The fear factor
We Have A Ghost director CHRISTOPHER LANDON on his freaky horror career
HIS FIRST FILM, 2010’s effed-up anthology Burning Palms, aside, Christopher Landon has spent the last decade and change carving out a career as one of the best and most interesting voices in mainstream American horror. His latest, the atypically familyfriendly We Have A Ghost, is now on Netflix, affording us the chance to track his progression as a director…
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES
(2014) After Burning Palms “briefly scared me away from directing”, Landon set up a sideline writing the first wave of Paranormal Activity sequels. But his hands-on presence (“I was on set saying, ‘The camera needs to be here’”) resulted in a natural step up to directing on the fifth instalment, by some distance the most intense of his career. “I did put a ton of humour in, but it was very grounded humour,” he says. “And after that I was hooked on making more.”
SCOUTS GUIDE TO THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE
(2015) Landon still looks back with fondness on his next movie, a gore-soaked, R-rated horror comedy in which a group of boy scouts get their zombiekilling badges. “It’s a movie about friendship, and how you grow older with friends,” he says. But he’s not oblivious to its faults. “Where I really messed up is, once you rip a zombie dick in half in the middle of a movie, you can’t really recover from it. There was nothing left to top it! I should have saved it for the end.”
HAPPY DEATH DAY
(2017)
A super-high-concept, horror-ific twist on Groundhog Day, in which a girl (Jessica Rothe’s Tree) has to relive her murder over and over again while trying to a) not be murdered and b) figure out the killer, this is the true breakthrough for Landon in many ways. “It’s where I started to lean into, ‘I can make this funny, but still be scary, and also put some of myself in there too,’” says the filmmaker, whose father, Little House On The Prairie star Michael Landon, died when he was just 16, “and talk a little bit about my experience with grief, trying to overcome it and how it can wear a person down.”
HAPPY DEATH DAY 2U (2019)
Landon followed up Happy Death Day’s success immediately with an even higher-concept sequel which expanded on the concept of the first, while revisiting and recontextualising its events. It’s a bold move to try to re-bottle lightning — there’s no ‘Groundhog Day 2’ or ‘Edge Of Tomorrow 2’, for example. “Smarter people decided not to!” laughs Landon. “It was challenging to make because we were recreating so much and having to rebuild so much, but it was a very easy movie for me to write. I knew that I was going to pivot and change gears and move into sci-fi. I tried to trick people into thinking it’s going to be the same movie all over again, and then completely left-turn it and go into something else.”
FREAKY (2020)
“If I’m good at anything, I do have a nose for ideas that feel conceptually intriguing, and are both old and new,” says Landon. Which neatly sums up Freaky, a glorious mash-up of Freaky Friday and Friday The 13th, in which Vince Vaughn’s Jason Voorhees-a-like swaps places with Kathryn Newton’s disenfranchised teenager. The film is a hoot, but was released at the height of the pandemic, and was seen by few at that point. Since then it’s found something of a second audience. “It was very painful, knowing the movie was just kind of doomed,” says Landon. “But it’s been interesting; I’ve worked on a couple of other projects and when they tried to sell them, they sell them off of Freaky.”
WE HAVE A GHOST (2023)
Although Landon’s films have often been
gorefests, there’s always been a sweetness and a warmth at their heart. Which means the Amblin-style charm of We Have A Ghost, in which a family moves into an old house and encounters a friendly spook played by David Harbour, should not really come as a surprise. “It felt like the culmination of my life,” he says. And up next? An actual Amblin movie, in the guise of a remake of Frank Marshall’s Spielberg-produced Arachnophobia. “The fact that I’ve been able to hang out at Amblin, and that’s where I work now, is one of the coolest things, because We Have A Ghost is such a love letter to that company, and to Steven Spielberg himself.” Don’t worry, though — he plans a return to the old ultra-violence at some point. “My other superpower is walking into a room, looking around and going, ‘I could kill you with that,’” he laughs. Just don’t try it on Spielberg.