The Fun, Gruesome, and First-Rate Scares of "You're Next" Have Been a Long Time Coming

Horror's next big thing has been genre die-hards' most anticipated movie for years now.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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People who are excited to see You're Next this weekend fall into two categories: the fresh crowd and those who've been impatiently waiting for two years now. The former group is comprised of folks who've seen those attention-grabbing commercials during shows like Breaking Bad and The Bridge, the spots with scared actors frantically trying to evade killers wearing creepy animal masks. As for the second squad, it's been a seemingly endless wait to see what some genre critics hailed as "the next Scream" way back in September 2011, when You're Next premiered as part of the Toronto International Film Festival's Midnight Madness section. Two weeks after its TIFF screening, You're Next played at the annual Austin, TX, genre blowout Fantastic Fest, receiving similarly glowing reviews.

Distinction as horror's "next big thing" seemed imminent—and then the film fell off the face of the festival circuit. Everyone who read all of its TIFF and Fantastic Fest press were left hanging, indefinitely. They wanted to see You're Next, but they were assed out.

It was all for the best, though. In the grand scheme of things for You're Next director Adam Wingard and screenwriter Simon Barrett, the two-year build-up has been a good thing. A very good thing.

The lengthy hold-up sprang from the fact that their little independently made horror flick—shot inconspicuously over the course of one month in Columbia, Missouri, in mid-2011—was purchased for distribution by the legendary genre film distributor Lionsgate Films, the company that released American Psycho (2000) before solidifying its legacy in 2004 by launching the now-iconic Saw franchise. Now that You're Next is finally being unveiled theatrically, Lionsgate's been killing it with the pre-release promotions, bombarding bus stops, subway stations, and highway billboards with the film's clever marketing strategy: Sell the hell out of those animal masks. Such enthusiastic marketing is easy for a major studio when the film in question delivers the goods, and You're Next does.

Self-aware, comedically sharp, and satisfyingly tense and gory, You're Next starts off with a familiar enough set-up. A group of wealthy, stuck-up thirty-somethings siblings (played by AJ Bowen, Joe Swanberg, Nicholas Tucci, and Amy Seimetz) gather at their Davison family mansion, along with their significant others (including The House of the Devil director Ti West), to celebrate their parents' (Rob Moran and O.G. scream queen Barbara Crampton) 35th wedding anniversary. Before dessert's served, though, a gang of masked intruders show up with a crossbow, machete, and an ax. But the killers quickly realize that Crispian Davison's (Bowen) new girlfriend, Erin (Sharni Vinson), is more than the friendly, loving woman she appears to be—she's a fighter. And she's ready to beat fools down.

The origins of You're Next are as humble as can be. Best friends for years now, filmmakers Wingard and Barrett made the film with other buddies, most of whom are either directors in their own right or had previously acted in each other's indies. No one involved with You're Next could have ever expected it to become a major motion picture, particularly one that's been this summer's most heavily marketed horror property. But this was certainly their dream scenario from the beginning. Thus, You're Next represents a rarity in Hollywood: An excellent movie made without any pretensions by average Joes that infiltrates the mainstream. That's something to celebrate.

Through a series of interviews with the film's core makers (Wingard, Barrett, Vinson, Bowen, and Swanberg), Complex uncovered the complete back-story on how You're Next went from aspirations as simple as "please play our movie at Midnight Madness" to a big-time studio release whose trailer played in front of a Brad Pitt movie.

RELATED: The 50 Scariest Movies of All Time
RELATED: 25 Directors Who Are 35 and Under You Should Know About
RELATED: The 15 Best Horror-Comedies of All Time
RELATED: How to Prevent a Home Invasion, According to the Movies

Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

The Fun, Gruesome, and First-Rate Scares of "You're Next" Have Been a Long Time Coming

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People who are excited to see You're Next this weekend fall into two categories: the fresh crowd and those who've been impatiently waiting for two years now. The former group is comprised of folks who've seen those attention-grabbing commercials during shows like Breaking Bad and The Bridge, the spots with scared actors frantically trying to evade killers wearing creepy animal masks. As for the second squad, it's been a seemingly endless wait to see what some genre critics hailed as "the next Scream" way back in September 2011, when You're Next premiered as part of the Toronto International Film Festival's Midnight Madness section. Two weeks after its TIFF screening, You're Next played at the annual Austin, TX, genre blowout Fantastic Fest, receiving similarly glowing reviews.

Distinction as horror's "next big thing" seemed imminent—and then the film fell off the face of the festival circuit. Everyone who read all of its TIFF and Fantastic Fest press were left hanging, indefinitely. They wanted to see You're Next, but they were assed out.

It was all for the best, though. In the grand scheme of things for You're Next director Adam Wingard and screenwriter Simon Barrett, the two-year build-up has been a good thing. A very good thing.

The lengthy hold-up sprang from the fact that their little independently made horror flick—shot inconspicuously over the course of one month in Columbia, Missouri, in mid-2011—was purchased for distribution by the legendary genre film distributor Lionsgate Films, the company that released American Psycho (2000) before solidifying its legacy in 2004 by launching the now-iconic Saw franchise. Now that You're Next is finally being unveiled theatrically, Lionsgate's been killing it with the pre-release promotions, bombarding bus stops, subway stations, and highway billboards with the film's clever marketing strategy: Sell the hell out of those animal masks. Such enthusiastic marketing is easy for a major studio when the film in question delivers the goods, and You're Next does.

Self-aware, comedically sharp, and satisfyingly tense and gory, You're Next starts off with a familiar enough set-up. A group of wealthy, stuck-up thirty-somethings siblings (played by AJ Bowen, Joe Swanberg, Nicholas Tucci, and Amy Seimetz) gather at their Davison family mansion, along with their significant others (including The House of the Devil director Ti West), to celebrate their parents' (Rob Moran and O.G. scream queen Barbara Crampton) 35th wedding anniversary. Before dessert's served, though, a gang of masked intruders show up with a crossbow, machete, and an ax. But the killers quickly realize that Crispian Davison's (Bowen) new girlfriend, Erin (Sharni Vinson), is more than the friendly, loving woman she appears to be—she's a fighter. And she's ready to beat fools down.

The origins of You're Next are as humble as can be. Best friends for years now, filmmakers Wingard and Barrett made the film with other buddies, most of whom are either directors in their own right or had previously acted in each other's indies. No one involved with You're Next could have ever expected it to become a major motion picture, particularly one that's been this summer's most heavily marketed horror property. But this was certainly their dream scenario from the beginning. Thus, You're Next represents a rarity in Hollywood: An excellent movie made without any pretensions by average Joes that infiltrates the mainstream. That's something to celebrate.

Through a series of interviews with the film's core makers (Wingard, Barrett, Vinson, Bowen, and Swanberg), Complex uncovered the complete back-story on how You're Next went from aspirations as simple as "please play our movie at Midnight Madness" to a big-time studio release whose trailer played in front of a Brad Pitt movie.

RELATED: The 50 Scariest Movies of All Time
RELATED: 25 Directors Who Are 35 and Under You Should Know About
RELATED: The 15 Best Horror-Comedies of All Time
RELATED: How to Prevent a Home Invasion, According to the Movies

Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

The Beginning of a Filmmaking Partnership

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There's been an exciting, somewhat punk-rock-esque movement happening within the indie horror world over the last few years, and long-time buddies Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett have been at its forefront.

Wingard, 30, hails from Alabama; Barrett, meanwhile, holds his Missouri stomping grounds dear. Together, they've made two features, A Horrible Way to Die (2010) and You're Next, as well as co-made V/H/S (2012) and its sequel, V/H/S/2 (2013). Through the latter two films, specifically, Wingard and Barett helped to curate two rosters marked by some of their equally buzz-worthy peers, including Jason Eisener (Hobo with a Shotgun), Gareth Huw Evans (The Raid: Redemption), and Timo Tjahjanto (who, like Wingard and Barrett, contributed one of the better segments to the recent The ABCs of Death omnibus).

The filmmaking tandem follows a simple model: Barrett writes what Wingard directs, and together they co-produce the finished products. Case in point: the V/H/S anthology franchise, a two-film series of found-footage horror shorts that's been a crowd favorite throughout the worldwide festival circuit since the first V/H/S premiered to standing and cheering audiences at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

Now that You're Next is bringing Wingard and Barrett into the mainstream, the opportunity for them to become household names is, as strange as it may seem to the guys themselves, is a definite possibility. Not bad for a couple of once-struggling DIY filmmakers who initially bonded over a mutual sense of outside-looking-in frustration.

Adam Wingard: The foundation is that we're both excited about the same kinds of movies. When I first met Simon, he was working on Dead Birds, in Mobile, Alabama. My friend E.L. Katz was living with me at the time, and he was writing for Fangoria. He dragged me out with him to the set of Dead Birds because that was an over-one-million-dollar production, and it was a real movie. He thought it'd be good for me to have that experience firsthand.

We went out there and I was helping him do interviews with people, and one of them was with Simon. One of the first things that Simon just threw out was he mentioned John Woo's The Killer, which, at the time, was my favorite movie. So it just started from mutual interests like that, like Hong Kong films and Italian movies and so forth.

Ultimately, we're both really cynical people who have cynical outlooks on humanity. Those world views combined in a good way, and we were able to, through the years, realize that we should try working on something together.

Simon Barrett: I think the number one thing that unites Adam and me is that we prioritize our work over everything else, and no matter what, we try to push ourselves to do things that are original, things we haven't seen before, and things that are out of our comfort zone.

We want to grow as artists; we don't want to stagnate and get complacent, because then we'll make dull movies. We always want to make movies that people enjoy but are also something new and artistically valid, even if you're just trying to make something that's super fun, like You're Next.

We both have that unique sensibility of trying to apply something artistic, or that indie sense, but the films we wanted to make weren't the films that people like Joe [Swanberg] or Amy [Seimetz] or Ti [West] wanted to make, even though they're our friends and our filmmaking peers. We had a different attitude.

The main thing, though, that Adam and I initially bonded over was how our careers were stagnating outside of the Hollywood system, and the way that our representation was able to do absolutely nothing for us. We were taking meetings with idiots that we hated on projects that we ourselves wouldn't want to watch. We realized that that wasn't why were started making films, that wasn't why we decided to take the gamble, both of us coming from no money and areas outside of Hollywood. I come from Missouri and Adam's from Alabama—we didn't come from connected families. So it's a gamble doing what we do, and we didn't take it to pitch direct-to-video sequels to movies that we hated in the first place, and those were unfortunately the meetings we were having and not getting hired for.

We had this attitude where we knew we had to do it ourselves. We had a body work behind us, with me writing Dead Birds and Frankenfish, which, for better or for worse, had beginnings, middles, and ends. [Laughs.] And Adam had done the movie Pop Skull (2007), which played at a lot of festivals and got him a bunch of acclaim. We were in a position where we could say to people, and this is what we said to Zak Zeman, the financier of A Horrible Way to Die: "Give us, like, $80,000 and we promise we will have a movie. We can't promise anything more than that, but we will definitely have a movie. At the end of the day, it'll be a film."

Leaving A Horrible Way to Die's Bleakness Behind

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For their first collaboration, Wingard and Barrett dabbled in serial killer cinema with A Horrible Way to Die. Somber, visceral, and, for the most part, inaccessible for anyone outside of art-houses and the Fangoria readership, it's a polarizing look at a traumatized woman (Amy Seimetz) trying to navigate a relationship with a new, well-meaning guy (Joe Swanberg) while also still getting over the fact that her ex (AJ Bowen) is a homicidal maniac—and he's just escaped from lock-up.

It's not the exactly a feel-good date movie. As proud as the filmmakers and cast of A Horrible Way to Die are of their film, the crowd and critical reactions to it taught them a valuable lesson: Sometimes, it's OK to make a movie that doesn't leave people feeling bad about life. After all, watching people get hog-tied and carved into pieces isn't "fun." Well, unless you're a sick son of a bitch. Which is a whole other issue entirely.

Barrett: Funny enough, Adam and I originally wanted to do a film that was even more of a downer than A Horrible Way to Die. [Laughs.] We wanted to do a film about a guy who murders a bunch of people as a child, who's involved in one of these school shootings, and gets released from juvenile prison when he turns 18, and it's about him going to community college and people finding out who he is, and the drama inherent in that. You'll notice that, A, I've just described a film that sounds even less enjoyable than A Horrible Way to Die, and, B, I've just described the Andrew Garfield-starring vehicle Boy A, which came out right around the time I started the screenplay. We went to see it at the Nuart [Theatre] in Los Angeles and immediately were like, "Well, fuck." [Laughs.] So then we regrouped.

We were trying to think of something we could shoot for under $100,000, and in my hometown of Columbia, Missouri, where I knew I could get a lot of resources for free. Adam started talking about how serial killer films tended to do really well in the video market, but I don't like those films, in general. A lot of them are just pointlessly nihilistic, and, also, between two David Fincher films, Se7en and Zodiac, it's kind of hard to tell a story that way—David Fincher nailed it in both directions you can go with that storyline. But as it turned out, that's the template for how we work: Adam comes up with a cool idea; I mull over everything I don't like about that kind of film; and then we discuss new ways to tell that story.

With A Horrible Way to Die, Adam started talking about how Ted Bundy had all of these relationships with people who had no idea that he was a serial killer. That fascinated me. What if you were one of these people who dated a serial killer? Or what if your child was a serial killer? That second question was ultimately covered in the great film We Need to Talk About Kevin, so I'm glad we went with the first question. If you dated and loved a man who turned out to be a serial killer, how could you ever trust any of your decisions again? That dramatic hook, which I'd never seen explored before, ultimately became A Horrible Way to Die. We ended up doing a lot of experimental things to tell that story. Some people like that film, but I think audiences were baffled by it.

AJ Bowen: I'm less of an apologist for A Horrible Way to Die, because it's possibly my favorite movie that I've ever been in. As an actor, I'm not ever looking to satisfy anybody's feeling other than my own, and I feel fulfilled by that one. That's not to say that it's not a bummer to play a serial killer for one month of your life and choke female college students. That gets a bit depressing after a while.

I think Adam and Simon's view of that movie comes from their experience at Toronto. While showing that film there, they saw James Wan at his Insidious premiere, saw how much fun he was having premiering a movie that the audience was enthusiastically and loudly loving. They wanted to see what it was like to make something that'd entertain people, rather than just make them feel sad. That was the plan with You're Next. It was designed to be a Midnight Madness movie.

Barrett: We learned a lesson from A Horrible Way to Die, which was, OK, we don't want to do that again. The next time we make a movie, let's make one that people can enjoy and have fun with, because ultimately that's why we got in this business. We want to make serious films that affect people, but we also want to make films that are fun. We don't want to just preach to the indie film/film festival choir.

I have a lot of friends who make documentaries, and a lot of the time they get frustrated because the documentary might have a message, but the only people who are going to see the film are the people who already agree with that message—in other words, what's the point? I see a lot of documentaries, and I like them, and I'd maybe one day like to make one. I think right now what appeals to us is not just preaching to the choir, but getting our films in front of wide audiences who might not otherwise thought to seek them out.

Bowen: I had to learn the value in making a movie for wider audiences. I'm sure I sound like a pretentious asshole artist right now, who's all like, "Well, art isn't about fun!" But I had to learn to appreciate that it's OK. I can't tell you how many friends of mine who like my other movies have come up to me after seeing You're Next and said, "Man, you finally made a movie it's cool for me to like." [Laughs.]

Mission: Midnight Madness

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The realization that making movies like A Horrible Way to Die wasn't about to earn them widespread fandom anytime soon didn't hit Wingard and Barrett until September 2010. They were at the Toronto International Film Festival, attending screenings for A Horrible Way to Die, when their own fan sides took over and prompted them to check out films premiering in TIFF's crowd-favorite Midnight Madness lineup. Known for its delicately chosen and always bonkers selection of horror, action, and dark comedy, Midnight Madness is any self-respecting genre filmmaker's dream screening platform.

That year, in particular, Wingard and Barrett found themselves at the Midnight Madness premiere of Insidious, which sent the Ryerson Theatre's audience into loud, energetic applause and hysterics. It was then that the A Horrible Way to Die fellas knew what needed to be done next: They had to make a Midnight Madness movie. Thus, You're Next was born.

Wingard: Midnight Madness is a very exciting platform for movies, in general. It's a very exclusive club, Colin [Geddes, the programmer] is a tastemaker, so people know that when they go to see movies at Midnight Madness, and they're immediately excited about it. There's a comfort level going into it because they know that these are the chosen 10 movies for that year. For a genre fan, that's where you want to end up in the indie world.

When we saw the Insidious premiere at Midnight Madness, we loved the whole experience. Insidious had the perfect debut, too, where it premiered at Midnight Madness and got immediately bought up by a big distributor. That was a good template for us. You not only want that big distribution deal, you also want that same kind of enthusiastic feedback from the audience, that exciting thing you get at Midnight Madness that you don't necessarily get anywhere else. And the Midnight Madness audience will turn on you, too, so it's not just a given that people are going to go in there ready to love your film.

Barrett: A Horrible Way to Die played at a lot of genre film festivals, and because of that we saw a ton of horror movies that year. It felt like horror was in a bit of a rut. It felt like the genres that were founded by The Blair Witch Project and Saw were just being emulated, and to a lesser extent, Scream from back in 1996. Horror movies were still doing the same kinds of things, and we were thinking, How do we do something new?

Wingard: We came into You're Next with a lot of ambition. Whenever we start a project, Simon and I try to think, what's the best-case scenario with this film? With A Horrible Way to Die, the best case for us was, can we even make a movie for this cheap and actually get it distributed? [Laughs.] That movie did well on the level that we were at, so that was very encouraging. So the next step was to do a mainstream film.

That was our question going into You're Next: Can we make a movie for your regular audience members who maybe aren't hardcore horror fans or people who watch indie movies?

Barrett: You're Next is very low-budget indie film, but it was very much designed for a studio like Lionsgate. Lionsgate was the studio we hoped would acquire it, because they're known for doing horror.

When we first met with Lionsgate at the Toronto Film Festival, they brought their marketing wizard, Tim Palin—he's always been a kind of personal hero for us. He's very well-known in the industry; he photographed a lot of the art for a lot of the iconic posters for Lionsgate movies like Saw. They sat him down in a room with us, and he had the marketing plan that you see today all in his head. That's what made us go with Lionsgate. And they've exceeded their promises.

Reinventing Home Invasions

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The primary objective was clear: Make a horror movie that all kinds of people will want to see and, theoretically, will have a blast watching. But what type of horror movie exactly? Having seen their fair share of home invasion flicks recently, Wingard and Barrett honed in on a set-up reminiscent of The Strangers, but one that would abandon all of the tired cliches and tropes so often seen in movies about masked intruders torturing scared, helpless homeowners.

There are only so many ways a bad guy can tie someone to a chair.

Wingard: Scream was one of the main starting points for me. I was editing A Horrible Way to Die, and in my downtime I was watching a bunch of movies on Netflix. Within the first 10 minutes, all the enthusiasm and excitement I had for the film watching it as a teenager just came back to me. I loved how mysterious and creepy the opening scene was, and also funny and iconic. On top of that, I'd just come off of a binge of other home invasion movies I was liking, so it all clicked right there.


 

A lot of horror movies set up characters the filmmakers obviously didn't care about and then fetishized violent or painful acts against those characters. That's a pointless and sadistic thing to do as a filmmaker. - Simon Barrett

 

I told Simon that I was interested in doing a home invasion movie. Strangely, initially, before we started talking about doing a mainstream film, we were really into the idea of doing our own little anthologies, and this was before the whole V/H/S thing came about. We originally conceived of doing a home invasion anthology film that we were going to do for a very low budget, and we got to the point where we had all of these ideas. Somehow, looking at all these ideas, we realized that it'd be better to pick one idea and make a movie about that. The whole process of coming up with and making You're Next came from a lot of different influences and goals.

Barrett: The Strangers is a great film and the French film Inside is a masterpiece, but all of these home invasion movies are pretty much doing the same exact things that Michael Haneke was making fun of back in 1997, with Funny Games. It was still the random killers with highly stylized costumes killing these well-off, complacent people for no reason, and playing off this kind of homeowner anxiety. But I don't have that homeowner anxiety, because I can't afford a home. And I don't have kids, and I'm not married, so that stuff doesn't scare me—I just enjoy it. Adam lived out in the country a bit more and did find those movies a bit scarier than I did, so it was us uniting our sensibilities a bit and asking ourselves, "What would scare both of us? What excites us about these kinds of films?"

I was having a conversation with Colin Geddes, who's a friend and just a really knowledgeable guy about films. And he was complaining about having to watch hundreds of films per year in the sub-genre that he described as "people tied to chairs." And that became the mission statement for us: How do you do a home invasion where no one's tied to a chair, no one's tortured?

"Even if you watch recent home invasion movies like The Purge, people are tied to chairs for a good portion of the movie. There are movies where people are tied to chairs for the duration. How do we take the threats of sexual violence and violence to children that make these movies so exhausting off the table completely? Because I don't feel like I have anything to say about those things, and, furthermore, I feel like a lot of it has already been said.

That stuff isn't fun to me. Adam pointed out to me that the post-Saw wave of horror movies got labeled in the media as "torture porn," which is a term that I have some issues with. It's a hard term to argue in favor of; it's the kind of thing that immediately negates any intelligent conversation about the subject, because who's going to use that term in a favorable way? But a lot of those movies were incredibly bad, and did earn that label in the way that they'd set up characters the filmmakers obviously didn't care about and then fetishized violent or painful acts against those characters. I think that's a pointless and sadistic thing to do as a filmmaker, even though our films are obviously very violent and brutal. [Laughs.] We take our characters seriously, though, and we try to respect our audience in that regard.

Finding the Right Ass-Kicking Woman

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Casting the majority of You're Next's roles was easy enough for Wingard and Barrett. Rather than casting a wide net for actor-strangers, which wouldn't have jived with the film's budget, they kept things all in the family, calling a bunch of old friends and frequent collaborators, including A Horrible Way to Die cast members AJ Bowen, Joe Swanberg, and Amy Seimetz, along with fellow indie directors Ti West and Calvin Lee Reader.

But those were all for the film's supporting players. To find their You're Next heroine, who'd need to not only act well but also be able to kick copious amounts of ass, Wingard and Barrett held tons of auditions with young, eager actresses. Their final decision: Give the role of "Erin" to the Aussie star of Step Up 3D. Seriously.

Don't laugh—the choice was perfect. In breakout starlet Sharni Vinson, Wingard and Barrett found the horror genre's next great "final girl," not to mention its most physically unfuckwitable hero in decades, and, finally, a woman who can hold her own without showing any skin or needing the camera to ogle her curves.

Wingard: It was hard to find somebody who wasn't trying to force that character out of themselves. To me, it was very important that we not find an actress who was trying to play that character, but find somebody who more or less had that character inside of them already, as a majority of their personality. Sharni was definitely that.

Sharni Vinson: I remember being contacted by a friend of mine who's a stuntman. He was living with one of the producers at the time, and they were trying to cast this role. They were looking for a tough kind of action-minded girl who could easily take on this role, but they'd been struggling for some time. They'd actually started to go the stuntwoman route. They asked my friend if he had any stuntwomen friends who'd be able to step into this acting role and tackle this character. What he said was, "I don't actually have any stuntwomen friends who can act, but what I do have is an actress friend who wants to be a stuntwoman. Maybe you could meet her."


 

It's hard to take [a female] character seriously when you're fetishizing her and putting her out there as pure aesthetic. - Adam Wingard

 

I've always had a passion for physical roles and action, so that's how I came into the audition at first. Then I read the script and loved the role of Erin. I hoped that I'd be the one who'd get the opportunity to bring this character to life, because I really understood, I think, what Simon Barrett had been after, in establishing the character as this kind of likable girl-next-door who can also handle herself when the situation arises, but it needs that stand-up-and-cheer aspect as well. You have to get behind the character. There are so many elements; she's not a one-dimensional character. You have to find that balance."

Wingard: I was very nervous, actually, going into the film knowing that we had a strong female heroine, at least the type of strong female heroine that Simon had written, one who was very physical. I feel like that's one of those things that only happens once a decade in movies. It's hard to force that kind of thing. A lot of people don't get it. I think they cast more with their eyes than they do with anything else.

A prime example to me is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake. I think Jessica Biel is a good actress, she's great in The Rules of Attraction, but they just went completely all wrong with her character in that film. She's supposed to be this badass, very similar, in some ways, to the type of character of Erin in our film—she's a badass girl with a background that allows her to roll with the punches and survive this encounter. But that movie completely goes about it all wrong because they're just totally sexualizing her every chance they get. They've got her in the lowest-slung jeans I've ever seen, they're constantly shooting up her ass. Her breasts are pushed up by this midriff-exposing shirt. It's hard to take the character seriously when you're fetishizing her and putting her out there as pure aesthetic.

Vinson: We had to take out all of the cliches. In order for a character to be believably tough, she can't pose tough. We had to take out all of the proto-feminine aspects of what that'd mean. You don't need to show skin. You don't need to do all of these A, B, C things by the rulebook of horror movies when it comes to portraying female characters. We were trying to break all the boundaries with that, and let this girl be liked, be believable, and just be, basically. It's unusual that you see a character like Erin, in a movie like this, doing the things she's doing in it.

Wingard: That's something that I knew we couldn't do with You're Next, with, obviously, the way we dress the character, but we also needed to find somebody who wouldn't force it or look like a fashion model playing tough. Sharni is, of course, a beautiful woman, but there's a toughness to her that's effortless.

Barrett: "t was important to us that the protagonist is a woman, because that's something movies do wrong a lot. The concept of the "final girl" is really ridiculous, because Adam's pointed out that, a lot of times, the girl who survives these movies seems to randomly survive them—it's not like she has any special skills that would allow her to survive, or that she's all that intelligent. It's just that she's kind of less fun than her friends, or less sexual. I don't see how that is empowering on any level. So in addition to wondering how we would tell this story in a new way, we were also trying to figure out how we could approach this character in a new way. A lot of male filmmakers really fetishize these female protagonists, and that undermines the strength of the character in a lot of complicated ways.

One thing that was interesting about working with Sharni is that Sharni doesn't like to do a lot of improvisation. She was occasionally having a hard time rolling with the rest of our cast. Every morning while she was in makeup, I'd go sit with her and we'd look over the day's scenes to discuss any changes she thought the dialogue needed. And almost always it'd end up being that we'd cut her lines, because she figured out that character more than I think I did, and how that character is tough and real.

Originally, that character wasn't written as Australian, but when Sharni auditioned for us, she auditioned in an American accent, but we just liked her so much. The thing about the character of Erin, and the thing I don't like about most female protagonists in modern horror movies, is that most of them just try to act tough. Adam's said that he finds that posturing really authentic and it takes him out of the movie, which I completely agree with. People who are actually tough in the real world don't go around telling you about how tough they are—they just are tough. They're generally nice people. If you know anyone's who's ex-military or anything like that, they don't go around flexing and being a jerk to everyone. They're just kind of quiet, but they're also aware that they could kill everyone in the room if they needed to.

That was what we wanted to write for our female character. We wanted her to be almost embarrassed by how tough she is; she just wants to fit in. Sharni actually is a tough person. She danced for two weeks with a broken ankle during the making of Step Up 3D. She broke two fingers doing that movie Bait. We're actually the first movie that Sharni's done where she didn't break a bone, which was, frankly, pretty amazing, considering some of the stuff she was doing under pretty exhausting circumstances, shooting six-day weeks and nights for a month.

Vinson: Nothing was broken, but there were plenty of bruises, some proper swelling of the knees, and things like that. I got a seven-inch stiletto knocked into the corner of my eye at one point. We had some blood; I thought I was going to be rushed off the hospital in the middle of Columbia, Missouri, but luckily it didn't turn that black. [Laughs.] We didn't have to do any close-ups for a couple of days. Even though there were no broken bones on this one, there were still some injuries, which I'm quite proud of—you can't go through an action movie without just going for it, and that sometimes means that. That's good—it means my work is done.


 

You can't go through an action movie without just going for it, and that sometimes means [breaking bones]. That's good—it means my work is done. - Sharni Vinson

 

The physicality part of this role was something I had already, from 20 years of dancing, physical training, martial arts, and boxing. So that part was OK, but the challenge was actually the character's mentality. I didn't grow up on a survivalist's compound. I don't have those skills and that training, and the people who do come from that environment have a very specific skill set that's more reactionary and instinctual than anything else. It's almost a kind of sixth sense, where you would be the first to hear a glass break.

Your reaction time is the key, so a lot of my training involved me working on that reaction time. I'd stand against a wall in a gym and my trainer would throw random objects at me, and I'd have to get out of the way really quickly. Just having a sixth sense with it. That was the challenge. I wanted to get into Erin's brain. Once she started fighting back, that was the easy part for me, but it was more about figuring out the "why" of it. We really tackled her brain more than anything else, which was really cool.

Bowen: She busted her ass. Whenever she wasn't shooting, she was working with our stunt coordinator, Clayton Barber, who coordinated the last two Bourne movies, so he was really working her. The only thing she didn't get to do in the movie was jump out of that window, and she was pissed. [Laughs.] It was three floors up, and we were trying to explain to her the concept of insuring actors. We were all like, "Sharni, we can't let you jump out of that window and have something break and have your shit look weird. We still have to shoot."

A Heroine to Cheer For

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Self-Aware Humor Without Any Winks

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Considering that Scream was one of You're Next's primary influences, in terms of tone, it's no surprise that Adam Wingard's movie is funny. Like, really funny, especially if you're a horror movie watcher who can spot Barrett's script's nifty subversions of classic slasher and home invasion movie fuckery.

When writing You're Next, though, Barrett didn't want to alienate casual horror fans or people whose scary flick expertise hardly stretches beyond Gore Verbinski's remake of The Ring and that Friday the 13th reboot starring that dude from the CW's Supernatural. The humor needed to be broad, yet also be intelligent enough to impress those who've seen it all before in horror.

There's one scene, specifically, that could make or break You're Next in this regard. It comes shortly after the intruders' first attack, when the terrified family members are trying figure out how to evade danger and get help. The lone daughter, Aimee (Amy Seimetz), volunteers to try one of the dumbest ideas ever: She'll run full-speed out the front door, so that the killers outside will be so caught off guard that she'll triumphantly get away.

Barrett: That divides audiences. I've seen people on message boards who don't get that we're joking with that scene. And I'll also point out, and I don't want to give a lot away here, that scene makes a little more sense once you watch the entire film. We're lucky now that, since the movie has screened a bunch of times, we're talking to people who've seen the movie more than once. When you actually watch the scene, the people who are guiding her to that moment might have more complicated motives than it initially seems. That's part of the fun of You're Next: planting ideas like that.


 

If we did our job, we allowed the situation to be where the humor lies. That way, the self-referential nature of some of it would be more a reflection of the audience watching the film. - AJ Bowen

 

The biggest thing I have to keep in mind when I'm writing scenes like that is, I don't want to make the film to get too inside baseball. You want to have both audiences, the ones who love and understand all of horror's tropes and who can appreciate when filmmakers play with them, but also the more casual audiences who just want to be entertained. I want to make a movie that people like me, who see every horror film and attend every horror film festival, will appreciate—people who are really savvy about the genre and are desperate for something new.

Bowen: It wasn't until we were on set, in that house, that the tone of the movie started to reveal itself. I'm not sure that it read funny on the page, but once we were in there and saw the way that we were dressed, the humor became obvious. I remember going up to Simon and saying, "I feel like I need to play this like it's Clue. I feel like I need to play up the comedy of it, because it's all pretty absurd."

I'm too close to it to say that we pulled it off, but if we did our job, we allowed the situation to be where the humor lies. That way, the self-referential nature of some of it would be more a reflection of the audience watching the film. I have a bunch of nephews and nieces now, and when I read them Dr. Suess, I'm aware of the subtext and satire, even if they're not—they're just enjoying the story for what it is on the page. When you're approaching something that's a bit broader and more mainstream, you come at it from a place of something that will satisfy someone who knows nothing about these movies.

I didn't want to ever wink at the camera. A good reference for this is Shaun of the Dead. There's that moment where they find the other crew of people, and it's the perfect example of what I'm talking about here. They walk past the other group of people who are dressed similarly and look the same, but you never see any of the characters acknowledge that their doppelgänger just walked by them. There's no destruction of the movie's reality in that moment. If the characters violate that reality, then it turns into a Scary Movie parody. I know that none of us wanted You're Next to be anything like that.

Barrett: The key to that is, you can't preach to the audience. You can't slow down the plot in any ways in order to point out the references or whatever meta shit you're trying to emphasize. It all has to be organic, and flow naturally. The funny thing about that scene with Amy Seimetz is, I've seen that scene play with festival audiences at places like Toronto and Fantastic Fest, where audiences are super savvy to the genre, and I've seen it play with test audiences in Orange County, of people who are pulled off the street and show up wearing Ed Hardy caps. We give the movie ridiculous titles whenever it's test-screened, so those people in Ed Hardy caps show up thinking they're about to see a movie called something like Bloody Reunion. And both audiences love that moment. One audience might get it, and the other audience might just think we're being silly, but both love it.

That was the moment where we realized that maybe we were successful with You're Next, when we watched it with test audiences in California and we realized that they were having a good time with that scene, even if they didn't get the subtext that's going on with it.

The Perfect Soundtrack to a Home Invasion

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The You're Next Family

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Back in September 2011, when You're Next premiered to overwhelmingly positive reviews at TIFF, the film transformed from a little indie horror flick made by a bunch of friends to the most anticipated movie amongst all genre die-hards, the fans who obsess over film festival reviews. And once news spread that Lionsgate Films had secured the distribution rights, the excitement levels ballooned enormously.

Unfortunately, closed-door mergers and business practices sidelined You're Next for nearly two years. Those ravenous horror fans who were so eager to see it after the TIFF and Fantastic Fest screenings? They were left wondering if they'd ever even get the chance to see the damn thing.

Bowen: Being in the indie crew that I've been a part of for the majority of my career, and when you live in the festival circuit, you become friends with people who write about movies. On the no-budget model, you're fortunate enough to play it in a festival somewhere and usually there's a 90-day turnaround where you talk a lot about the movie, it comes out in a minimal release, and that's that. My first movie, though, The Signal, took a year-and-a-half to come out, and that was before VOD, so my first experience was very similar to what's happened with You're Next. The only difference being that nobody ended up seeing The Signal. [Laughs.]

When Lionsgate bought You're Next, I'd already heard rumblings that Lionsgate and Summit were going to merge. It figures that they would right after they bought our movie, though. [Laughs.] What that did was, it created a slate of 15 films—14 other films and then ours—that were already at some point in the development process of release. So I knew that they planned on releasing You're Next wide, and how that would take more time.

The only part that was weird for me was a lot of those people I'd become friends with in the indie world and festival circuit hearing that the film was in turnaround and thinking something was wrong. I'd try to explain to them for a solid year, "No, that's just how it goes." This is the same studio that has to get The Hunger Games out. They lease theater spaces a year in advance, to make sure they have enough theater spaces ready to screen their movies, so us being the newest and lowest-budgeted acquisition, I knew it was going to take a little bit of time.

Vinson: The anticipation of waiting for the movie's release has been nerve-wracking beyond what you can imagine. [Laughs.]

Bowen: It was hard to convince people to believe me that we were going to come out. [Laughs.] But when they finally announced the film's release date, August 23rd, which was around a year ago, I thought, OK, I get it. I grew up watching horror films, so I knew enough about the business to understand it was good that they decided to put it out in the summer and not, say, February. For the past year, I've been watching them slowly build out the campaign for it. It's taken as long as it was supposed to take, I think.

For me, it's been sort of this absurd out-of-body experience to see the amount of promotion and marketing that goes into something that's released by a major studio. I could probably make 15 movies for the amount of money it costs to promote one in the studio system. And it's also strange to start talking about You're Next again after we finished making it over two years ago. I've made five films since You're Next, and we're all really different people than we were back then. But I'm used to making movies that people either don't like or are bummed out after watching because it made them depressed, because of the content. [Laughs.] It's weird to be in a movie that people are getting visceral entertainment out of, which is new, and it's nice. I was never sure I'd ever be in something like that.

Vinson: When we were shooting this movie, it was day three of shooting when I realized we had something special. I went into it with absolutely no expectations. It was a low-budget horror movie, and you never know what's going to happen, so you go in with no expectations. Everybody did their jobs to the best of their abilities. Very early on, it was evident on set that Adam Wingard was doing a film that was like no other film. He was going out of the boundaries, and he's a very artistic director, so there were moments he was capturing that were so stunning, and sequences he was staging that were so suspenseful.

It was at that point where I thought, Wow, this is going to be a true groundbreaking horror movie. I saw that early on. And then to see the film get screened at these festivals and to see those reviews, but then to have to wait for two years before the whole world can see the film, it's been a process, to say the least—a very surreal process, actually. The thing is, though, it makes the fact that we're finally here so much more rewarding. The whole process has been something special, from the script stage, to production, to getting into a festival, to getting picked up by Lionsgate, to then having to wait two years for the release, and it finally being here.

It's not often that you get to bring out a movie where you've developed this family for over two years before the movie's even released. And now, we're like the You're Next family, if you will.

Indie Kids in the Mainstream

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It's been a long, anticipation-laden two years for Adam Wingard, Simon Barrett, and the You're Next cast and crew members to get to the film's nationwide theatrical release.

Just how long? Well, for starters, Wingard and Barrett have been key figures in three horror anthologies (V/H/S, The ABCs of Death, V/H/S/2) that have all been made in the downtime between You're Next's TIFF premiere and now; co-star AJ Bowen has acted in five movies during that interim, while Ti West has directed two films (last year's The Innkeepers and the forthcoming The Sacrament), Joe Swanberg has made two of his own (Drinking Buddies and the recent Fantasia Film Festival-premiering 24 Exposures), and Amy Seimetz's directorial debut, Sun Don't Shine, was unveiled at last year's SXSW Film Festival and opened in limited release earlier this year.

If not for the fact that Wingard and Barrett are currently working on their next feature, The Guest, they'd be quaking with nervousness and anxiety over this weekend's official You're Next opening—OK, so they're no doubt doing that regardless. But keeping busy has made it tough for the film's makers to lose nightly sleep hours out of pre-release paranoia.

Besides, all they can do now is hope that movie fans give their little indie flick a shot. And smile more while watching a horror movie than they've done in a long time.

Barrett: "We didn't schedule The Guest intentionally this way. It's a film we've been planning to make for well over a year, but I almost feel like it can't be a coincidence that we all decided to immerse ourselves in a new film at this time, so we wouldn't be able to obsess over You're Next the whole time. [Laughs.] Because if we weren't totally exhausted making another hugely ambitious film, I think we would be spending six hours a day checking You're Next marketing and tracking reports. It would be very stressful, trying to figure out if people are actually going to see this film and enjoy it. But so far it's going great."

Bowen: "I live in Los Angeles, and there are billboards and posters for You're Next literally everywhere I turn and look. We're aided a bit by those animal masks, and the fact that the marketing has been focused on those masks. None of the posters or billboards have any one actor's identity on them, so I can look at it from a slightly detached place. But then again, I have been getting calls and texts from people telling me they saw the TV spots during Breaking Bad and the trailer before World War Z, which is really strange to me because it's a Brad Pitt movie that everybody went to see."

Joe Swanberg: "It’s crazy, because I am doing press for Drinking Buddies right now I have had the experience of being out in L.A. and there are billboards for You’re Next everywhere! It felt like I couldn’t turn a corner without seeing a billboard for You’re Next. And to think about being on set actually shooting the movie which is a very small movie where we were just working with our friends to now this like massive Lionsgate promotional campaign is really mind-blowing."

"But the thing is, I love the movie. I think that they did an amazing job with it and it is a really fun movie, and a really scary movie. It's inspiring to think that you can transcend the budget and that, with a distributor that really believes in the project, you can potentially reach a huge audience."

Barrett: "It's been weird, though, because so far we've only experienced Lionsgate's marketing from afar, because we're in Moriarty, New Mexico, working on The Guest, where the population is 1,800. If we go to Albuquerque, we can go to the multiplex and see the You're Next posters. We'll just be watching Adult Swim or The Bridge in our hotel rooms, see the You're Next commercials, and start texting each other, all excited, telling each other which channel to go to. It's funny, though—I think, to prevent ourselves from getting too stressed out about our first film with this sizable of a release, we've decided to just make another movie. And when you're making a movie, you really can't think about anything else."

Bowen: "At the end of the day, my brain is so hard-wired to not live in the world of possibility that I assume it will come and go like a fart in the night. But if it doesn't, then it will do a whole lot for Sharni, Simon, and Adam. I'm trying to be philosophical about it—it's been a strange thing to process. It'd be tougher if this was my first movie, because I wouldn't know how it works, but being 35 years old now, I'm aware of how different this is than the other times."


 

It was inspiring for me to see Adam and Simon take those risks and move to that budget level, which is tiny in the grand scheme of things, but compared to what we had been doing, it felt like a really big movie. - Joe Swanberg

 

Swanberg: "It was inspiring for me to do You're Next. It was inspiring for me to see Adam and Simon take those risks and move to that budget level, which is tiny in the grand scheme of things, but compared to what we had been doing, it felt like a really big movie."

"They took that opportunity and did something with it, and didn't take that opportunity to sort of be punk rock and take it lightly and say, 'Who gives a shit?' They really took that opportunity to make the best movie they can make and the most accessible movie they can make. But it was also very personal and really affected how I thought about Drinking Buddies, and how I approached having a similar opportunity."

Wingard: "Strangely, for me, at least, it hasn't been that different from our past experiences. We actually started with You're Next the same way we started our other films, in terms of how we got the financing and how we made it totally independently. And we got the distribution at the film festivals and then went touring with it. The only difference is that we've been touring with You're Next for two years while we've been trying to get financing together for other things. Only in the last month or so, with it having started with its TV spots and billboards all over the place, it's started to feel different, with the size of its release. But we're still doing the same things: We're still going to film festivals, we're still getting so drunk that we shouldn't be doing the interviews the next mornings." [Laughs.]

"Fortunately, Simon and I have been working on this new film, so we haven't been able to get caught up with all of the advertising and what-not. If we were in Los Angeles right now, I'd imagine that it would be incredibly nerve-wracking at this point. Now we're able to focus on what we're doing. You're Nextis going to come out and do what it's supposed to regardless."

"But, yeah, it's cool to see all of us on TV, in commercials, and realize that we've hit the mainstream finally. It's one of those things where I think we're going to have to get used to it. The whole indie world that we came from is just going to keep getting bigger and bigger, and those are going to be the mainstream names. Theoretically, this should be more of a commonplace thing soon enough. I hope that You're Next is able to open those doors."

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