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Here's
Blood in Yer Eye!
Barrel Entertainment talks with Chas. Balun
by John Szpunar
Chas.
Balun is the editor/publisher of the legendary horror magazine
Deep Red. Deep Red hit the world
full in the face in 1986 with its rambunctious, no holds barred
brand of New Blood Journalism, oftentimes biting the
hand that fed it. Nobody was a sacred cow to Balun and his
contributors. They called things as they saw them and spearheaded
a virtual blitzkrieg into the heart of a genre that had grown
stale and lifeless. Balun has not backed down an inch in recent
years—his constant involvement with all things red and
moist has inspired countless others to carry the torch and
to create something of their own—your humble Boys from
the County Barrel included. Here then, are some words from
the front line… as Chas. Balun gives us all a piece of
his mind!
Barrel
Entertainment: What came first, the writing or the
drawing?
Chas
Balun: Well, I was always a painter and illustrator who
wrote—not the other way around. The art always came first.
I just sort of got into writing because I was always a witty
smart ass and it was just way easier to write than it was
to paint or draw.
BE:
And when did the drawing start?
CB:
Oh, around kindergarten (laughs). I started right off. That’s
what I did—that was always my little thing, right from
the get-go.
BE:
Portrait of the artist as a young man: Who were your major
influences?
CB:
I usually fell back into the old masters school of art and
painting. That classical, realistic approach to things. Whether
it was a Rembrandt or Vermeer, or a da Vinci. All of the top-level
talents were an inspiration to me as a kid because they could
just draw so well! I was just so impressed with that. Anyone
who could just really draw in a realistic manner… But,
I started off with the learn to draw courses on television.
I bought one of those kits and sat in front of the TV set
with my charcoal stick and my eraser. You know, I followed
the lessons.
BE:
This eventually led to some underground comix work.
CB:
Oh yeah. I used to go to the San Diego comic convention over
here. It’s been going for over thirty years. I was going
to it back in the hippie days, essentially. I’d go down
and get stoned with the Zap Comix artists and
meet all of those guys. Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso. So
some friends and I came out with our own comics. What was
cool was that all of us worked in the graphics section at
Golden West College at one time. Besides Jack Lewis and myself,
one of our other co-conspirators was Mike Gabriel. He went
on to direct Rescuers Down Under and Pocahontas.
He turned into Mr. Disney superstar! But we did a bunch of
issues of Mighty High Comix and Spaz Comix.
We contributed to some other stuff as well.
BE:
All self published?
CB:
Actually, George DiCaprio was an old friend of ours. He was
one of the major distributors of Spaz Comix.
Of course, he’s the father of Leonardo DiCaprio. He probably
isn’t pushing underground comics out of the trunk of
a beat up ’59 Dodge anymore…
BE:
Leonardo DiCaprio said that his father inadvertently turned
him on to S. Clay Wilson.
CB:
Oh, shit yeah! He was one of the major comix distributors
on the West Coast.
BE:
What were your impressions of the underground guys?
CB:
Well, I met Rick Griffin, Gilbert Shelton , Victor Moscoso,
Paul Mavrides… they were just fun guys. Sure, they were
party-hearty type guys, but shit! They could also wield
a mean pen.
BE:
A lot of those guys have cited EC comics as a major
influence. Did they have a similar affect on you?
CB:
Well, I used to buy them. But I don’t think they made
that big of an impression on me. Except for Jack Davis, who
drew the best. You know, the stories… as cool as they
were, you’d read the first two panels and you could always
guess how the ending would be. I appreciate them in a historical
context. They were an important step in the pulp fiction/exploitation
cinema link. Stuff like Creepshow and Tales
from the Crypt. The anthology series that spawned
in movies sort of came from a comic book source. They were
hugely influential. Whether they were really good or not is
another matter.
BE:
Where did your obsession with horror films come from?
CB:
Oh, King Kong, of course. I saw that so many
times that my nose would be bleeding. I grew up in the early
days of television. There weren’t that many stations.
Here in LA, there was the Million Dollar Movie on Channel
9, which was on of the major local stations. In those days,
they didn’t show, like, fifteen movies a week. They showed
one movie every night at 7:30. And then twice on Saturday
and once on Sunday. They got maximum mileage out of the films
they showed. And King Kong was one that I would
watch every night. Three times on the weekend! I would just
be utterly amazed. That’s just a magical film. It’s
held up for seventy years. It creates its own special world,
where you go, “Yeah! Punch my ticket! Count me in here!”
BE:
So that led to your initial fandom—
CB:
Well, it was a circuitous route there. It didn’t just
go from King Kong to splatter films. I had a
long side trip in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. That’s
when I came of age, when the pigs were coming onto the campus
and thumping your professors. So monster movies and comic
books kind of took a back seat to overthrowing the government
and getting ready for the revolution. All of that shit. The
revolution didn’t come and Pig Nation wasn’t overthrown…
I got back into horror movies.
BE:
You’ve said that things really started to open up
for you with Dawn of the Dead, Friday the 13th,
and Alien.
CB:
Well, I was always a fan of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
That was always the big influence. But I think things broke
open in ’79 and ’80. That’s kind of when things
really turned. Alien and Dawn of the Dead
really showed us something that we hadn’t seen before.
Dawn of the Dead—that was just so extreme when it came
out. I was fairly shocked by the explicit violence that it
had. So you could obviously see that the tide was turning.
Then, when Friday the 13th came out, it was
just this mainstream phenomenon. But it actually worked. I
mean, the ending is terrific. The first time you see it—it’s
just a great chair jumper. It’s set up and manipulated
so well. So you could see that people were putting a new spin
on the old stories. Friday the 13th was nothing
but a rehash of Mario Bava’s Bay of Blood.
But it worked. It wasn’t an Italian film, it had recognizable
stars… I think it just tapped into a nerve and into something
that was waiting to happen. Maybe it was a barrage of films.
It was Halloween, Friday the 13th,
Dawn of the Dead, it was Alien.
And now, when you look at how many films are the bastard progeny
of them… it would be triple figures. How many films were
spawned from Friday the 13th, Halloween,
and Nightmare on Elm Street? That’s like
thirty films right there! Yet alone all the Prowlers
and the Grad Nights! They kind of just found
the template in 1980. And then refused to let go of it.
BE:
You mentioned Mario Bava. When did you first become aware
of the Italians?
CB:
After I started to get really bored with American horror films.
They were just repeating themselves. I just started getting
back to the roots. I saw Suspiria, Bay
of Blood, found Ricardo Freda—even our humble
Joe D’Amato. Theirs was a product that seemed more directly
aimed at horror film fans.
BE:
Why do you think that was?
CB:
I don’t think the Italians have the pop-sensibility about
the horror film that we do.
BE:
Well, we’re talking about two totally different cultures.
CB:
Right. We have to have hip cultural references, hip pop music,
TV stars, and movie stars. Whereas, they took the plot dynamics
and realized all the things you could do with a simple stalk
and slash formula. They originated the giallo cinema,
which came from all those books. They evolved into movies.
I think things were bouncing back and forth across the Atlantic,
between stalk and slash films and the Italians inventing a
certain genre. The Americans copied it and then the Italians
copied it back again, upping the ante a little bit. I think
things were bouncing back and forth there for a while.
BE:
What do you say to John Carpenter’s claim that Halloween
was a tip of the hat to the giallo?
CB:
I don’t think so… Because Halloween
is such a straight forward stalk and slash number. If he thinks
he’s bringing in any supernatural overtones to it…
I don’t think that really holds any water. It’s
just a masked, unseen, unknown killer who’s frightening
because you don’t know his motivation or where he’s
coming from. That seems like an arc atypical boogeyman type
of thing. It’s not in the direction that Argento has
with his multi-layered plots. I mean, there was no doubt from
the get-go who was doing the killing in Halloween.
And that’s always the root of the giallo: Who’s
doing it and why? In Halloween, they
just strip it down to the original motivation: He just kills
because he’s such a bad dude!
BE:
Why did you start writing film reviews?
CB:
Because I don’t think anyone ever did it right for horror
films. Horror films always seemed to be looked down on as
a bastard child of real cinema. They always got the short
end of the stick. And I don’t think you can judge horror
films with the overall template of major cinema. In a lot
of cases, at least. A lot of consideration has to be given
to the conventions of the genre—whether it’s a horror
film or a western. There are going to be things that turn
up again and again. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.
In a war movie, you’ve got to have a war. You’ve
got to have people who die, heroes, the coward, the love interest.
But when it’s really done well, you don’t resent
the access to those conventions. You welcome them.
BE:
The Connoisseur’s Guide to the Contemporary Horror
Film was your first real crack at things.
CB:
Yeah. And when you go back to that, it’s more serious
and scholarly. I didn’t really joke around that much.
So I was going through the phase where I said, “Horror
films certainly deserve some kind of serious treatment, so
I’ll try this approach.” That was only after watching
X amount of films. But after watching ten times as many, I
realized that I really needed to have a sense of humor to
go on! Most of them blew homeless goats! And unless you were
just a completely anal retentive fan-boy, you could not
accept some of this stuff. Most of them weren’t done
by people who had any love or affinity for the genre. They
were made by people who were lazy. They could make a film
with no story, no actors, no budget and it would still be
a success. I mean, if ice skating movies were a big hit, they
would have made those. But they made horror films because
Friday the 13th made so much damn money.
BE:
Jack Ketchum recently compared your writing to that of
Lester Bangs. How do you feel about that?
CB:
I’m flattered! I think that’s terrific! I appreciate
the comparison. And the fact that Jack Ketchum wrote an introduction
for me—just the fact that he did that is enough!
That someone who I’ve respected for years would say those
kinds of things. The fact that he compared me to anybody
was just an honor. But Lester Bangs…I mean, that’s
quite a notable designation there, for crying out loud. Because
I liked that guy’s attitude! I liked that someone
could say, “That Led Zeppelin album blew!” or, “That
hot shot is copping riffs from some old Muddy Waters record.”
You could just blow the whistle on people. And… when
do you ever find honest critics who will go against the stream?
And go against what the fans deem to be sacrosanct? Just to
have someone say, “Well fuck it! I don’t owe anything
to anybody. I’ll call things the way I see them and let
the chips fall where they may!” But Lester’s was
one of those lives that ended way too soon, for Christ’s
sake. You’ve got to pace yourself and find a drug that
you can use for fifty years! Not one that you can abuse for
fifty seconds and say, “Whoops! I’m dead!”
BE:
Back to The Connoisseur’s Guide… How
did you find distribution for that?
CB:
I folded, stapled, and collated it on my kitchen table. Then
I bought every horror film magazine that ever came out and
mailed it out to all of them. I figured that I’d hit
on something, somewhere. I’d put an ad in Fangoria;
I was just my own public relations, shipping and receiving
dude. I’d go to conventions and pass them out, mailed
them to every fanzine and editor that I could find. I just
got hip to the world and found out who was doing what. A lot
of my inspiration for self-publishing came from Rick Sullivan,
who used to do The Gore Gazette. I give him
all kinds of credit for opening up the gates of gore and for
having a real opinioned, sarcastic approach to things. And
also, one that was funnier than hell! I’ll always give
him credit for coining the word, ‘chunk blower.’
That was never mine. I just used it more than anyone else,
so there was an association made there.
BE:
Was Steve Puchalski doing Slimetime at the time?
CB:
That was kind of around the same era. The other one I read
at that time was Craig Ledbetter’s High Tech Terror.
It was a little Xeroxed zine from Texas.
BE:
When did you first start to freelance?
CB:
Well, Fangoria called me up when I was writing
Horror Holocaust.
BE:
Horror Holocaust was published by FantaCo…
CB:
FantaCo picked up on some of my stuff and they started to
distribute it. They always had a full-page ad in Fangoria.
That really opened it up. FantaCo would say, “We need
160 copies!” Then, “We need another 200!” I
always believed in self-publishing. If you were a writer and
graphics artist like I was, you could essentially put together
everything. All you needed was to get it printed.
BE:
How did you get involved with FantaCo in the first place?
Did Tom Skulan call you up?
CB:
Yeah, he sent me a letter and called. I’d sent him copies
of Connoisseur’s Guide and he kept reordering
them. They did pretty well selling it. Then I did my self
published Gore Score. That really got a good
review in Fangoria (laughs). So, Tom wanted
me to do Horror Holocaust. He saw that I was
doing something good and that I could be gotten cheaply. I
was the cover artist, the writer… I was a one-man army.
BE:
What kind of a guy was Tom?
CB:
A complex individual (laughs)! I always thought of him as
a good friend—a best friend, but I never really understood
him. And I think he lost the fun and the joy of being involved
in the scene too soon. It became more of a labor to him. It
wasn’t fun anymore. I think that’s what really wrecked
it for him.
BE:
The first issue of Deep Red was self-published.
CB:
Yeah. We only printed around seven or eight hundred of those.
BE:
You did that issue with a woman named Chris Amouroux…
CB:
Yeah, Chris. She used to work with Eric Cadin at Hollywood
Book and Poster. Eric was always selling my stuff and Chris
was always there. She always had an interest in horror films
and funky ass shit. Plus, she looked like this hip, cool,
goth chick before that movement had a name. She was doing
a fanzine at the time, so we just kind of combined forces.
It was a nice connection with Hollywood Book and Poster; one
of the regular employees was right there with all of the directors
who came in all the time. So we thought we could put something
together and have a good outlet for it. And Chris was cool!
She got Joe Dante to write an article for us… she had
some good Hollywood connections. And since she worked at Hollywood
Book and Poster, we got all of the visual graphics that we
needed.
BE:
Who were the contributing writers for the first issue?
CB:
Probably just Chris and me (laughs). There might have been
somebody else, but I think it was just us.
BE:
You mentioned that you did some underground comics work
with Jack Lewis. He turned up as one of the graphic artists
for Deep Red.
CB:
Yeah. I’ve known Jack for thirty years. He was my original
boss at Golden West; he was the first guy who hired me as
a graphic artist. We go way, way back. We were painters together,
comic artists together… best friends for thirty years.
He was a great artistic inspiration to me—somebody who’s
just a great fucking painter.
BE:
What did you hope to accomplish with Deep Red?
CB:
Oh, to bring a more eclectic approach to horror films to the
public. And to fill in the blanks that Fangoria
was missing. Fangoria was just too slick. They
liked everything—there were no shitty horror films. There
was always something fascinating about this shoot, or this
crew… this catering company. I wanted the bubbling effervescence
of the frothing fan boy. But I also wanted some sarcasm and
some black humor. A jaundiced look at things; a highly personal
look at things. I wanted to give all kinds of people a voice
to say what they had to. And there were all kinds of people
out there who were good writers; they just needed a forum
for it. I just wanted to do a grass roots, people’s horror
zine.
BE:
You collected a bunch of notable contributors, including
Denis Daniel and Steve Bissette. How did you get a hold of
them?
CB:
They just got a hold of me. And Tom Skulan was on the East
Coast, while I was over here in fucking California. So he
knew a lot of these guys and he had a big store in Albany.
A lot of these guys would ask him how to get a hold of me.
Bissette was one of them; Tom published some of Steve’s
comic art. I don’t know what Denis Daniel is up to now.
He was a radio disc jockey back in those days. I think he
wanted to do a radio interview with me on Halloween and one
thing led to another.
BE:
You also had a lot of foreign correspondents like John
Martin…
CB:
John was writing for Samhain. Once the first
couple of issues came out, I hit a nerve with people. We had
letters come in; I remember David Schow writing in about what
a refreshing change the magazine was. I followed up on some
of those letters and got people to put their money where their
mouth was. John Martin was one of them—I always liked
his stuff in Samhain. He knew a lot of English
blokes that I wanted to do some interviews with. That interview
with Sean Hutson… I’d have never been able to have
done that. And Loris Curci wrote some stuff for Deep
Red Alert. He was neighbors with Lucio Fulci and Giannetto
De Rossi. So all of these people sort of knew what we were
trying to do and wanted to contribute. I think that’s
why the magazine had any success or popularity. It was the
voice of the people, not some film studio or corporation dictating
to the people what movies we had to say good things about.
We had self-motivated individuals who wanted to do this because
they felt passionately about it.
BE:
But there was a time when you started to feel disillusioned
with the way things were going…
CB:
Oh yeah. I didn’t want to become like Fangoria,
where I had issues coming out and there was nothing to say.
I wasn’t going to become part of that. I wasn’t
going to put out a magazine unless I really had something
to say. Not just to fill pages and meet a deadline. I had
other things going on in my life and I didn’t want to
waste the time putting together something that I wasn’t
proud of. I decided to wait for this time to pass; maybe it
would be cool again, maybe it would be exciting again…
which of course hasn’t happened yet.
BE:
In its own way, Deep Red was a shot in the arm.
You covered a lot of films that a lot of people wouldn’t
have known about. I know Buddy Giovinazzo credits Deep
Red for exposing Combat Shock to its audience.
CB:
Yeah. We were shamelessly biased in promoting something that
we thought we’d discovered. A buried treasure or a hidden
gem that we thought we’d polish up a bit and throw on
the table. So many films get lost. I thought enough was written
about the popular films. How many articles can you write about
Jason and Freddy Krueger before you just want to see something
like Combat Shock, where some fucking junkie
is baking his baby in the oven—and unapologetically so!
You see that and say, “Gosh, this is kind of grotesque.
I kind of like this. This has a point of view, this has an
attitude.”
BE:
You wrote about Last House on Dead End Street in
The Deep Red Horror Handbook. You were about the only
person at the time that knew that Victor Janos was really
Roger Watkins. How did you know that?
CB:
Roger asked me that too! Well, I was the editor of a horror
magazine and I got mail from all over the place. I just happened
to get mail from someone who had maybe eight different versions
of Last House on Dead End Street; he knew how
many minutes and seconds each version was—how much was
cut out of this one, he knew about the alternate title as
The Fun House. And he knew that it was made
by students and that Victor Janos was really Roger Watkins.
He just thought that I would benefit from that knowledge.
I used it and probably got that film more promotion than it
had ever gotten before!
 BE:
Around the time that FantaCo was publishing Deep Red,
you did some artwork for their comic book, Gore Shriek.
What was it like doing comics again?
CB:
Gore Shriek… as a comic, it was fine.
I tell you though, after I realized how long it took to draw
a comic, that sort of turned me off to whole experience. It
took way, way too long. And comic books never pay dick. I’ve
talked to Bernie Wrightson and he said, “Chas., I felt
like I was really smoking if I could just ink a page a day.”
And at a time when people were paying between $40 and $100
a page… I mean jeeze! You might as well go mow lawns
or wash cars or something! Drawing is just too hard. And there’s
no way to do it quickly. I can count the number of people
on no fingers and no hands who can just grab an ink pen and
start inking in things without penciling it in first. But
I don’t mind telling a story. I’ll either draw stuff
without the words or write the words without the pictures.
BE:
You were once slated to work on a film called Butcher’s
Pride. What can you tell us about that?
CB:
Well, that was one of those situations where everybody said,
“We’re going to make a film, we’re going to
do this, we’re going to do that.” I had a lawyer
friend who wanted to do something. And I knew Gunnar Hansen,
so we thought we could work together on it. Gunnar would be
involved, I would direct… it was one of those things
that never worked out. I think I got fired from the project.
I had such a bad attitude. I was supposed to come up with
the story and Gunnar would do the screenplay. I could just
tell that we weren’t all on the same page. And I’m
one of those people who does not work and play well with others.
I would just be insufferable to work with on any kind of film
project. So, kind of mercifully, that project never really
got past its embryonic stages.
BE:
Was this kind of experience the kind of thing that made
you want to write fiction?
CB:
Why did I want to write fiction… Well, I thought, “Gee,
I’ve read so much horror fiction and most of it just
blows. I don’t care about these characters, I don’t
care what they had for lunch, what car they drive, or if their
uncle drinks too much…” Come on, if you’re
going to write a good splatter novel, there’s got to
be a lot of guts, you’ve got to kill a lot of people,
and there’s got to be a lot of horror. If you want the
important shit, read the other books. But, if you just want
to get off on some mayhem, deliver! That was my motivation.
Why can’t more books be like Jack Ketchum’s Off
Season? For 192 pages, that’s a fucking killer
read. It’s got everything you want in a horror novel.
The only other person I found who was writing balls-out horror
all the time was Sean Hutson. And everybody hated him. “He’s
just a hack, he wrote Slugs.” But I’ve
yet to read one of his books that I thought didn’t deliver
the goods or was a pretentious bore. And that wasn’t
over 400 fucking pages long!
 BE:
Quick Gore Score review: What did you think of the
J.P. Simon adaptation of Slugs?
CB:
Um… not as good as the book, but good enough! I mean,
it’s just stupid exploitation cinema, but the slugs and
shit falling in the salad, heads blowing up… that couple
crawling across the floor that’s teaming with slugs and
snails… That filled the bill for me! “Oh, there
wasn’t a serious psychological subtext to this about
a fear of invertebrates that developed in the home of a dysfunctional
family…”
BE:
You told me that Jim Van Bebber was once interested in
doing something with your novella, Director’s Cut…
CB:
That as far as a phone call. You know how movie things are.
Again, that’s why I just started shying away from the
film business. I can write books, do paintings, and illustrations
on my own. Just me. I don’t have to call up other people
to get their approval or money. I need to do something that
I can do in my own house, unadulterated on my own terms. And
movies aren’t the pathway for that.
BE:
In 1987, you wrote an article called Movies with Guts.
It listed ten or twelve films that you thought were about
as rough as they came. Things like Freaks, Peeping
Tom, The Devils, Blood Sucking Freaks, The
Conqueror Worm… How would that list change today?
CB:
Movies with guts… now I think they’re just happier
to gross you out. Just to break some taboos—and they
think that’s ballsy. You look at some of this stuff and
say, “Where’s the story?” It’s just, “Here,
we can gross you out!” And, you know, today, there’s
this edgy neuroses thing that people are working out, which
I’m sure Nacho Cerda was working out in Aftermath.
I think a lot of people are using film as their personal forum,
to rid themselves of certain issues that they need to address.
It’s not necessarily interesting to someone outside their
circle. No one has a good fucking story to tell.
BE:
Not to say that personal issues shouldn’t be addressed.
CB:
Right. But give me a story there! Just watching all of these
aberrant, psychological anomalies that this person has…
that doesn’t necessarily make for entertaining cinema.
Put it in the context of Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
where you have cannibalism, someone works in a slaughterhouse,
somebody’s a psychotic… you wrap it up in that kind
of cool story. Then you’ve got something.
BE:
It’s always fun when something springs out from nowhere.
What films in the last ten years have restored your faith?
CB:
That’s a tough call. The only thing I’ve really
gotten behind and enjoyed a whole lot was Peter Jackson’s
Braindead. That was almost an anomaly there;
it didn’t even belong where it did. And then it just
disappeared. No one is going to do something like that again.
And now Peter Jackson is doing Lord of the Rings.
Good bye, Peter. Good to know ye… it was too short. There
haven’t been those kinds of films that came out in the
‘70s and early ‘80s, whether it’s an Evil
Dead, a Dawn of the Dead, a Texas
Chainsaw Massacre… films that got all that grass-roots
support. Braindead was one of those horror films
for the people.
BE:
The last one that really got me in that way was Street
Trash.
CB:
Uh-huh. And that’s really not a horror film, it’s
a splatter film. I think that what one can gleam from Street
Trash is this: Jimmy Muro directed it. And I thought,
“God, this guy’s got an incredible career ahead
of him.” But then you realize that he probably learned
a whole lot about making movies and how it works. Isn’t
it odd that he hasn’t ever directed another movie, yet
he appears in the credits of some really high budget films
as a steadycam operator? I think he really got a full-on blast
of what low budget filmmaking is all about with Street
Trash. “Gee, it’s great to be in all these
magazines and get popular accolades… but that doesn’t
pay the rent. Maybe it’s time to do something that utilizes
my skills, but also has some kind of payback to it.”
BE:
With that in mind, what’s it going to take for a new
renaissance in the horror film?
CB:
Unfortunately, I don’t see much hope at all because all
of the major horror directors either burned out or went on
to other things. And I don’t think that anyone’s
come up to take their place.
 BE:
Well, we have people like Jim Van Bebber… although
it doesn’t look like we’ll be seeing a nation wide
release of Charlie’s Family any time soon.
CB:
It’s such a political arena when you enter into filmmaking.
You have to worry about who’s going to distribute, what
the content’s going to be—we’ll give you money
if you do this, if you do that. I think the era of the independent
filmmaker is just going to rapidly erode… as far as getting
distribution and making money on a little film, you’ve
got to play the game. You’ve got to produce a viable
commercial product. Come on, nobody’s going to give you
a million dollars to just be an artist. Fuck that, it’s
called show business. And there is no show without the business.
So these days of these people making a film for 80 thousand
bucks, by accident—that’s not going to happen.
BE:
Why do you think that things are different today?
CB:
Because everyone is more self-conscious about what product
they’re putting out. And there’s always going to
be a bottom line. Is it going open big, is it going to play
theatrically, is it going to play foreign, is it going to
be R or PG-13… There’s so many more business considerations
in it, whereas I think back in those days, it was kind of
the last of the “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps”
era. You could just be fucking nuts, you could get some dentist
or lawyer who had a few bucks to back it. It’s more of
a corporate thing now. I don’t think anything’s
done by accident. It’s all pretty well calculated. And
it’s even more sad when you see a movie that cost 100
million dollars and you go, “Jeeze, why didn’t they
spend more than $500 on the script?”
BE:
You know things are bad when they’re planning to remake
Dawn of the Dead. It’s insulting.
CB:
Sure (nervous laughter). But look at all the ridiculous things
that have been happening. Look at all the bad TV shows that
are being remade… that’s saying something. That’s
saying, “Hey, we’ve got nothing to say.”
BE:
So is the state of the genre better or worse than you thought
it would be ten years ago?
CB:
Oh, it’s worse. It’s no fun. A lot of the fun is
gone because every horror film that comes out is so self-conscious.
Look at all that self-referential shit they have in the Scream
movies. Everybody’s got to be so hip to everything. You’ve
just sort of lost that innocence where you could drop people
into an intense situation and manipulate them. We’ve
passed that certain point where we can look back and see what
happened there, but I don’t think it bodes well for the
future. There’s not enough passion, there’s not
enough dedication to the right way of doing these things.
A lot of people think that they have to follow the formula.
And a lot of people won’t admit that they peaked twenty-five
years ago. It was a flashpoint and it will never happen again.
It’s like the way they keep throwing these Woodstocks.
In 1969, things were happening in a certain direction, and
that tapped into it. You can’t just dredge into the past
and try to manufacture an experience again.
BE:
A lot of directors are repeating themselves.
CB:
I think that it’s really unfortunate that people like
John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper can’t come to grips with
the fact that they got it dead on, one of their first times
out of the chute. And after tens and millions of dollars,
and God knows how many opportunities, they can’t recapture
that. They can’t go back, they can’t make it better.
And I think that must really grate on their asses. It’s
like, “Gee, maybe you guys ought to write your memoirs
or something.”
BE:
How do you feel about the way that Dario Argento has gone?
CB:
Well, Argento’s such a passionate true believer that
he’s just going to keep making films until he gets it
right again. He’s going to remake the same film over
and over again (laughs). But… he’s going to make
another Deep Red, another Opera,
another Tenebre, because he just tries so hard
and he believes so passionately. It’s his religion. It’s
his faith; it’s his reason to believe. I realize he’s
fucked up a bunch of times, he’s just put out stuff that’s
just numbing at the best. But he won’t quit. He’s
one of those passionate believers in things.
BE:
That’s what we need, I guess. True believers.
CB:
Uh-huh. Some people are so self-delusional and will never
understand the kind of stuff that we’re talking about.
But the fans do. And luckily, there will always be the true
believers and the watchdogs like ourselves out there to call
them on it…
Chas.
Balun Splatography
Self
Published
Mighty High Funnies, 1974
Mighty High Comix, 1975
Spaz Comix 1, 1975
Spaz Comix 2, 1977
Mighty Spazzy, 1979
A Day in the Life of Mr. Hostile, 1980
The Connoisseur’s Guide to the Contemporary Horror
Film, 1983
The Connoisseur’s Guide to the Contemporary Horror
Film (revised), 1983
The Gore Score, 1985
The Gore Score (second printing), 1985
Deep Red 1, 1986
Deep Red Magazine
Deep Red 1; 1987, FantaCo
Deep Red 2; 1987, FantaCo
Deep Red 3; 1988, FantaCo
Deep Red 4; 1988, FantaCo
Deep Red 5; 1988, FantaCo
Deep Red 6; 1988, FantaCo
Deep Red 7: Special Edition; 1990, FantaCo
Deep Red Alert 1; 1991, FantaCo
Deep Red Alert 2;1992, FantaCo
Deep Red Volume 2, no. 1; 1997, Blackest Heart Media
Criticism
Horror Holocaust; 1986, FantaCo
The Gore Score; 1987, FantaCo
The Deep Red Horror Handbook; 1989, FantaCo
The Connoisseur’s Guide to the Contemporary Horror
Film; 1992, FantaCo
Bled to Death: Horror Eats Itself; 1994, ChunkBlow
Press
More Gore Score; 1995, Fantasma Books
Lucio Fulci: Beyond the Gates; 1996, Blackest Heart
Media
Red Ink; 1999, Blackest Heart Media
Gore Score 2001; 2000, Michael Matthews Publishing
Novels
Ninth and Hell Street; 1989, FantaCo
Director’s Cut; 1995, Blackest Heart Media
Links
For more on Chas. Balun, follow the links below…
> www.chasbalun.com
>
www.blackestheart.com
>
www.rottencotton.com
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