DEADLINE: What are your go-to horror movies, that made you have to play in that sandbox?
COOGLER: I consider Spielberg’s work in the horror space to be a bit of a North Star. And it is complicated with him, right, because he hasn’t out and out made a horror movie before. But I would classify Jaws as a creature feature horror film, and Jurassic Park as well. Jurassic Park is a stealth horror movie. The whole thing of, what if dinosaur were real? But when you talk about those T-Rex scenes, the Velociraptor intro, the ‘raptors in the Kitchen, that is out and out horror cinema. And it is popular. It is visceral. It gets the audience feeling like they’re on a damn roller coaster ride. Then there’s this movie that came out in 2015 called Green Room. You seen it?
DEADLINE: No, I haven’t.
COOGLER: Oh, it’s fantastic, Fleming. And it is basically like the house of horrors movie played for real over 24 hours. This semi-pro punk band gets stuck in a venue in rural Oregon that’s owned by neo-Nazis that are led by Patrick Stewart. And it is brilliant, bro. And the makeup effects are so stark that I hired the guy that did them, for Sinners. A guy named Mike Fontaine, who’s exceptional, a savant. He’s the guy who put the penguin prosthetics on Colin Farrell for that show.
Taking it back, I love John Carpenter. My dad’s favorite movie as you know is Rocky II. We never talked about what his second favorite movie is, though, and that’s Halloween. So if I watched Rocky II five times, I watched Halloween three times. One of my mom’s favorite Carpenter films is The Thing. They love Carpenter, but different films and the only film they ever agree on to watch is The Fugitive. Otherwise, he’s watching Steven Seagal films and she’s watching Martin Scorsese films. My dad, every time he’s taking Halloween and maybe Assault on Precinct 13. For mom, it was The Thing. I love it, the isolation, the practical effects, the cosmic horror of it, and the threat, the idea of, Hey, you got to stop this thing, or it’s going to wreck the plant. All of a sudden, a rag tag group of guys that can’t figure out how to do a blood test, now have to save the planet. There’s Robert Rodriguez and From Dusk Till Dawn…
DEADLINE: Sinners made me think of that film, which Quentin Tarantino wrote and which starts as a tense kidnap drama with Tarantino and George Clooney, and then becomes a full-out vampire film.
COOGLER: Even more than From Dusk Till Dawn, I love The Faculty from Rodriguez. I love how he mashed up Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing, but set it in a 1990s high school. I love the confusing mishmash of movie and setting. And then a big one for me that I heard about and finally got to see, was Don’t Look Now. A fu*king masterpiece, bro. And it has the best intimacy scene I’ve ever seen in a movie. And how you got to see these characters experience pleasure and it buttressed how dark the movie actually is, in a way that informs relationships and informs the world. But that movie just took my breath away. Also love Rosemary’s Baby and The Silence of the Lambs.
