INTERVIEW: ‘First Word on Horror’ features literary greats of the genre
Photo: First Word on Horror focuses on five horror authors, including Mariana Enriquez. Photo courtesy of First Word on Horror / Provided by EG PR with permission.
Filmmaker Philip Gelatt loves all that the horror genre has to offer, but he’s especially enamored of an oft-forgotten segment of the world of scares: the literature of things that go bump in the night. So much oxygen is taken up by horror films, both new and classic, that not many genre fans actually pick up a horror book and find a connection with the written word. Gelatt is hoping to change that with his new documentary series, First Word on Horror, which features interviews with five greats in the literary genre. The first set of episodes focuses on Paul Tremblay, Elizabeth Hand, Mariana Enriquez, Stephen Graham Jones and Laird Barron.
“Creatively, I’ve always loved writers in general and horror writers specifically,” Gelatt said about the origins of the project, which will debut Friday, Feb. 7, with the Jones episode. “I’m good friends, at this point, with a number of writers who are in this series, but this series really started with one of them, Laird Barron.”
Gelatt was interested in telling the life story of his friend, whose novels include The Light Is the Darkness, The Croning and Blood Standard, among others. The author had a fascinating upbringing in rural Alaska in the 1970s, with memories of dog-sled racing and living remotely in the wilderness.
“Then a couple of years ago, he got very sick and almost died,” Gelatt said about his friend. “He recovered from the illness, at which point I popped my head up and was like, ‘Oh, I need to do an interview with you about your life and your work just in case you die. Somebody has to do it, and I would like it to be me.’ So I did this interview with Laird and also had him read one of his stories, and then intercut them in the way that the series works, not really knowing what I was going to do with it.”
Gelatt added: “I was like, ‘Oh, maybe it’s a short film. Maybe it’s a feature. I don’t know what it is.’ But the producer I worked with on that said, wisely, ‘There’s something interesting here creatively. Why don’t we do more interviews with other horror writers and replicate this and see if we can turn it into something?’ That really began the journey of the series.”
After Barron, Gelatt went around to a few other authors whom he respected. He was trying to gather as many different life experiences and literary perspectives as he could get, showcasing the horror genre as a diverse one. Now, with five authors’ stories under his belt, he’s ready to release the documentaries on Substack, with a new tale every few weeks.
“In terms of releasing it, there was some thought at the beginning about, ‘Oh, maybe we’ll try to sell it to a streamer, or maybe we’ll turn it into a feature and take it to festivals,'” he said. “We’re doing it on our own. Why don’t we maintain control of it? Why don’t we experiment with different ways of releasing it that would allow us to maintain the level of creative control that we currently have? And that’s what really led us to this Substack idea. Let’s try this. We’re in control of it.”
After the talk with Barron, Jones was up next. He’s the author of The Only Good Indians, My Heart Is a Chainsaw and I Was a Teenage Slasher, among others.
“Stephen was chosen for a number of reasons,” Gelatt said. “Some of them relate to his biography. Some of them relate to his skill as a writer, and some of them are honestly because we already knew him. So it was an easy ask. That same sort of logic applied to the whole picture. We weren’t just picking because of convenience. We were picking because of uniqueness of biography. We wanted to get voices from a diverse community and people from many different backgrounds to sort of pick at the different ways they think about horror. That’s sort of how it happened.”
The director added: “And honestly we kept it at five authors. I would have loved to have done more, but we thought, ‘OK, we’ve got these five. Let’s release them. Let’s see if there’s an appetite for this, and if there is, then there’s probably countless other authors that I would love to talk to if we’re going to do more.'”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
First Word on Horror, directed by Philip Gelatt, premieres on Substack Friday, Feb. 7, with an episode on Stephen Graham Jones. Other episodes focus on Paul Tremblay (Feb. 21), Elizabeth Hand (March 14), Laird Barron (April 4) and Mariana Enriquez (April 24). Click here for more information.
