By John Talbird.
I’ve dabbled in Stoker lore a few times. I adapted Dracula for the stage, I worked on a Syfy series called Van Helsing…. So I’ve tried to stretch that myth as many ways as I can and it amazingly can stretch very far as you’ve probably seen in all kinds of media. I just thought that as a situation where you look at men and women and the power dynamics of a date that turns sideways, it was a great place to start from.”
In the early 1990s, Neil LaBute adapted and directed his stage play In the Company of Men in just two weeks with an estimated budget of $25,000. It would go on to gross nearly three million dollars and win awards at Sundance, New York Film Critics Circle Awards, and National Board of Review. This sharp, indie realism would continue in such films as Your Friends and Neighbors (1998) and The Shape of Things (2003) intermixed with big-budget projects like Possession (2002) and The Wicker Man (2006). In addition to continuing to write for the stage, LaBute has made numerous short films (Sexting [2010], 10K [2017]) and has worked on several TV series (Van Helsing [2016-2021], The I-Land [2019]). His most recent film is a post-#metoo vampire story. House of Darkness (2022), along with 2022’s Out of the Blue, are the first feature films he’s made in seven years.
We spoke via Zoom on a recent late-summer day. The edited version of that conversation follows.
Let’s start by talking about House of Darkness: Many people will not know or remember the three vampire women living in Dracula’s castle at the beginning of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). What made you interested in their story and why update it to the contemporary age?
It was a fun springboard. Sometimes, when you’re writing you just have to find that thing that gives you the juice to get going somewhere. And I’ve dabbled in Stoker lore a few times. I adapted Dracula for the stage, I worked on a Syfy series called Van Helsing that took the name of the vampire hunter from that novel and kind of rebranded him as a female hero. That show even has a female Dracula in it. So I’ve tried to stretch that myth as many ways as I can and it amazingly can stretch very far as you’ve probably seen in all kinds of media. I just thought that as a situation where you look at men and women and the power dynamics of a date that turns sideways, it was a great place to start from.
You mention all the various texts that have come out of Stoker’s novel. Why do you think that the vampire myth is such a powerful metaphor?
I think that the unknown is a powerful metaphor. I don’t think you can deny the power of being swept away by something that is frightening and beyond our control. But I think you have to definitely lean into the fact that there is a premise there of living forever. In the same way that people search for eternal life and go work out at five in the morning before they go to their job, we’re all kind of secretly wishing to live forever. And especially when we’re young we think that we’re going to live forever. We’re going to be the one that time is not going to take. So there is something powerful about that offer, even as double-edged as it is, that gift that comes with vampirism. It’s seductive and probably more so because it’s not based, as far as we know, in any kind of reality. But we can vicariously live through it. People love to be told stories, transported. As I said, it’s a sturdy genre. People like all the elements and like to go on that ride as many times as it pulls up in front of their house. “Oh, cool. Here’s some teenaged vampires. This sounds like fun!” And off we go, whether it’s The Lost Boys (1987) or Twilight (2008). There’s even going to be a new Interview with the Vampire [a television series for AMC debuting in October of this year].
What’s the definition of a play or film? These days it’s getting hazier and hazier with Zoom plays which you watch at home and National Theatre Live which you watch at the cinema.”
I’m a big fan of your early films and went back and looked at some of the reviews. The word “nihilistic” gets thrown around a lot about these early movies. I’m thinking particularly about the Aaron Eckhart character in In the Company of Men and the Jason Patric character in Your Friends and Neighbors: They’re such compelling evil sociopaths. I think that some people, with your more recent move into genre work, will think that your career has taken a surprising turn since the early years of this century. For instance, your recent and upcoming films look as if they explore the action genre (Fear the Night [post-production]) and noir (Out of the Blue (2022)). Some people might view this career shift as a departure. I wondered if you could help us make connections with these earlier drama-based films and the later more genre-inflected work.
There was probably a juncture three films in when I agreed to sign on to Nurse Betty (2000). I had to make the decision about whether I was going to just direct films that I had written myself or would I be willing to do other people’s work as well. And so I said, yeah, I want to explore all kinds of things. So even though I wrote House of Darkness and some of these other more recent genre-based films and TV shows, I’m asking myself, Can I look at a male-female relationship in the context of a horror movie? There are certainly threads that run throughout my career. I’ve been interested in power dynamics between men and women since the beginning.
I watched Dirty Weekend (2015) when I knew that you and I were going to talk. It actually seems like a departure from the earlier films even more so than House of Darkness. There’s a softer tone to it and it breaks down the male-female binary with the transsexual character and the ambiguity of whether the Mathew Broderick character has had sex with either a man or a woman when he was drunk. It does seem that you’ve explored a lot of different issues in your films without limiting yourself to any one type of plot.
Yes, the same with my work on stage. I’ve gone everywhere my mind would take me, adapted things, remade some things. You try to push yourself and sometimes you’re successful, sometimes less so. But it’s nice to go out there and explore so that I don’t feel too trapped into thinking that I have to recreate something that people liked near the beginning of my career.
Going back to your stage work: I was struck watching House of Darkness that besides for that central sequence which seems to be shot in a cave, most of the film could have been performed on a stage. When you’re engaged in a writing project, how do you know that something is going to be for the cinema or for the live theater?
It’s actually very uncertain—throughout the writing process and sometimes even to the point that I wonder who I’m going to show a finished work to. And that ultimately decides it: whether I show it to some producers in the theater or film producers. We just had access to the mansion in Arkansas and I decided to set House of Darkness there. The dream sequence, which is supposed to be part of the mansion, is actually set in an abandoned mining tunnel in the vicinity. The production of the film coincided with the time of COVID-19. It was envisioned that, since it is so self-contained and there are so few actors involved, that it would have been something we could have filmed in a relatively easy way. But sometimes even when I close the laptop and think, Okay, I’ve got this script now, I still have to decide, What’s it going to be, film or play? That happened with Some Velvet Morning (2013). It could have been on stage, it could have been a movie. It just happened to be made into a movie. It takes place in one house, two people. What’s the definition of a play or film? These days it’s getting hazier and hazier with Zoom plays which you watch at home and National Theatre Live which you watch at the cinema.
John Duncan Talbird is the author of the novel The World Out There (Madville Publishing, 2020) and a chapbook, A Modicum of Mankind (Norte Maar, 2016). His fiction and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Potomac Review, Ambit, Juked, The Literary Review, and Riddle Fence among many others. He is Associate Editor, Fiction, for Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon is on the editorial board of Green Hills Literary Lantern. A professor at Queensborough Community College-CUNY, he lives with his wife and son in New York City.