This year’s installment of the V/H/S franchise is all about Halloween, which only makes sense for a series that releases a new film in time for the best time of the year. Part of V/H/S/HALLOWEEN is the directing duo Micheline Pitt-Norman and R.H. Norman, who crafted the “Home Haunt” segment. I won’t spoil anything for those who haven’t watched the film yet, but suffice to say it is a wild, chaotic, and incredibly entertaining haunted house romp that’s equal parts horrifying and heart-warming.
We spoke with Pitt-Norman and Norman about “Home Haunt”, tackling a bunch of franchise firsts, and finding their perfect V/H/S family.
Dread Central: Your segment is such a blast. It’s so wholesome at first with that relationship between the son and the dad. And then it all goes batshit. But, I wanted to start with, where did this idea come from? How did you approach pitching for V/H/S/HALLOWEEN?
Micheline Pitt-Norman: We pitched four concepts to them. And we each collectively worked on them together, and shaped them, and they’re all very different. One was really, really dark and actually scary. Like, it could have actually been upsetting and scary. But they didn’t want that. They wanted the wildest, the most fantastic, ambitious one. [Laughs]
R.H. Norman: They wanted us to kind of do Grummy again, you know, where we build crazy sets.
MPN: And the world-building.
RHN: So, you know, that’s always hard. [Laughs]
DC: Just a whole haunted world.
MPN: You have a week to make it all.
RHN: But yeah, the inspiration for this particular pitch was Rick Baker. Anybody who’s familiar with Rick or Burbank in general is that every Halloween, he has a home haunt-like display and a borderline show that he does at his house. So he puts his whole family in elaborate makeup, like Rick Baker-style makeup. Then he builds stages, and they do these little performances. They have a trick-or-treating line that goes for a mile.
We always go to watch it because it’s always so crazy with all the makeup. So we’re just thinking, “Well, what if Rick Baker accidentally killed half of Burbank with his home haunt?”
Beyond that, you know, when we’d be over at his house, we would hear stories about how one of his daughters hated doing it, because he always made her ugly. She hated going to work looking like a monster. So that’s where that family dynamic came from with this Clark Griswold-style dad and his son, who’s paying a social penalty for his dad’s weird and growing hobby.
MPN: Because when he was a kid, it was like he was the cool kid in the neighborhood because they had this haunt maze and everyone loves trick-or-treating on Halloween. But as he gets older, he’s the weird kid that everybody makes fun of and no one wants to be friends with or date him.
RHN: And I’m glad you picked up on that. We wanted to do the first, at least partially wholesome V/H/S segment because no one’s ever done that.
DC: I love the real family video style of the segment. There really isn’t a segment in V/H/S history that has a wholesome, cute beginning. It always dives right into the horror.
MPN: It doesn’t exist. We were also the first people in V/H/S history to let the lead main characters survive. Nothing bad happens to them.
DC: Oh, my God, you’re so right.
MPN: We also have the biggest cast in V/H/S history.
RHN: Josh Goldbloom will get mad about that. His canon, which is not the actual canon, is that something gets the family off camera. But we disagree. They survived. Oh. Okay. Because..
MPN: We love Josh, but he’s wrong!
RHN: The Mortis family got out.
MPN: We tried to do a lot of firsts with our segment. I mean, they give you so much freedom with V/H/S.
DC: I was going to say, you guys got to do a lot of crazy shit.
RHN: But I feel everybody does. The magic of V/H/S is the creative freedom, the support you get. Yes, it’s hard. You have only $2 and three or five days to do something, but you have complete creative freedom to make something that you want to make. And you have the producers’ full support from day one. You can keep pushing it and go bigger and wilder, and they’re there with you, encouraging you and pushing you.
I really say that it is a true gift as a filmmaker to be a part of the V/H/S franchise because, unless you’re Martin Scorsese or some huge director, you’ll never get the creative freedom as a filmmaker as you do with V/H/S. And that is a gift is in itself.
DC: The whole movie is such a testament to that. The amount of sheer insanity on display and just the range to the wall. talent, the range of storytelling.
I know you’re a duo, but, Micheline, I’m sorry to be that person, but it’s exciting to have you and Anna involved in a found footage series that gets so crazy.
MPN: Are we the first V/H/S film that has two women?
DC: No, you’re not the first one to have two women, because Chloe Okuno and Jennifer Reeder were both in V/H/S/94!
MPN: Oh, amazing.
DC: But it’s rare. And so just having both of you be able to work with such incredible, crazy effects and create wild deaths, because women are always expected to make certain movies. But you have the freedom to be gross here, that’s just so cool as a filmmaker.
MPN: I think that it is a gift to have this freedom, and if you’re going to do V/H/S, I hope you appreciate what a gift that freedom is.
DC: OK, I hear you used stop motion in this segment. Tell me about the stop motion in this, because that’s crazy. It’s the first time stop motion has been done in V/H/S, right?
MPN: Yes, in V/H/S history. When we set out to do this, we knew we wanted the maze to come to life, and we knew we wanted to do stop motion.
RHN: Our very talented production designer, Calder Greenwood, did that. He’s a champion. We really have to give him a lot of credit. He really is a visionary artist, and what he does is he can create. He fit us perfectly because we like creating worlds out of scrap, and he’s really good at creating papier-mache universes.
MPN: And we knew that the maze needed to come to life. I designed the maze aesthetic, like the outside, and then we worked with Calder and said, “Can you do this stop motion?” We needed to make sure this was practically able to be pulled off.
So we all worked from the very beginning, day one of here’s what it’s going to look like, if we’re going to do this, this is what we have to do, and this is how we do it. We all worked as a team, you know, Chip, myself, and Calder, and we were able to pull it off.
But even if I’m drawing something, [R.H.] is seeing it. We’re talking about it. Nothing’s ever done singularly with us.
DC: I was going to ask about that!
MPN: We respect each other’s opinions, thoughts, and ideas.
RHN: We make every decision mutually. But we have different strengths and skills that complement each other. So, you know, I’m mostly an old school camera and edit guy, and she’s a walking art department.
MPN: I geek out over a set design and costumes and makeup.
RHN: She’s an animator. So we make all those decisions, whether it’s camera or art department, every department, we make those mutually, but we also tend to have our strong points to complement each other. I never want to direct by myself. It actually enables you to do so much more.
MPN: We’re a Hydra.
RHN: It actually makes it a lot easier to concentrate on certain things, to handle certain issues. With two of us on set.
MPN: He can be blocking and working with actors, and then there’s a fire situation that needs to be taken care of by the director. So he can keep working, and I can go take care of that fire. Or vice versa. We’re able to trade off in that way, and I can go shoot a scene with the DP while he’s setting up for the next shot.
DC: That’s so nice.
RHN: It is so nice.
MPN: We actually work so much faster and quicker because there are two of us.
DC: Also, being married, your minds meld in a way, a little bit, too.
MPN: Now that we’ve done two things together, we’re getting better and faster and stronger. So it’s just really setting us up for success for a feature.
DC: How’s the feature?
RHN: It’s going. We love James [Wan]. We love our producer Ingrid [Bisu], who’s James’s wife and an amazing producer.
MPN: Everyone at Atomic Monster is just the most wonderful, kind, gracious, creative people. They’re really just the dream team over there, and having James be the spearhead with Ingrid on this project, it’s just been a great creative collaboration.
RHN: It’s a dream come true.
DC: Back to “Home Haunt” and V/H/S/HALLOWEEN, I did want to shout out Sarah Nicklin as the mom. I know the segment is focused on the father and son, but I love the mom. She’s a badass!
RHN: We did that intentionally. We knew she was the glue that keeps the family together, but that doesn’t give her much conflict or interesting things to do there. So we’re like, “We’re gonna give her the conflict with all the monsters.” She becomes mama bear!
DC: I love the father-son dynamic, but I love that you brought the mom immediately. That was such a cool idea.
RHN: We didn’t want her to be a throwaway character or just filler, because that’s the risk. And that’s something we really took care to do. This is true of any kind of short form storytelling; you have very limited opportunities to create characters to people can connect with. It’s much harder to do that than in a 90-minute feature.
So we took a lot of care in creating characters that we thought people would connect with. Our goal was that we wanted to create the most memorable core characters of a V/H/S segment.
MPN: Like the first real V/H/S family, you know? People will think about them in the future.
RHN: It’s kind of really a franchise staple, and this is not to the series’ detriment, that there are segments of a bunch of college kids acting like idiots and getting killed. That’s the V/H/S bread and butter..
DC: That’s a great time!
MPN: Everyone loves those. But we wanted to do something to break the mold a little bit.
DC: But that’s so cool to get to do that and have the opportunity to do that in such a cool way.
MPN: And we have such great actors. Jeff Harms and Noah Diamonds are such a great family unit. I love how distinct Noah and Jeff’s voices are, so when they’re switching POVs behind the camera, you can really feel that change.
RHN: We cast it almost entirely for voice.
MPN: You can really think about how that person sounds because they’re driving the performance behind camera.
DC: I didn’t even think about that!
MPN: You think about it from a voice actor and animation perspective. [The performance has] got to give extra life to the moment and push it forward. We also wanted to have people who felt real.
DC: Well, that’s cool to have the animation background come in to play with that.
MPN: I also animated and drew the little opening sequence. Because we didn’t have more money, and I was like, “I’ll just do it.” I did it in a day on a Sunday.
DC: Did you design the flier, too?
MPN: Oh, no, our friend Ciro Nieli did that. We also wanted to work with other artists. Then the record was done by Eric Powell, who does The Goon comic book. It’s an unhinged vintage record.
DC: That’s so cool to work with your friends and show off their work, too.
RHN: We always do!
MPN: It’s really cool that they also gave us homie discounts, so we could work with them because there’s no way we could afford our incredibly gifted, talented friends without their generosity. Ciro Nieli is an animation showrunner, and he’s done the most successful run of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ever in history.
DC: So, is there anything else that you want to tell people about “Home Haunt”?
MPN: I mean, honestly, we’re just really proud to be featured in such a storied franchise and in what we feel is a great installment with so many talented filmmakers. We’re just honored and humbled about it, and we’re just very excited for people to be able to check it out.
RHN: Our hope for it is, is that it becomes in the rotation of Halloween essentials every year. That people are going to watch V/H/S/HALLOWEEN with Trick ‘r Treat and with whatever else.
DC: I think this is a really good calling card for you guys as filmmakers. It shows what you’re capable of and what you can make with limited resources. So what the hell can you make WITH resources?
RHN: We’ve got a lot of weaknesses, but that’s our strength. We know how to torture a penny. We can make it confess to the crimes that it didn’t commit. We know how to do that.
V/H/S/HALLOWEEN is streaming now on Shudder.
Categorized: Interviews
