Danny McBride Reveals His Favorite Horror Films

Following the announcement that Blumhouse was a developing a new Halloween film, countless names were tossed around for potential filmmakers that would helm the film. No one could have predicted that Danny McBride and David Gordon Green would be the filmmakers selected for the project, given their notoriety in the comedy world, but McBride recently shared some of his favorite horror films to let audiences know someone with good taste was spearheading the anticipated project.

“The Shining and Halloween were always my favorites growing up. We didn’t have HBO or Cinemax when I was a kid, but I would record movies still,” McBride recalled. “They were just like scrambled signals. I remember one night somehow I had recorded this horror movie called Chopping Mall. All of like six years of me growing up we had this film and it was all scrambled. In some areas the scrambling wasn’t too bad, so I would just watch that over and over again. I just loved it. It was just fun.”

Given that McBride is co-writing the new Halloween, it’s a relief to hear that the original film is one of his all-time favorites, with The Shining being another seminal work. Additionally, Chopping Mall is a lesser-seen, campy horror film, which shows he also enjoys his movies to have a lot of fun in them.

The filmmaker also expressed that horror has always been an integral component of his life and the upcoming Halloween sequel isn’t merely a unique opportunity that he wanted to explore.

“Honestly, it’s probably the genre that I watched the most. When I was a kid, it was definitely all that I would devour,” McBride admitted. “My sister and I, when we were probably way too young to be watching those movies, we would go to the video store and we would just zip right past all the new releases and go right to the horror stuff. We were always looking for the most effed up scary box that we could see. We would always try to sneak that in with the (other) rentals with our parents. I’ve always loved horror movies.”

The filmmaker also went on to explore how two seemingly different genres have a lot in common.

“I think that horror movies and comedies, they’re engineered the same way,” McBride pointed out. “They’re definitely made to watch with others. You have to engineer in a way to like know how to pace out. Like with comedy, you can’t just fill things full of jokes. You have to pace jokes and know how to hold off on the laugh at one place so that you could score a bigger laugh in another area. Horror works the same way. It’s really about that tension and that pacing and being able to just know how to manipulate the audience to feel exactly what you want them to feel. That kind of engineering, as a writer, is just fun. It’s challenging. There’s a reward when you succeed in that because you get to take people on a roller-coaster ride.”

The Halloween sequel is slated to hit theaters on October 19, 2018.

[H/T The Charleston Paper]