Director Tim Sullivan on Gay Horror and "Driftwood"

Some people have childhood stories about dressing up in their parent's clothes. But Tim Sullivan was probably covering himself in ketchup and trying to knock down chandeliers. A horror fan who has always identified with The Phantom of the Opera, Sullivan entered the movie industry in his teens; his first job was pumping blood onto the set of the cult film Return of the Aliens. Since then he's worked in the industry in many capacities, finally establishing himself as a director with 2001 Maniacs and Hood of Horror. His most recent film, Driftwood, is a change of pace from the Grand Guignol theatrics of his earlier work: A supernatural thriller set in an "attitude adjustment" camp for troubled teens, that relies on psychological shocks instead of buckets of blood. With Driftwood due out soon on DVD, and Halloween around the corner, we were dying to talk to Sullivan.

Q: Thanks for speaking with me.
A: This is actually very cool for me, because this is my first interview for a gay publication. To be blunt, I've been advised against it. There still is that stigma about being pigeonholed as gay. But in every film that I've done there's a certain attitude that could be considered gay. Because when I was growing up in the 80s watching all the horror movies full of naked girls, what was there for me? How come there's not a good looking guy skinnydipping? Jason didn't have to be gay to kill some good looking guys! So when I made 2001 Maniacs, I made sure there was democracy in the good looking young people who got naked and covered in blood.

Q: The gay themes are more overt in Driftwood.
A: My writing partner joked that I tricked him into making a gay ghost story. On a universal level, it's a story about being contained and controlled and being denied your freedom. But it's ultimately a story about being killed for being gay. It's really gratifying to have made such an over the top movie as 2001 Maniacs, and then find that fans responded to Driftwood so well. I think horror fans have always been outsiders, and they relate to that outsider theme in the movie. The fans have really validated my instinct that the gay/straight thing is not that big a deal.

Q: So why don't we see more gay content in horror movies?
A: Well, if my lot in life is to be the gay horror master, bring it on! I don't know, it's all out there, but it's all been metaphorical. The first great iconic horror director was James Whale, who was gay.

Q: I don't remember who said it, but Bride of Frankenstein has been called one of the gayest movies of all time.
A: Right! Fangoria is the number one horror magazine, and my friend Tony Timpone, who is the editor, told me there was controversy about the use of the word faggot in Hostel. Why is faggot the one bigoted term that's still okay to use? So anyway, a lot of gay teenage horror fans wrote in, and Tony told me he never got so much mail. So he did a poll and found out that 35 percent of his readers were gay. That's a huge demographic! And it makes sense. Think about Frankenstein's monster. His own creator abandons him. Isn't that what you fear when you're a gay kid? Think about all the classic monsters that became monsters because they were denied love. The Mummy, King Kong, the Phantom of the Opera. And then you have the vampire mythos. Not only are they creatures of the night, but they can turn you. I mean, when I was a kid I wanted to make the football players gay, you know? After I finish the sequel to Maniacs, my next movie is Brothers of the Blood, and it's a love story between two male vampires and a female mortal. It's sort of where Interview with the Vampire should have gone. I'm very excited because Thomas Dekker from The Sarah Connor Chronicles just agreed to do the film.

Q: That's interesting, after the rumors that he didn't want to play a gay character on Heroes.
A: Those stories make no sense to me. Thomas actually just directed a movie called Whore that deals with gay teens. The Heroes people should feel like heels when that comes out. So anyway, I don't know why we don't see more gay stuff in the horror genre. Clive Barker is gay but his films don't really deal with that. Then there was a really great gay film called Hellbent that got shoved under the rug. That's what frustrates me. All the horror film festivals took Driftwood, and not one gay film festival accepted it. They said it wasn't gay enough.

Q: Speaking of Hostel, films like that and Saw have brought back the debate about graphic violence in movies. What's your take on torture porn?
A: The term torture porn I think can be used too loosely. But yes, I think there is an unsettling trend in recent years of films with drawn out scenes of sadistic torture. To me, that's not entertainment. Stuart Gordon, who made the Re-Animator movies, once said that horror movies are our rehearsals for death. So maybe that's why people like those kind of movies, but I prefer it when death is like the punchline to a dark joke. When it's over the top, like Tales from the Crypt. I don't understand the appeal of 10 minutes of a guy tied to a chair with a ball in his mouth, pissing his pants and being slowly hacked up. That's the kind of film that gets people up in arms, and then that particular genre dies out for a while and people say horror is dead. But horror is a very broad thing, it can be a ghost story or it can be gory or whatever. You know, we are faced with so much real life violence today that people are getting numb, and maybe they need to take things to another level.

Q: Horror movies are often about very real, contemporary fears.
A: Absolutely. Look at Godzilla. He's the Hiroshima bomb. Horror movies, especially the independent ones like Night of the Living Dead, really capture the zeitgeist of their time. So maybe down the road, film scholars will look at these movies and how they came to be in a post 9/11 world. We create our own monsters. And in a way we created that monster that took down the twin towers. I think a lot of us haven't really looked at that.

Q: And so it comes out on movie screens. And in 2001 Maniacs too, I think. As a horror fan, it must have been great for you to revisit the cult movie Two Thousand Maniacs, and to work with Robert Englund [best known for playing Freddie Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise.]
A: He's the Boris Karloff or Vincent Price of his time. It was a dream come true. And the movie wouldn't even have happened if he didn't believe in it, because I asked him to do it before I started the script. He just gets it, you know? Because horror filmmakers and actors never get the recognition they deserve.

Q: Right. After you die they suddenly realize, oh, Tod Browning was a great director.
A: Right. Bela Lugosi was considered a second class actor. But the actor who played Bela Lugosi could get an Oscar. Look at Tobe Hooper and Martin Scorsese. They started about the same time, they're both excellent filmmakers, yet Scorsese is honored and Tobe Hooper is "that horror guy."

Q: This is a problem for all genre movies. We had to have French film critics tell us that film noir was important. They even had to name it for us.
A: Funnily enough, I leave for Europe next week for a two month promotional tour, where I've got all these sold out audiences waiting for Driftwood. In Europe, 2001 Maniacs is seen as social commentary on America, but no one seemed to get that there.

Q: So why stick to horror?
A: Because I love it. Okay, the idea for Driftwood first came when I was teaching a youth group, and one day one of the kids just stopped showing up. I found out that he was sent to one of these attitude adjustment camps. They have sprung up all over since Columbine, and they're independent and aren't regulated by the government or anything. The more I learned about all this the more horrified I was. And when I tried to track down this kid, I was asked quite bluntly why I, an adult gay man, was taking an interest in this teenager. I really wanted to tell this story, but I couldn't get it sold because it was too on point. It was preachy. So we thought of adding the supernatural element, and suddenly the film worked. So that's the real answer to why I work in the horror genre. I can actually say more of the things I want to say if I disguise it as a horror film. Not too many people would spend $5 million on a movie about bigotry and the red state/blue state divide, but if you say it's Hee Haw on acid, with Robert Englund and lots of blood, you can get it made.

Q: This brings us back to why horror movies don't get respect. They make us uncomfortable.
A: Sure. Look at Twlight Zone. Rod Sterling was brilliant. He could get anything on television by disguising it as science fiction. If he had said, 'I want to do a show that deals with civil rights issues and governmental control,' the network wouldn't have let him. So he said, 'I have a show with Martians and gremlins,' and they said okay.

Driftwood releases on DVD Nov. 13. Learn more about Tim Sullivan's next films at www.myspace.com/newrebellion.