Director Jon Garcia Interviews ‘The Blair Witch Project’ Producer Gregg Hale
Cryptid horror movies are a favorite of mine because I adore cryptids. From Bigfoot and Mothman to the Loveland Frogman, these legends are perfect vessels for creature features. Director Jon Garcia tapped into that with his new Bigfoot horror film Summoning The Spirit, a new take on Sasquatch himself.
In honor of the film’s release, Garcia sat down with producer Gregg Hale, who also famously produced The Blair Witch Project, about how they got into filmmaking, creating their own legendary monsters, and what it means to be an indie horror filmmaker.
Jon Garcia: So I know I know more about the myth of the Blair Witch than how it was made. What was it like to actually make the movie? And how long did the production last for The Blair Witch?
Gregg Hale: Well, I guess it depends on what you consider production. I mean, we developed the idea for probably over a year, pursuing it as a more traditionally made movie. We gave the actors cameras, and we basically ran them through a giant obstacle course, and they filmed themselves. That’s ultimately how we captured the footage of The Blair Witch Project and then started shooting the framing stuff and then realized that the framing stuff didn’t work. So we completely pivoted and made the film just the footage that the actors had shot in the woods, just their story.
There was a long development process of trying to raise money for it, traditionally changing that, coming up with $22,000 to shoot the stuff in the woods, then getting more money to shoot the other stuff, and then realizing the editing took forever because it was 22 hours of unique footage, not 22 hours of takes, but 22 hours of unique footage. So all told, by the time we submitted to Sundance in ’98, you know, close to two years total of developing the idea and all the different iterations that I just mentioned. So, yeah a two-year process that got us to the film that we sold at Sundance.
You know esthetically, the biggest influence on The Blair Witch Project—and I’ve said this many, many times—was probably Cops. So we would have to check what year Cops came out, but when we started sort of developing Blair in like ‘96, Cops was relatively new and you’d never seen anything like that when it came out.
JG: There was a fun story about the cameras you used. You got them from Best Buy then took them back. I’ve totally done that before.
GH: We shot on Hi8 and then 60mm black and white. But we bought two Hi8 cameras from Best Buy. We used both of them in the shoot, but primarily just one. The production designer, Ben Rock, bought one that had been used the most. The other one we literally put back in the box and returned it to Best Buy and got our money back, because we needed that 500 bucks to finish the movie.
JG: When people think about successful, low-budget horror films, they think about The Blair Witch Project and they think about Paranormal Activity. Those are two that come to mind. How has low-budget filmmaking changed since you made The Blair Witch Project?
GH: I think there are lots of other ones too, but yeah, those are found footage houses. The barrier to entry of making a film now is so much lower even than it was in 1997 when we made The Blair Witch Project. In 1997, you still had to ultimately transfer your movie to film to be in festivals. And ending up with a finished product was just a more involved and more expensive technological process. Now the technological bar and the cost bar to some degree of making a film is so much lower that I think in some ways you’re going to have a glut of material out there.
Distributors especially, you know, streamers or video on demand or whatever, they know how much material is out there and they know how desperate people are to sell things. So I think just the market where you can actually make a movie and make some money has been diminished. So in some ways, I think it’s easier to actually make the movie, but it’s probably harder to take that movie and have it translate into something that feels successful or feels financially viable if you’re looking at it as a job or as a career.
I think it comes down to the movie being good and innovative, although, that’s not always enough, right? Some of it’s right place, right time. I mean, I think The Blair Witch Project is a good movie, but it’s a lot of right place, right time, too. I still think that’s true.
JG: So Exists, I’ve seen this recently on several forums, mostly on Facebook, but one on IG, as well, calling it “the most legit Bigfoot movie ever made”. So congrats on that.
You mentioned to me that some of The Blair Witch Project was inspired by Boggy Creek and some of the instances in Blair are inspired by Bigfoot phenomenon which I thought was kind of cool.
GH: Ed and I were both freaked out by Legend of Boggy Creek when we were kids. And one of the reasons that Legend of Boggy Creek worked so well is that it’s framed like a faux documentary. And that just fucking freaked me out when I was a kid. So the thought of a story being framed as a documentary was something that had been in both me and Ed’s heads since we were little. In fourth or fifth grade, I did a fake show-and-tell where I pretended like I had seen Bigfoot. I basically did a mockumentary show-and-tell, and I made a poster and I did a fake Bigfoot print and photographed it and brought it in and showed everybody and pretended like I had really seen Bigfoot. Then I just did it, you know, 40 years later.
JG: When I told you about Summoning the Spirit, we were sitting at a tiki bar and I asked you about your experience making a creature film. You mentioned the concept of creature motivation, which was very helpful to me. So what is creature motivation?
GH: I think a creature ultimately is not only just a character, they’re usually your main antagonist. I think an antagonist without their own internal story and their own internal motivations, is really boring. It’s not going to make sense and you’re not in for a very good movie. I think a creature that has its own story and its own motivations is going to make more sense and be more compelling. It also just helps you make your movie right because you’ve got an antagonist that has a point of view that helps guide the propulsion of the story from the beginning. They have an inciting incident.
The Sasquatch in Exists has a little bit of a three-act structure that the kids are just cutting in and out of. She has her own motivation, her own story. If you consider Altered a creature film, which I guess it probably is, you know, the alien, she had her motivation of what she was trying to do as well and I think that just makes for a better movie. That’s well done in Summoning the Spirit. There’s a story behind the Sasquatch. The creature wants something and is not just there to wreak havoc. It’s got a goal.
JG: People like creature features. Why do you think is in that?
GH: Well, I think that creatures or monsters kind of do two things simultaneously. They project your fears and your hatred onto this thing outside of you that you must resist or you must destroy. So it can be one or the other and they can serve that function. And then at the same time, it can be a mirror of darker human instincts that you may have yourself.
You can see yourself in the creature sometimes. A creature can be kind of this interesting thing that’s a little bit of a shorthand for that kind of duality that’s harder to pull off with a fully human character. A creature kind of gives you more flexibility in how you depict them. And it also gives the audience more flexibility in how they perceive them. It feels like more of a myth that you’re able to get into and believe and get into the psychology of it without humanity getting in the way. I don’t know if that makes any sense.
I think Summoning the Spirit has that. Has that a little bit like retroactively when you realize why the Sasquatch has been doing what she’s been doing, in retrospect, you’re like, Oh, that sucks for her. You know, King Kong definitely kind of front-loads that where you’re kind of on King Kong’s side earlier in Summoning the Spirit. I think you do get a sense that something is going on with the creature that makes it kind of clear that the creature is not completely bad.
JG: So when you make a horror film how do you know if something is scary when you’re filming it?
GH: I’ve always heard the most fut sets are horror movies and dramas where you need that levity. And some of the hardest sets are comedies. I don’t know if that’s true. I think it’s kind of hard to tell just being on set if it’s working or not. You can look at something on the monitor. I think you can get an idea and obviously, [The Blair Witch Project] director, Ed, is great at this. You know, you have an idea of how everything is going to come together and work. But so much of horror is getting the audience into the moment and then the pacing leading up to the scare and then the music and the sound, you know, there’s so much that goes into it.
I think you go into it with an idea of the elements that you think are going to make for a frightening scene or a creepy scene or an effective jump scare then you try to execute it. But I don’t know. I think a lot of times you don’t know fully now until you’re in the edit room. I mean all films are definitely made in the edit, but I think horror films in particular are a little dependent on the edit and the post to really bring everything together.
JG: In Summoning The Spirit, we had this scene where a character’s eye gets pulled out and it was like four in the morning. I was looking at the stunt guy for help because we didn’t have a practical effects person and he looked at me like,
“I’m a stunt guy, not practical effects.” So I was like, it’s four in the morning and everyone wanted to go home. I was trying to get it all in one shot rather than breaking it up into inserts to sell the effect, which is what I would do now. So one of the many things I’ve learned is to shoot coverage, coverage, coverage!
GH: Yeah. And you can. I mean, obviously. In The Blair Witch Project, you don’t see shit, right? That’s kind of the amazing thing about horror. The most effective stuff is what’s not on screen. I mean, that’s really the only genre that I can think of where not seeing something is more effective than seeing something, you know?
JG: Very, very true. Like my film The Hours Till Daylight. I wondered if I wanted to show a ghost at the end of the movie, like an actual, CGI ghost situation. The visual effects ended up taking about a year and a half to finish. But I also had to think about, is it scarier to see it or not see it? And now when I go back, it was probably scarier to not have seen it. But who knows?
GH: Yeah, we did the same thing. I mean, Blair Witch was literally one thing we shot that we thought you’d be able to see and you couldn’t. And then at the end, we had all these ideas for you to see the Witch but then the co-director just couldn’t come up with anything that we could pull off. So I just kept telling them as we were shooting, that we still don’t know how it was going to end until I was like, you got ten days and we could do something like this. Now you got a week and you can do less. And then three days out, I’m like, that’s it, dude, you’re not going to see anything. And that ended up being the best decision we ever made.
So in The Blair Witch Project, it worked one way, but there was that debate. We tested Lovely Molly, which I fucking hate test screenings, but we did one and we got some feedback from the audience and we added something at the end based on a test screening. And in retrospect, we should not have, in my opinion. When you watch the film, I think you’re going to know exactly what we added that we shouldn’t have.
JG: We always have a lot of irons in the fire. A lot of things we want to do in different stages of development, right? How do you decide what you’re going to put your time and energy into at this point?
GH: Yeah, it kind of starts with an instinct, right? It’s got to start with the feeling that this is something that I want to do, something I want to try to create. Because if you don’t have that motivation, I think it’s going to be hard to see it through properly. Then you put a lot of stuff out there and you see what sticks. At some point with making movies especially, it comes down to where can I get money. And that ends up being where the rubber hits the road most of the time. It’s mostly do I have the funds/resources to make this right? At some point, it becomes just practical, but I think it always starts with a gut instinct of some sort and then just persistence and spinning plates until something takes.
JG: For the first time in my career, I’m thinking “OK, do I need to think smarter than just my inclination to want to go out there and create and be working on something and putting my heart into something? Or do I need to be thinking more about the return and how is this going to affect my career? Is this actually going to bring in money?” It’s the first time I’ve thought like that. It’s not debilitating, it’s just my mid-40s periphery.
GH: I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. I think if you were only out there trying to make stuff for the market and what’s going to sell, more than likely you’re going to end up making shit. But I think if you’re starting from a place of “I want to tell the story” or “I want to make a movie creatively, artistically,” then your heart’s in the right place. And then applying some sort of parameters to it of, “Well, how can I make this make money?” Or “How can I change this so that it’s more marketable?”
So me and Ed [Sanchez], we both come from the school of filmmakers who, like, that’s all we’ve ever wanted to do. We kind of structured our lives around trying to be filmmakers. But you came to filmmaking later in life. So just curious, how did that work for you as a person in your thirties deciding you wanted to be a filmmaker?
JG: Yeah, I was on the music trajectory for years and I moved here right after a family tragedy. I wanted to get out of Texas and start new. I started a music career and people weren’t really responding to my music the way that I hoped they would. I’d loved movies my whole life, that’s all we did growing up. My family would go out to eat and watch movies. My mom and dad were into the classics- El Cid, The Silver Chalice and they loved Charles Bronson Westerns. I never thought I could ever be a filmmaker. I went to PSU in 2007 and upon graduation started making my first film. It took me a year and a half, but I was obsessed and thought I’d finally found something that I really loved to do.
GH: What year was that?
JG: 2009. I felt that film was this conglomeration of all these different skill sets I’d learned over the years. I’ve always been multifaceted and had interests in a lot of areas, but I’m not necessarily great at any of them. So filmmaking felt like a perfect fit for me in some ways.
GH: Your degree was more like Film theory, film studies, yeah? So really, as a filmmaker, you’re just completely self-taught.
JG: Yes, my degree from PSU was more theory than application. However, I still gained confidence as a writer from their screenwriting classes. I don’t have a solid production education even though I’ve made 11 features. Sometimes I work with people much younger than I am and they have had a USC education or something like that and they are surprised at how I work and produce. But it’s just the way I learned.
GH: You’ve made a lot of relationship-oriented dramas or comedies, and a few of them have been queer. How did you go from being in that kind of genre, so to speak, as a filmmaker to doing horror? And how does it feel different to you as a filmmaker to make a horror film versus a relationship drama?
JG: Well, I don’t know if I really made a horror movie. I saw one YouTube review that said “A Bigfoot horror movie……..” The relationship drama was definitely in there. I’m fascinated by relationships and the way they work and the coming together of relationships, that’s kind of what I focus on, like in Summoning the Spirit.
A kind of cool thing about making a horror film was that every time blood or effects was implemented everybody’s spirits were lifted, everybody was having fun. Making a horror film just had an energy to it, you know? When Bigfoot walked on set, I felt an energy. It was something I hadn’t felt as a filmmaker before, the choreography, the pyrotechnic, even though it’s very little of that. I’d say to myself, “This is what filmmaking is.” It’s a magic trick.
GH: Some of the early malaise films were magicians and a lot of it was filmed as if it was a magic trick. And I think horror is a little bit like that, right? You’re not really pulling somebody’s eyeball out, you know? Bigfoot’s not really there. You’re not really ripping somebody’s arm off. So you get that kind of play-acting. Little kid energy, right? That’s the appeal of making something fun that really shouldn’t be fun. Doing it can be a fun experience when it’s not a nightmare, right? When it’s not falling apart and driving you crazy.
JG: Yeah, has it happened to you?
GH: Oh, of course. Yeah.
JG: My magic trick to date has been like, “OK, the subtext is, I love you or I’m beginning to love you.” And by the end of the film, either that is divulged and they have that moment and they come together or sometimes better it’s never said. People go their separate ways and it’s a tragedy. That seems to land harder with some audiences because it’s more realistic. So this was new.
GH: Yeah. Horror has a big advantage because there’s a genre or a sub-genre or whatever you want to call it. There’s always a dedicated audience in a way that no other genre has. Not even close. So young filmmakers and beginning filmmakers and a lot of famous filmmakers get their start in schlock because there’s always an audience for that.
JG: Filmmaking is the only thing I’ve ever completely obsessed about.
GH: Do you think you’re going to make another horror film? Are you motivated to make another horror film?
JG: Absolutely. I want to make one as soon as possible.
GH: Do you know what it’s going to be or can you talk about it?
JG: Yeah, there are several of them that I’ve been talking about for a minute. One of them is this mermaid, uh, horror film. It’s like a cross between Splash and Shaun of the Dead.
GH: Fun.
JG: Yeah, it’s tons of fun! Coastal Oregon, right? Small, peaceful fishing town. The safest town in Oregon gets overrun by these creatures. There’s also another one that’s LGBTQ called The Red Light. And that’s about two people that wake up in a basement. They don’t know how they got there and they’re trying to figure it out. And they kind of develop a relationship throughout the day, like a love affair until they realize the truth about how they got in there.
Summoning The Spirit is available now on Tubi.
Categorized:Interviews
