychologist named Thelma Moss. And basically it was our Ark of the Covenant speech. It allowed the audience to say, “Okay he’s got these superpowers…Now let’s get on with the scares.”
It’s interesting to me that you weren’t just looking at the idea of the “psychic vampire” as a high-concept gimmick or a plot device for a horror movie, but as part of a worldview that acknowledges but can’t entirely explain the unknown. Ultimately, the movie was more about that feeling you had in the catacombs than about the psychic vampire plot device…and that feeling came from questioning what’s real. There is very real power in imagination. When you believe that something is real, it is — for you, in that moment — as real as anything…
Exactly, and that’s something that was important to get across the audience. To make Meg’s character even more susceptible, the girls gave her a sleeping pill — something to make her disoriented so that she’d wake up and not really know what was going on, and then feel really vulnerable. They know she’s a girl who doesn’t take drugs.
Or hang out in cemeteries…
Right. In classic horror movie fashion, they all happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, because Raymar was just entombed there. And we’ve already set up the idea of psychic vampirism…which is something we have all experienced in our lives, even if we’ve never heard the term “psychic vampirism.”
Everybody has to agree that there are certain people that can drain the energy out of you in a casual conversation. Most have no idea they’re doing it, but they somehow use other people’s energy to keep themselves going. And then there are people who do the exact opposite. When I worked with Bette Midler, she had such energy that, after I talked to her, I was buzzing. Quentin Tarantino is the same way. I remember a few years back, he told me about Grindhouse. I saw the entire movie as he was explaining it, and when he left I was on a high. That’s a gift. This phenomenon exists in life.
Now let’s take it to the next step, which is that Raymar is using the girls’ energy to open up crypts. Now we’re into pure horror movie visuals — coffins coming out of the wall and opening up. That’s many people’s greatest fear at funerals. Thinking: I don’t want to see what’s in that casket. I don’t want to look at death.
I’ve heard that Meg Tilly was genuinely frightened when you were filming in the mausoleum.
Oh yeah. And it shows. A lot of times when I’m directing actors in scare scenes, I tell them not to go for the fear — because it usually becomes too big, too much, and then it becomes funny. I tell actors to try not to be afraid. Try not to freak out. You know that you’re seeing someone walking toward you with a knife in their hand, but try to be cool. Seeing inner-conflict makes me, as a viewer, more uncomfortable than seeing someone express fear. But then if you have somebody like Meg who is so committed that she really seems like her mind is going to snap…It isn’t funny. It was as intense as I wanted it to be. When see that an actor has that ability to really go there, you let them.
Because if it seems like they truly believe that they’re being attacked by zombies, then the audience will believe it too…
Hopefully. The other thing I wanted to do was to change the accepted theory that when the dead come back to life, they walk. [In One Dark Night], the zombies were hunks of decomposing or mummified flesh that are being manipulated and moved through the air by a type of magician.
There’s an old Army vet, a heavy-set woman, an old man, a little girl buried with her doll…I looked for personalizing touches because that’s what I would notice when Mike [Hawes] and I visited real mausoleums. The crypt-keepers would take down the dead flowers, but they left behind photographs and notes, Christmas cards, birthday cards…and some of them were really personal. The things people said in those cards were things they couldn’t say in life. They know that they’re never going to get a response, but they have to say it anyway…I really wanted to get those details into the movie, so that when Meg walks into the mausoleum, we understand that she’s afraid of being in there with people’s memories. The longer it took to get the movie made, the more of these things I kept putting in the script and the more personal it became.
Just before the movie came out, some reviewer saw it and they asked to do an interview with me. I was able to do what I’m doing now and talk about all the reasons why it was important for me to make this movie, and to express my feelings about death and about having respect for the dead. And the article that came out of that was wonderful. You could tell that the critic didn’t really buy everything in the movie. He was like, “Well yeah, it was fun, but…the most interesting thing is the way that Tom McLoughlin wants to honor the dead.” He wrote, “Maybe one day the dead will come back and make him an honorary member.” I loved that.
Do you believe in ghosts?
I’ve had a number of — for lack of a better description — “encounters” with things that are beyond reality as I know it. And I wasn’t in any sort of hyper-state or drunk or stoned or anything else. The first one happened when I was sixteen. My girlfriend Amy’s parents were part of a unique group…Believers in the paranormal. They met every Thursday night to meditate and discuss, and they were open to all the other possibilities outside of “normal” religion. I was a sixteen-year-old kid and my world was all about sex, drugs and rock n roll, so that stuff really didn’t mean a lot to me, but my girlfriend grew up in a house where they believed in all these other things. So she always spoke about ghosts.
At that time, Amy was seeing apparitions in the house and was quite frightened. She said things were moving around her all the time. Now, again, I didn’t believe any of this. I’m sixteen. She’s sixteen. She would tell me these things very sincerely and I sort of wanted to believe her, but I never saw any proof. So I dismissed it, figuring, I have an attractive, artistic girlfriend with a very vivid imagination.
Anyway, a Ouija board was discovered in her family’s attic. Nobody could explain how it got there. When this group learned about the Ouija board, they asked my girlfriend and I to sit in on their meeting so they could figure out what was going on with her. They made a fire in the fireplace and took out the Ouija board and the planchette, and once the fire was big enough, they put the whole thing into the fireplace. We’re all just sitting there, waiting for it to burn…and it didn’t burn. You could probably come up with a logical explanation — the lacquer on the bottom of it wasn’t flammable…or whatever.
But then — I kid you not — different sections of the Ouija board lit up in different colors. A blue flame, about an inch and a half around, came up from one section. Then a red flame, same size, from another section. Then an orange flame, a purple flame, a green flame…all in different sections of the Ouija board. And each time one of those flames came up, they gave off a screeching sound. It sounded like these old fireworks that were called Piccolo Petes. So there are six or seven of those things going off at the same time, and everybody in the room was in a state of shock. Suddenly the whole thing just went poof and disintegrated. The flames engulfed the board and it was gone. We must have sat in silence for five minutes after that. Nobody knew what to say or what to do. No words of wisdom. Just…wow. It was like we’d just witnessed a horrible accident and everybody was frozen and speechless. And that was it.
The next night, I went back over to Amy’s house. At the end of the night, I was standing out on the front porch, saying good-night, and I remember feeling like there was someone else there. I didn’t think too much about it at the time — it was only as the night went on that I really had to secretly acknowledge feeling like there was something with me. I went home and went to bed, still feeling a little weirded out.
Around three in the morning, I woke up…just woke up abruptly…and I could see a shape in the corner of my bedroom in front of the closed door. I saw the outline of a head, shoulders, and then a line straight down, like a long cape or something. Couldn’t see arms or anything, just this form. And it was like…television st
atic, except it was sort of a violet color. And just like the cliché, the room was freezing.
Truthfully, I really was not sure if I was dreaming or if this was real, but after a while I knew I was awake and that this was real somehow. And I was scared. So I called Amy in the middle of the night. Her mother answered, and I said [timidly], “Hi, this is Tom.” And she goes, “There’s something there, isn’t there?” I said, “Yeah.” She goes, “Okay here’s what you need to do. Close your eyes…” And I said, “I don’t want to close my eyes.” It was like this thing was staring at me, as I was talking. I was transfixed. She said, “Just close your eyes. You have to close your eyes.” So I closed my eyes and then she said, “In your mind, imagine the room is filling with white light. Just picture the room getting brighter and brighter.” It took me a while, but I tried doing that. I just tried to imagine I could feel it getting brighter, brighter, brighter. She said, “Don’t open your eyes.” Of course I was terrified that I was going to open my eyes and this thing was going to be right in my face. Like in a horror movie. After a while, she said, “Now open your eyes.” I did and it was gone. The coldness was gone.
I said, “What was that?” She said, “I’ll tell you tomorrow.” “Well, what if it comes back?” “It won’t.” Eventually I went back to sleep, still confused by what I just saw. I was still scared. But then another part of me was thinking, now that the thing is gone, Boy was that pretty cool. [smiling]
A Strange Idea of Entertainment: Conversations with Tom McLoughlin Page 6