Mischief Night is an interesting film. It’s one of those little sleepers that wants to entertain you. Home Invasion films have been around forever and certainly more and more lately. This being said, it’s not the story, but how you tell it. Director Richard Schenkman has obvious talent and after seeing the film, I definitely wanted to sit down and talk about it. Read on to learn a little about how to make a night mischievous…
Can you tell me a little about the film?
Well, here’s a synopsis that I wrote a while back: “Mischief Night occurs annually on Halloween Eve, and is traditionally a night of pranks and tomfoolerly, but some people take it too far… resulting in mayhem and murder. One year after the occupants of an isolated home were killed on a horrifying Mischief Night, the house is occupied by 17 year old Emily Walton and her father David, both still deeply wounded by the death of Emily’s mother in a car crash 9 years earlier. The accident left Emily with psychosomatic blindness and asthma, and David with a broken heart. But this night finds David heading out on his first date since the accident, and Emily secretly visited by her young boyfriend Jimmy. Soon a mysterious Intruder arrives. What at first seem like harmless pranks – egging, knocking-and-running – soon turn terrifying and ultimately deadly, for this Intruder has murder on his sick and twisted mind. Ultimately young Emily must summon every instinct at her disposal to protect herself and her loved ones from the murderer who seems to know her home even better than she does.”
I think that explains the movie pretty well!
In terms of the production, I can tell you that it was a very small, very lean project. We had a low budget, but we had a great crew, including deeply experienced, highly talented craftsmen, several of whom I’d worked with before on other projects. Everybody involved really loved the script and thought we were onto something special, and the production itself was a lot of fun. I know that everybody had a great time on set each day (or night) and we were all sorry when the production wrapped!
Where did the idea of Mischief night come from as a practice?
Oh, gosh, I don’t know! It’s definitely an east-coast thing, primarily in New York State, New Jersey, and a few other places, at least according to Wikipedia. In fact, here’s what Wikipedia says about the origin of the day: “The earliest reference to Mischief Night is from 1790 when the fellows of St John’s College, Oxford, studied under a headmaster who had encouraged a school play which ended in ‘an Ode to Fun which praises children’s tricks on Mischief Night in most approving terms’.”
Funnily enough, it’s also known by a whole variety of other names, depending on the locale. In fact, we include in the movie a moment where David (Emily’s father) remembers participating in a version of it called “Cabbage Night,” which is apparently a real thing.
But hopefully with the movie reaching a wide audience, the awareness of Mischief Night will spread across the country. At least my producer hopes that will happen, since he’d love to see a sequel. But only an innocent version of the night, I hope – no murders… that would be bad.
Emily is such a great character. Why the decision to make her blind?
The original story of this film was cooked up by Jesse Baget and Eric Wilkinson, my producing partners on the project. They’re both lifelong fans of thrillers and horror movies, and they’ve seen all the classics. They knew that this was going to be a very contained movie, really limited mostly to the one location, and so in trying to come up with all the plausible challenges that a person could face under these circumstances, they hit up on the idea of Emily being blind. Thus she would not only be “trapped”, so to speak, in this isolated home, but she’d be further isolated within that home by the darkness that constantly surrounds her.
And I was particularly intrigued by the idea of her blindness being a psychological condition rather than a physical one, because in my opinion it lent itself even more toward our themes of personal responsibility, forgiveness and redemption.
Was it hard to find an actress that could pull that off convincingly?
Yes and no… I did see a very large number of actresses. Some could pull off the blindness very well, but they didn’t seem young enough to me. Or others were great at the drama and the blindness but they didn’t capture any of the humor in the role. Or some just struck me as too “light” – they wouldn’t be capable of the heavier moments when Emily is truly terrified or even heartbroken.
And yet, in the end there were several superb candidates and it was a tough decision narrowing it down to just one. But I’m very, very happy with the choice we made. I think that not only did Noell Coet do a great job, but she was a pleasure to work with every day. She made my job so much easier by being a consummate professional and a funny, joyful human being.
There is almost a Hitchcockian vibe going on. Was that conscious?
No, I wasn’t going after Hitchcock in any particular way. Certainly I grew up on his films and indeed a lot of what he developed has gone on to become a basic part of film grammar, and so I suppose if you are creating suspense, you are working from Hitchcock’s playbook, whether you’re conscious of it or not. He was known, after all, as “the master of suspense” for a damn good reason! For what it’s worth, I take any comparison with Hitchcock as high praise.
Funnily enough, some people who’ve seen “Mischief Night” have pointed out its similarity to this or that movie, and in most cases I never even saw those movies! I’ll certainly acknowledge the debt I owe to “Wait Until Dark” as well as “The Strangers” and “Ils,” but even so, the way I work is always the same, regardless of the genre: I start with the script, and figure out the best way I can tell that particular story. I know that there are filmmakers – Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Scorcese and of course Hitchcock come to mind – great filmmakers with a particular style that you can generally identify consistently in their films, regardless of genre or story. But I don’t work that way; to me it really depends upon the script, and the look (or the style) grows organically from that. Even so, I would never ape the style of any particular filmmaker unless I was doing a parody.
The look is always an important thing when creating your villains. What inspired the intruders of Mischief Night?
Jesse wrote the first draft of the script, based upon the story he and Eric came up with. It wasn’t entirely complete, but it had most of the key elements in place, and one of these was the idea that the Intruder is wearing a mask and a cheap raincoat. To me this idea was simple, it made sense, and it felt real, so I didn’t see any need to change it. Therefore, it became a matter of working up the best, scariest mask we could create and figuring out exactly which raincoat to use and how to customize it for our purposes.
Maybe the first person hired to work on the movie – months before we shot – was Mark Villalobos of Monster FX. His team began to work on the mask, and version by version we got closer to the finished product. We couldn’t just go to the store and buy a mask because of copyright reasons, plus we wanted our mask to be unique. So Mark started with a life cast of a very famous actor whom I shall not name, made the basic mask from that, and then experimented with various paint applications until we hit upon the perfect prop. It’s the kind of thing where “you know it when you see it”, right?
I’ve never heard of that kind of blindness. Is that a real thing?
Oh, yes. Not only did I did I research Conversion Disorder – of which psychosomatic blindness is only one of numerous possible symptoms (asthma is another) — but I also ran all the sequences with Dr. Pomock by an old friend of mine who is a professional therapist, and she vetted all the dialogue. When you’re making a movie with fantastical elements, I think it’s crucial that the realistic parts be as truthful and accurate as possible. You have to ground the story in reality if you want people to invest in it. That’s also why we spent a fair amount of time getting to know Emily and David at the beginning of the movie – so that you would know them, believe in them, and care about them.
It is such a sharp thriller. Would you like to explore it as a franchise?
As I mentioned earlier, my producing partner Eric would certainly like to see a sequel!
I think that when you’re making this kind of movie, with a classical setup and an iconic villain, it’s only natural to consider how you would go about creating a second or third chapter, especially if the first one turns out fairly well, and we’ve certainly given it some thought. I start the process by asking a series of questions: Would we follow Emily, and see what’s going on in her life and how the experience of the first film has affected her? Or instead focus on the Intruder? Did he survive, or did someone else find his mask and raincoat and decide to continue his evil Mischief Night tradition? Do you stay with the house? Or does the action take place somewhere entirely new? As we answer these questions to our own satisfaction, a story begins to form, and then we can write a script.
That, of course, is if there’s interest in the marketplace for a sequel and if we can put together the financing for such a film. Meanwhile, Jesse has a number of films he’s working on, Eric is involved with several projects, and I have a recently completed script for a western I plan to shoot as early in 2014 as is practicable. If we wanted to get a sequel ready for Mischief Night 2014, we’d need to get on it pretty darn soon!
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