Tina Kakadelis
What happens when the actors of a suburban haunted house attraction start dying? Not in the pretend way they die a few hundred times a night, but for real. This is the set-up for Haunt Season, the upcoming film from writer/director Jake Jarvi. In anticipation of the release of Haunt Season, Jarvi sits down with Film Obsessive’s Tina Kakadelis to talk all things spooky, his past life as a Universal Studios ride operator, and the logistics of bashing someone’s head in with a bowling ball. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Film Obsessive: Hey, Jake. How’s it going?
Jake Jarvi: It’s going great. How are you?
I’m doing well! I was poking around on your YouTube channel, and you mentioned that you were a ride operator at Universal. And, as an ex Disney employee, I have to ask about what ride you operated.
Okay, this is 20 years ago. It was when there was a Backdraft attraction in the lower lot at Universal Hollywood. It was basically a fire show. It was three rooms and in the last room there’s a big fire show with barrels exploding and everything. I had to keep my finger on this button the whole time. And if anybody put their kid on the railing, I had to press the emergency stop. I loved it. I love the whole theme park life. I love that you asked me that. I was thinking about my time at Universal so much while I wrote this movie. Have you ever read Stephen King’s Joyland?
I have not!
You probably would appreciate it. It’s very much about working at a theme park. That book plus my summer-and-a-half at Universal as a ride operator and all the people that I met there were so much in my head while I was writing this thing.
Having this interview scheduled for today was funny to me because last night I got back from Halloween Horror Nights in Orlando. This morning, I watched Haunt Season and it felt very kismet. Also, in that same video, you say you don’t like haunted houses, so I’m kind of curious what inspired you to make Haunt Season?
I’m very, very scared of haunted houses, but I’m going to Horror Nights on Thursday. I basically just want to be in the environment. I want to be in the streets. I know there are some crazies running around with chainsaws on the streets too, but I love seeing everything all decked out. I love all that theatrical smoke. I love walking through the beautiful sets they built. I just don’t want somebody jumping out at me and you can’t avoid it. Someone’s going to jump out at you.
I wrote Haunt Season because Steve, the guy who owns Realm of Terror, the haunted house where we shot the film, was like, let’s do it, you make movies, I make everything else. He’s an entertainer who builds haunted houses and escape rooms. That’s his life and he said, let’s bring our two things together and make an awesome horror movie. I was like, dude, awesome, a slasher movie, let’s go. I wrote it based on his locations.
As an ex theme park employee, there is this Peter Pan mentality of never growing up because you’re surrounded by all these childlike things and everyone around you is there on vacation. They’re in a very different mindset than the people clocking in, clocking out, but it’s still hard to lose that feeling of childlike wonder. I was curious if you felt the film industry had a similar Peter Pan mentality.
There is a certain imagination and enthusiasm that never leaves the people who participate in both of these things. In the indie film community in Chicago, it’s just that you want to be a part of making and telling a story. Hopefully it’s an engaging enough story that people get lost in it and you take them away for a second. That is the origin of wanting to tell whatever story you’re telling. For some people, it just never goes away. It’s the same for haunted house actors. It’s the same for anybody who engages in escape rooms. You’re building an experience that’s going to take someone out of their life and put them in another place for a little while. That is universal to all of this.
I hadn’t been through Steve’s haunt when I wrote the movie and I wrote it about ambitious creatives. The people that I know. It turned out to have a very good overlap with the people that he knew in the haunted house world. I love that you pointed that out. That’s so astute.
I blame the years of handing out turkey legs at Disney, where it’s just always kind of front of mind. You are the writer, director, editor, and producer of Haunt Season. How was it balancing all of those different roles? Do you feel like one definitely took more time than the other? It sounds crazy.
It is crazy. It’s an absolute nightmare. The writing is probably the most fulfilling thing because you’re starting from scratch. The directing is the thing that I take the most pride in because you’re actually just shaping how every element comes in. Even though you’ve got somebody who’s very good at lighting and shooting something with an actor standing around the camera doing that part, the process of bringing it all together is so, so fulfilling.
Producing is the worst thing. It’s the absolute worst. It’s all about who can be where and when. How much is that going to cost? What can we get it for? Is this place too expensive? We need to find another place. I wanted to do a whole thing where the lake house in the movie was supposed to be a roadside motel. It had to do with the thematics of, again, a group of people who are temporary like the haunt is temporary. The motel would be temporary too. Lake house vacation kind of works, but that was only budgetary. Producing is the worst and editing is a dream. At that point, you can’t do anything else. You just have what you have and you just make the best of what you have.
Going along with producing being a nightmare, am I wrong in saying that all of the gore and blood effects are practical? No computer?
There is a computer element in that. What I did, which I did a lot in our superhero web series before this, is I would take a practical element done by our special effects makeup artists, Corey Ruby and Cyle Williamson. They would build whatever the weapon was going to interact with, right? Like the arm that was going to get sawed through or the torso piece or the neck piece. For the wide shots where the weapons actually interact with the people, I would just blank plate those. Get the weapon hurting the thing, then pull that out, put the actor in there, and then hit them with a bunch of blood. Then, I would just composite it together. All of the blood and weapon interaction is practical. I just added an actor on top of it.
And the bowling alley scene, I heard that was a nightmare.
It was an absolute nightmare because when I wrote it, I loved that the haunt in the movie borders a family fun center, because it does for real. The haunted house is right next to this arcade, bowling alley, and mini-golf place. The fact that they’re both forms of entertainment and one is just nastier than the other was really what I wanted to address. I wanted the horror to leave the haunt at the end and come into the family fun center. That was super important to me. Once I found out that you cannot walk on those lanes without special shoes or we all needed to be wearing booties, I had to change things.
Originally, the killer was going to be crushed with a pin crusher. That was just impossible. I mean, especially on our budget. Impossible. That limitation led to a much more satisfying conclusion for our villain, I feel like, because it’s much more active for our protagonists. That was all budgetary as well. That one had no digital composite. It was just a dummy that Cyle and Corey put together. We had one shot at crushing the villain’s head with a bowling ball. We did it and it was the best.
It looked very satisfying as a viewer. When talking about these haunted houses and horror movies, they are safe ways to be a little dangerous and live on the edge a little bit. I think it’s why we all gravitate toward them. In Haunt Season, you take one of these safe, controlled environments and it actually becomes very dangerous. Do you think that makes the film inherently a little more unsettling, because this could just be a haunted house gone wrong?
I’m not the first person to set something like a horror movie at a haunted house. I mean, Hell House LLC has the supernatural side taken care of and Haunt is a slasher where the people who come in are the targets. For most of our movie, it’s the haunted house’s cast that’s being targeted for their participation in the event itself. That was kind of my gateway in and I think, especially with our killer’s ultimate motivations, I feel like it’s so tragic for people who are so excited and genuine, who just want to be a part of something, to be punished for not being the right kind of participants in the eyes of just one person. That was such a brutal idea to me and I really loved it.
I think it also speaks to a lot of ways that we try, and I don’t think you and I personally, but the way that people try and police fandoms or police enjoying things. I like that your film is very much anti-that sentiment.
Absolutely. That was even top of mind as well when we got to that end scene. Originally, the big villain speech that’s in the movie now wasn’t there, but somebody that I was letting read the script earlier was like, you know, you have an opportunity here to do the big speech and have it just be that nobody believes it because they all are here for a good time. They think it’s part of the show. I was like, dude, that’s the best.
The death count is pretty high in the movie. As the writer, do you ever feel a little sad killing off some of them? Did you try to make some of your characters last a little bit longer because you liked hanging out with them?
Actually, someone in the very first draft of the script died that does not die in the final movie. By the end, I was like, I can’t do that to her. I cannot do that to her. And so she lives to fight another day. Everybody who dies in the movie was so excited to die. All the actors were so excited for their death scene, but I was so sad to see their character go. Everyone in the movie was so lovely. I wrote a bunch of characters that I wanted to hang out with, and the actors breathed such convincing life into them that it was just devastating to watch them die.
My last question for you. There’s a very big distinction in the styles of day and night in the film. Daytime feels like Halloweentown and nighttime is dark, intense colors. Where did you find the inspiration for those two distinct styles? How do you create a world where the two of them can coexist?
For me, I wanted those daytime scenes more than anything because we shot all the exteriors in the second half of October 2022 in Illinois. I would go to those pumpkin patches one day and I’d be like, can I film here when nobody’s here? They would be like, yeah, sign the location release. I’d come back at dawn and just shoot their pumpkin patch. The empty haunted attraction and that big pumpkin fest, too. Those scenes in the movie I just could watch forever.
It’s that vibe that I feel every October and to be able to actually capture that vibe for once and put it in something forever was such a wonderful opportunity. I watched those scenes and I can feel October year round, you know?
Then, the colors of the night scenes, that was Alexander Lakin our DP. I dug his reel. He was one of the only DPs in the area whose reel wasn’t all daytime stuff. He really leaned into the darkness and could light it really, really well. So Alexander, his gaffer Chris O’Malley, and first assistant director David Keyser, they all combined to create this incredible dark look. All the night stuff looks so much more beautiful than I ever could have made it and it’s all because of them. Alexander just wanted to inject a lot of color into the movie.
We were going to shoot a lot of those lake house party scenes during the day, but he was like, we’re going to be facing the windows and I don’t want to just black out the windows, I want blue moonlight coming in. Can we move all of those to nighttime? I was like, Alex, producing is a nightmare, but I will do it. I will do it because your images are so gritty.
That’s awesome! Thank you so much and congratulations on the movie. It’s really fun. It really brought me back to working at a theme park.
That is exactly the vibe I wanted to convey, so thank you so much.
Absolutely. And have fun at Horror Nights!
