ROB SAVAGE
THE DIRECTOR OF ZOOM-DEMON HORROR SMASH HOST IS PLOTTING FRESH SCARES
Where are you in the world, Rob?
I’m in LA. It’s my final initiation into the Hollywood cult. I’ve got to sacrifice a goat.
What are you working on at the moment?
There’s a couple of things. I’ve got a Sam Raimi project, and a thing for Fox and 21 Laps that I’m working on as well. Hopefully one of them’s going to shoot tail-end of this year.
The last 18 months have been interesting. Host breaking out’s given you a major boost.
Before I was working on a bunch of projects, hoping that this is going to be the one that gets people to pay attention. Now the difference is that people are hopefully wanting to watch what I do next because of Host. It’s a different kind of pressure.
Before Host, you made a ton of short films and commercials.
I was this pretentious art-film kid who was also watching Cannibal Holocaust when I got home from work, and getting the industry to understand where I fit took a lot of time. I had a very pretentious feature-length film [Strings, which Savage shot when he was 17], but it didn’t really showcase what I wanted to do, which was genre filmmaking. I was afforded these opportunities to go into places like Film4 and the BFI, and I was pitching alien-invasion movies or zombie-apocalypse movies. They didn’t know what to do with me. So I had to go back to front and start making short films to contextualise what I wanted to do, what I could pull off. And, having worked in commercials and done a bit of TV, I was able to make those short films quite targeted. Two in particular were my attempt to get the industry to recognise me.
Which were?
Dawn Of The Deaf and Salt. We did Dawn Of The Deaf on seven grand. We took the Host approach — I wrote down a big list of places and things we could pull off for no money and wrote around that. I love that feeling when a horror movie twists the knife and turns on you, and Dawn Of The Deaf is very character-based and explores these different facets of deaf culture, and then around the seven-minute mark twists into a zombie-apocalypse movie. That played at Sundance and got the attention of Americans. Nobody was really biting in the UK. And on Salt, my brief to everyone was, “We’ve been dropped into the middle of a James Wan movie. If we spliced this into a Conjuring film, it’s got to look just as good. And it’s got to have twists and turns, packed into just two minutes.”
That’s a lot of bang for your buck.
I always say to film students, “Don’t do what I did. Don’t make a low-budget feature unless you really think it’s going to grab people’s attention. What you should be doing is making a short, two-minute, potentially shareable film that has a hook.”
Working in America now, what’s your view on the British horror scene today?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I think Americans will take huge swings with their ideas, that I think sometimes British filmmakers are too afraid to take. But one of the things that’s been amazing about this last year is seeing so many bold British horror movies take these huge swings. I fucking love His House. Saint Maud is so fucking confident from the first frame.
And you’ve already shot Host's follow-up.
It was nice to be able to go straight into making another movie with the same creative team. It was a very low-budget project we wanted to do pre-host that suddenly we could just go and do. We were allowed to do what we wanted, and that’s amazing. But Host was such a clarifying experience for me. Pre-lockdown I was working on a TV series, and I was the lead director, and I just felt like I was having to force myself to care every day. It wasn’t what I saw myself doing. I was having a real crisis about where to place myself, and Host was such a pure experience. This is how it should be; this is the feeling that had been lost after ten years of being a jobbing director. Now I’m just thinking project to project. This next movie might end my career and I might go back to making movies on Zoom with my friends, and that would be fine.
HOST IS ON SHUDDER NOW