"Maniac": How Elijah Wood Broke (Very) Bad in One of the Best Horror Remakes Ever

You'll never look at Elijah Wood, or a woman's scalp, the same way again.

Not Available Lead
Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

Not Available Lead

How's this for surreal—inside Manhattan's year-round haunted house venue Times Scare, women are literally lining up to fall under Elijah Wood's knife. Well, technically, the ladies are just inserting their heads into the hole cut into one of the tall, stand-up posters (see below right) for the 32-year-old actor's latest film, the brutal and striking horror remake Maniac, and he's not actually pointing a blade in their direction—it's an illustrated representation of his character.

It's a macabre variation of one of those carnival set-ups couples pose behind for pictures, the boyfriend playing the horse and the girlfriend playing the cowboy. Except, in this case, instead of roller coasters and cotton candy, the nearby attractions include a gurney with the straps hanging free, walls with protruding doors etched into their designs a la a mortuary with slide-in coffin beds, and a fully stocked bar decorated with framed butchers' knives and meat hooks hanging from the ceiling.

It's the perfect setting to premiere Wood's debut as a should-be-iconic horror movie villain named, simply, Frank, the deranged Los Angeles serial killer at the center of Maniac (available on VOD and out in limited theatrical release starting today). The venue is fitting because of its positioning—Times Scare is located next to quite apropos establishments. On its left is Show World Center, an adult video store and private peep booth hub that hearkens back to the '80s-era NYC days when the original Maniac premiered in Times Square; next to Show World, there's the theatre where performances of Silence! The Musical take place, which parody, yes, one of fiction's all-time great serial killers, Hannibal Lecter.

Wood, for his part, couldn't be happier about the evening's vibe. A big horror movie fan, he feels right at home, so much so that, when he's announced to introduce Maniac to a crowd of around 100 people seated in Times Scare's attic-like Elektra Theatre, Wood practically glides to the stage, waves to the crowd, and grins. Alongside him are the film's director, Franck Khalfoun, and three of its actresses, all of whom play unfortunate women stalked, killed, and scalped by Maniac's Frank. "This is the first time I've been in the same place with all of my victims at once," says Wood, smiling. With a sinister, though enthusiastic tone, he continues, "It's exciting!"

As it should be. Presented in first-person POV, from Wood's character's eyes (not found-footage, thankfully), Maniac is a violent, ambitious, and excellent work of progressive horror. Wood plays a mannequin restorer by day and murderous madman by night; stricken by memories of his late, cold-hearted, prostitute mother, Frank's incapable of connecting with women. Though it emotionally and physically hurts him to do so, Frank can't help but kill the girls he's attracted to, but not just simple homicide—he scalps their either helpless or lifeless heads, stuffs the hair and flesh into a Ziploc bag, and staples it onto one of the mannequins inside his bedroom. Then, imagining the mannequins are alive, he sleeps with them and carries on one-sided conversations. It's not until he meets the kind and fascinating Anna (Nora Arnezeder) that Frank finds himself able to curb his desires, but not for long.

The original Maniac, released in 1980, ranks as one of the grindhouse period's nastiest exploitation films, an uninviting ode to New York City defilement anchored by a very sweaty Joe Spinell. He's the opposite of Elijah Wood in every way—tall, heavyset, and not unlike a sloppier version of Ron Jeremy if the porn star also happened to be a linebacker.

The new Maniac, thankfully for the late Spinell and O.G. director William Lustig, is the best horror remake since Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead (2004), due in no small part to the brave and inspired casting of Wood, who gives a boundless, imposing, yet delicately vulnerable performance. Credit for the notion to turn Wood (whose FX series Wilfred returns for its third season tonight) into 2013's Maniac goes to the film's co-producer and co-writer, Alexandre Aja, who previously directed the splatter-heavy gems High Tension (2003), The Hills Have Eyes (2006), and Piranha 3D (2010).

As of now, Maniac is the horror film to beat in 2013. Here, Elijah Wood and Franck Khalfoun explain how they pulled off what seemed to the impossible: taking the guy who's widely known for playing the heroic Frodo Baggins and making him one of the new millennium's most traumatizing and memorable on-screen killers.

RELATED: The 50 Most Disturbing Movies
RELATED: Personality Complex: Jason Eisener Abides By the Philosophies of Sam Raimi and Master Splinter
RELATED: Where Have All the Midnight Movies Gone?
RELATED: The Unfair Business of Being a Woman Director in the Boys Club of Horror Filmmaking

Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

Why remake "Maniac"?

Not Available Interstitial

Before Jason Voorhees became a sequel-hungry household name, and years prior to the string of 1980s slasher flicks that included The Burning, Prowler, and My Bloody Valentine, there was Frank Zito, the mentally disturbed, homicidal grunt with mommy issues in the 1980 cult classic Maniac.

Played by the one-of-a-kind Joe Spinell, Frank ineffectively works through the trauma of growing up as the son of an abusive, and now deceased, prostitute by stalking beautiful throughout Manhattan, murdering them, scalping them, and placing their gooey, rank head-tops on the collection of mannequins concealed inside his apartment. He's an overweight, greasy, acne-riddled ogre of a man, yet one who, thanks to Spinell's complex performance, somehow elicits sympathy. Killing women brings him no real pleasure. He hates it as much as the audience does, but he also can't stop doing it.

Made for only $48,000, Maniac, directed by William Lustig, premiered in New York City's seedy 42nd Street in December 1980. Audiences and critics alike were shocked and repulsed, by images such as Frank strangling a woman in a close-up for what feels like a half-hour and an iconic (for gorehounds, at least) scene in which Frank blows a man's head clean off with a close-range shotgun blast. Feminist groups were in an uproar. Gene Siskel famously walked out of his press screening 30 minutes into the film; renown critic Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that "Good sense, if not heaven, should protect anyone who thinks he likes horror films from wasting a price of admission on Maniac."

An unlikely, reasonably obscure film, it's an unlikely one to receive the in-vogue remake treatment. But French horror master Alexandre Aja—who's proven himself a sort of remake titan by directing the impressive redoes The Hills Have Eyes and Piranha 3D—had an ingenious strategy for his version of Maniac: Make Frank the total physical opposite of Joe Spinell, and more insecure, emasculated, and endearing in spite of his murderous ways. The brilliant idea: cast the short, genuinely likable, and far-from-Berkowitz actor Elijah Wood. And call upon filmmaker Franck Khalfoun, an old friend and collaborator of Aja's, to direct.

Franck Khalfoun: "When the original Maniac first came out, I was only 11, so I didn't see it then. My first time seeing it was on an old, busted VHS copy of it somewhere, randomly. I'd seen it and forgotten about it for years, until I was approached by [producers] Alex Aja and Thomas Langmann. Then I revisited it and I said to myself, 'Oh, my god, I remember this!' What really struck me about it was Joe Spinell, and the empathy I felt for that character. That's what I remembered. I remembered feeling terribly sorry for that character."

"For me, that's where the journey began. I thought, OK, this guy is murdering women and somehow I felt empathy for him and forgot about the victims for a while? That was really interesting to me. That's when we started the discussions about how we'd do this version. Does the world need another serial killer movie? Can we offer one that's different and shed light on something new and interesting? That's the first thing I said to Alex: 'Do we really need another serial killer? Why? Let's figure out what's cool, and let's do some research and really find a new way into this story."

"Maniac really is the movie that's been copied by damn near every other serial killer movie that's come after it. And now you're asking me to copy the movie? [Laughs.] That was very daunting. But I knew we could make it work if we played up the character's vulnerability and heightened the audience's empathy for him. Make him really conflicted about killing these women, make it clear that he doesn't enjoy doing this. That's why I didn't want to redo the original movie's big shotgun kill, where Joe Spinell blows Tom Savini's head off."

"If that scene is in our movie, how is the audience supposed to empathize with Elijah's character? And considering how intimately he kills the other women, why would the audience accept, and believe, that he would suddenly grab a shotgun and blow some guy's head off? I wanted this movie to avoid that."

Elijah Wood: "It's not often that I read horror scripts or even entertain the idea of working on a horror film, as much as I love the genre. There are only so many great genre films that come out of the states these days, but I think that number is increasing. There are more and more impressive horror movies coming out of the states lately. The future looks bright, at least to me."

"I was intrigued by the prospect of playing a character who's largely only seen in reflection was really intriguing to me as well. The approach really impressed me. It was gratifying to learn that they were taking something older and turning it into something completely original. They took the source material, made it their own, and that was really exciting. I'm not a huge fan of remakes myself. If you're going to do something, then you should do make it your own. The Dawn of the Dead remake is a great example of one that also impressed me in that way."

"The other thing that always bothers me about remakes is that they usually tend to delve deeply into the psyche of the killer, which always bothers me. In Maniac, that's part of the movie's point, so it makes sense to give background and make the audience feel some empathy for my character, but in movies like Friday the 13th, Halloween, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, that seems counterproductive. It annoys the shit out of me. More often than not it robs the scariness from the character. It's like, come on, don't make me shed a tear for fucking Leatherface! Jesus."

Changing the Location to Los Angeles

Not Available Interstitial

The original Maniac has many components that make it a memorable piece of exploitation cinema. The thick red blood that screams 1980s slasher movie. The fact that its protagonist is played by the kind of actor who'd never get to lead a picture in today's much vainer marketplace. And the grimy aesthetics, nightmarish urban landscape, and graffiti-covered backdrops that firmly set the film in a Manhattan that doesn't exist anymore.

It's the same NYC Martin Scorsese captured in Taxi Driver. When Joe Spinell's character chases a frightened woman through the 59th Street subway station, and into the grungiest looking bathroom stall imaginable, it's a reminder to the city's current MTA commissioner that his company has come a long, long way.

But times have changed. The urban desolation that was shorthand for New York City back then is no more. As Maniac 2013 director Franck Khalfoun realized, today's Frank wouldn't fit as well into the Big Apple's climate. He needs to clip wings and slice heads open in the City of Angels.

Khalfoun: "The original script was much more of a straightforward remake. It was, like the original, set in "the empty Lower East Side of New York City," and when I read that, I asked Alex, "OK, what year is this?" [Laughs.] New York is not empty anymore. Where are we in today's society, and what city in America reflects the country's cultural center more nowadays? And I think that's Los Angeles. The culture that we export, no matter how shallow it is, comes from Los Angeles."

Wood: "There's also something bleak about Los Angeles. It's the place where people go with their dreams, and, more often than not, those dreams don't come true. They aren't realized."

Khalfoun:"And that's what I mean. That American dream is all smoke and mirrors. It's the idea that we're the factory that creates that, meaning people who work in Hollywood, and people have to go there to do what we do. There's a lot of bad stuff that comes out of there."

Wood: "There also happens to be a lot of mannequins in LA. [Laughs.] In the metaphorical sense. A lot of attractive people that radiate emptiness."

Khalfoun: "That's why I thought the city was more interesting. Plus, it's a beautiful city."


 

There also happens to be a lot of mannequins in LA. In the metaphorical sense. A lot of attractive people that radiate emptiness." - Elijah Wood

 

Wood: "Downtown Los Angeles really is gorgeous, and it retains some of what you could find in New York during the '80s but that doesn't exist in New York anymore. At night, Downtown Los Angeles is a wasteland. There aren't a lot of people around, but there are a lot of homeless people and a lot of drug addicts. But it's in the context of an incredibly architecturally beautiful city. These incredible buildings are occupied during the day but then every scurries away at night—there's something creepy about that dynamic."

Khalfoun: "It's true. It's full of people in the day, but at night everyone is gone. There's also this past decadence to it. Back in the day, Downtown LA was where all of the rich people and movie stars hung out, and there were the hotels where they had balls. And that's all replaced by homeless people and drug addicts."

Wood: "It's a funny city to walk around in, too. It has the same basic structural layout as New York, but walking in the streets doesn't feel the same. Walking the streets in New York, it's constantly moving, and you're surrounded by moving pedestrians. Even during the day, there are parts of Downtown LA where it doesn't feel comfortable to walk down the street.

"All of that fit the character perfectly. When he's driving around the city, or walking down the street, there's this sense of unease that's prevalent even before he starts stalking women. It's that emptiness and unease that nighttime Los Angeles brings alive in the film, I think."

A More Empathetic Psychopath

Not Available Interstitial

In the 2005 adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel Sin City, Elijah Wood caught everyone off guard playing Kevin, a silent, smirking killer who butchers prostitutes and eats their flesh. At the time, the thought of Wood, a.k.a. Frodo Baggins, as a homicidal psycho must have seemed ludicrous to most casting directors, but Sin City director Robert Rodriguez saw something in the young actor.

Alexandre Aja had the same fit of curious inspiration when looking for his take on Frank. He, along with director Franck Khalfoun, was able to look past Wood's boyish looks, penchant for comedy, and generally amiable appeal and understand that Wood physically embodies the scariest kind of serial killer: a murderer who looks like the guy who'd fix your computer, mow your lawn, or date your daughter.

Khalfoun: "The character was always physically different from Joe Spinell's, but emotionally we wanted both characters to be disturbed in the same way. Joe Spinell's physical nature in the original always bothered me. It was important that we made everything about our Frank believable here. To believe that Nora and Joe Spinell would work out romantically the same way that he and Caroline Munro did in the original was a concept that I could never understand or accept. That relationship always took me out of the original. It's not believable.

"Today's audience is so sophisticated that they would have seen right past the lack of believability had we gone with someone closer in look to Joe Spinell. It would have been too jarring. It's interesting, though, because in Alex and Greg's original script, before we switched it to first-person POV and before Elijah came onto the project, there wasn't any mention of Frank's physical makeup. He was just a shapeless character, but one with the emotional beats and dialogue in place.

"Alex Aja and I have always had that debate, about what's scarier: a scary looking guy or a normal looking guy?"

Wood: "For me, and I know Franck agrees with this, the scariest thing is the insidious nature that lives inside someone who seems normal. Quite often with serial killers, if you go down the historical route, most of them appeared normal. They didn't initially ring any alarm bells. You have your odd serial killer who was obviously fucked up, but most of them had this duality where they, at least on the surface, attempted to live a normal life. That, to me, is more believable, to approach Frank in Maniac in that way.

"I find that far scarier. It's like that guy who was keeping those women in basement, the one that was all over the news recently. He'd go to barbecues at his neighbors' houses and nobody knew that he was doing these horrible things. There was that guy who gave the interview and said something like, "I ate ribs with this dude!" That's far scarier, when you realize, fuck, there's been this monster living next door to me this entire time."

Khalfoun: "If you have kids, that's terrifying. Which is sad, because now you're afraid to let your kids outside of the house. It used to be that you walked out of the house and hung out with friends, but it's scarier nowadays."

Wood: "I've always been fascinated by this topic. I'd actually done a fair amount of research into serial killers on my own before I even heard about Maniac, just as a pedestrian. I've always been fascinated by true crime, and particularly serial killers. I find that kind of behavior very interesting—what drives someone to that behavior, and the emotional disconnect that's involved. I'm sure that kind of was in my subconscious when we were making the film."

First-Person POV

Not Available Interstitial

The question that Franck Khalfoun asked himself before agreeing to direct a Maniac remake: Does the world need another serial killer movie?

If you're going to cover the same ground as countless other films, particularly ones that linger on such ugly stuff, there better be a legitimately interesting reason to do so, lest the filmmakers be seen as purveyors of needless exploitation. Khalfoun sat down with his producers and came up with a clever and fresh take on the murderer movie: He'd do it in first-person POV, placing the audience directly inside the killer's head, forcing them to watch every heinous act and feel the discomfort, horror, and tragedy up close and personal.

Khalfoun: "There were a couple of movies that I looked at to help me better understand how to make the first-person POV approach work. There's this great old Humphrey Bogart movie called Dark Passage. It's Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and she's stunning in the film. It's all from the point-of-view of this guy who's escaped from prison, and it's Bogart. It's Bogart's voice, obviously, and the whole movie is done in POV, and you see her all the time. At some point, he picks up a newspaper and reads the headline, 'Prisoner Escapes,' but the picture isn't Bogart. You're like, 'What the fuck?' And you learn that, to escape, he visited a plastic surgeon, and eventually he takes off the bandages and reveals himself to be, in the mirror, Bogart!

"That movie is the one that really resonated with me. I saw Bacall and couldn't believe how stunning she looks throughout the entire film. I was like, OK, this is possible. That's when I knew that I wanted our lead actress to have that same visual impact, to be this stunning woman and really radiate on the screen.

"I learned a couple lessons from Dark Passage. I noticed how, when the characters would talk to Bogart, they'd stare directly into the camera, and it looked like they were straining themselves to stare right into it. [Laughs.] Like they were craning their necks toward the camera every time they spoke to him. It didn't look natural. I thought about how we needed Elijah to always be behind the camera and give the lines to the other characters, and I saw that immediately from how differently Dark Passage handled it, and how unnatural it looked in that film."

Wood: "I've always really loved Peeping Tom [the 1960 British film about a voyeur who murders people with a bayonet attached to a video camera, as he records their final moments]. That's a favorite of mine, and when I read the script for Maniac, it made me think about Peeping Tom. That helped me get even more excited about this project."

Khalfoun: "Peeping Tom is one of the ones that we knew we'd reference and it would legitimize our attempts at doing this. If you think about it, and you remember a film like Peeping Tom, you'll realize that horror almost originates in the POV style. Every horror movie has a POV shot, and they tend to be the scariest moments in the film."

Voyeurism

Not Available Interstitial

Maniac opens with a slickly executed pre-credits sequence in which Elijah Wood's character preys upon a nightclub patron walking home late at night, from his car's driver's seat—the scene's payoff, while a fierce shock to the system, is a gruesome masterstroke that sets the mood.

Minutes later, the film reaches its first, and most important, moment of uncomfortable voyeurism. After a dinner date with a pierced, heavily tattooed girl he's met via an online dating website, Frank gets invited back to her apartment. She's Lucie (nicely played by actress Megan Duffy), a cute, friendly firecracker who's smitten by Frank's anti-jock demeanor. Like a deer in headlights, a nervous Frank accepts the glass of wine she offers, looks around her place, and does his best to keep up with a now-naked Lucie as she tries to initiate sex. But he's not able to reciprocate, and something awful happens.

In any other serial killer movie, the scene could've been your run-of-the-mill murder set-piece, complete with a gratuitous nudity. In Maniac, though, the through-Frank's-eyes POV lends it an unnerving intimacy. You know something bad's about to happen, you know you shouldn't be in this apartment, and there's nothing you can do to help poor Lucie. It's the scene where Maniac's true horror becomes apparent.

Khalfoun: "The scene inside Lucie's apartment was key for us, because it really establishes how horrible what Frank's doing is, and how uncomfortable the audience will be doing all of these right alongside him. There's this anticipation that something terrible is about to happen. It was important for there to be an intimacy in that scene. Megan [Duffy] plays her so sweet, with this mixture of innocence and charming sexuality. Even when she's advancing on Frank sexually, she's still this nice girl. You're in her private space, in her small apartment.

"The most uncomfortable thing about that scene, to me, is the amount of time we spend in her apartment without cutting away. Frank is alone in the main room for enough time to look around and see her personal photographs, and it doesn't feel right. He's awkwardly waiting, just standing there, and the audience feels awkward with him. And then she shows up naked, and the violence that escalates is so horrific and so brutal, to him cutting her up, and he's very shaky at that point.

"The whole thing is this slow build to nausea, and when he himself throws up, I hope that the audience understands why, and maybe has some of the queasiness themselves."

Wood: "That scene is important in another way, too. It's the first time where we see Frank's emasculation, in how his insecurity gets the best of him once Lucie starts touching him and pushing the experience forward. He can't handle it. He's too scared to act on it, and that's one of the things that triggers his darker impulses. It's the only way he knows how to react. He doesn't think he's man enough to be sexual with her, nor will his psychosis allow him to be.

"It's those moments of vulnerability that amplify the humanity in the character, and, I hope, help you feel empathy for him. Those were important moments in defining who the character was. The thing is, he's a monster in what he's capable of doing, but he's also socially inept. He's afraid of other men, because he doesn't possess that same personal, physical strength. Those moments were important to make the character more human. He's not just a homicidal monster.

"I think vulnerability, social awkwardness, and fear are all things that we can all relate to in some way. I understood those elements about the characters in a personal way."

Nora Arnezeder

Not Available Interstitial

As sympathetically as Elijah Wood plays his character in Maniac, let's face it: He's still the monster. That's unavoidable. What makes the film so effective is that he's also its most tragic figure, and the key to exposing that side of the character is Nora Arnezeder, the French actress who plays "Anna."

Through their shared affinity for art and mannequins (Anna's a professional photographer who snaps images of the lifeless statues for her own gallery), Frank and Anna click in ways that he's unable to with other women. She's charming, affectionate, and easy for Frank to talk to, and he's instantly smitten by her. Anna, for her part, genuinely cares about him, too, but she's also romantically unavailable. Once again, Frank can't win.

Arnezeder's performance is perhaps the new Maniac's greatest secret weapon against comparisons to the 1980 original. Whereas the earlier film's leading actress, Caroline Munro, played that film's Anna with a cold air of entitlement, the Paris-raised Arnezeder (who you may recognize from last year's Ryan Reynolds/Denzel Washington action pic Safe House) radiates warmth. Without her, Maniac 2013 would be a much different movie.

Khalfoun: "The first thing about Nora that struck me immediately was, going back to Lauren Bacall in Dark Passage, when I first spoke to Nora, I noticed that she has this way of gazing into your eyes as she's speaking to you, so intensely. She really listens, and she really is interested in what you're saying. I don't know if it's her innocence, or if it's her big eyes. [Laughs.] I don't know what it is, but it struck me that, if that happens on camera, it would be really important with us. It would allow us to be with her. If she can't look natural when she's looking into the camera, then we're dead immediately.

"She had intrigue in her eyes, and genuine interest in everything I was saying to her. I'd seen her performance in other things, and I thought the accent might be troubling, honestly, but it turned out to be charming. I know American audiences have trouble with French accents for some reason, and I wondered if that would be distracting. But she's great. She's really sexy, and her radiance really brings light into Frank's world. It's like nothing he's ever seen before."

Wood: "There's something very pure about Nora. Watching the film as an audience member for the first time, it really struck me how much she radiates off the screen. It's impossible not to incredibly charmed by her, not to, like Frank, fall in love with her. And she's acting very naturally, which really helps sell the POV aesthetic. It does feel like you're just hanging out with this really warm, sweet, personable woman, who also happens to be stunningly beautiful. It's disarming, in a way."

Rob's Score

Not Available Interstitial

Pushing Horror's Limits

Not Available Interstitial

Aside from drastically altering people's perceptions of him as an actor, Elijah Wood's performance in Maniac also represents his first official foray into full-blown horror cinema. The person to whom this makes the most sense? Wood himself, a lifelong horror film lover whose passion for the genre has led him to join forces with friends Daniel Noah and Josh C. Waller to form The Woodshed, a production company dedicated to exploring the horror market.

Wood and his colleagues already have a crop of films either in the production, development, or near-distribution stages, including a "socio-political zombie" project called Curse the Darkness, a black-and-white vampire western (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night), the documentary/narrative mash-up Toad Road (a horror film about drug use), and Cooties, a horror-comedy about zombie children written by Saw and Insidious scribe Leigh Whannell that will co-star Wood and begins shooting in July.

Wood: "The Woodshed was in the works prior to Maniac. We started it two-and-a-half years ago, in terms of getting it going and taking meetings with various people in the creative community, and gathering scripts. It's funny how, around that same time, Maniac came along. It was like I'd opened the flood gates of horror, and I loved that.


 

The idea of pushing people's perceptions of what is and isn't a horror film is interesting." - Elijah Wood

 

"I'm a huge fan of the genre. My two partners and I are really inspired by what's going outside of America, honestly. A lot of the best stuff that's happening in the horror genre is coming from Europe, Asia, and South America, so we're really inspired by those films, as well as films from the '70s and early '80s. That was really the impetus to start the company, to bring back the spirit of those films and bring the international sensibilities to American genre films. We want to expand what people consider to be a horror film, if that makes sense.

"It's funny, I remember watching the behind-the-scenes feature on the latest The Exorcist DVD release, and both [screenwriter] William Peter Blatty and [director] William Friedkin are adamant that The Exorcist. I find that fascinating. Ultimately, their perception of a horror film is some schlocky slasher film, when, in fact, The Exorcist a horror film. I think that's interesting, the idea of pushing people's perceptions of what is and isn't a horror film.

"Me not entertaining the idea of making horror movies before Maniac wasn't really a conscious thing. I just wasn't reading any horror scripts. That's definitely changed, though, because we're reading a lot of scripts for the company. And for a while, it was hard because there weren't a lot of horror scripts floating around that were satisfying to me as an actor, but that's changing. Insidious is a wonderful example of how they're starting to cast these films in really interesting ways. And, in tow, they're also writing for actors, supporting that level of creativity. That's signaling a change of the tide."

Khalfoun: "I don't even think there needs to be a difference, genre or not. It shouldn't be. Is what you have a great story? Do you believe the characters? Do you genuinely want to follow the characters? Are you on this adventure with them? How it turns, yes, then you can say that it went toward the genre and maybe got horrific. But, no matter what, the stories have to be good and compelling. Whether you're watching a genre movie or not, those are the things that count."

Latest in Pop Culture