Want a chance to check out everybody’s all-American golden boy himself, Dennis Quaid, as a psychopathic small-town mortician with a penchant for murdering minors and burying people alive? You’ll get your chance in BENEATH THE DARKNESS, a down-home horror flick Image Entertainment sends into limited theatrical release this Friday, January 6. Fango spoke to director Martin Guigui about the movie, and touched on his future projects—including RAGING BULL II!

BENEATH THE DARKNESS is the story of a group of teenagers (played by Tony Oller, Aimee Teegarden, Stephen Lunsford and Devon Werkheiser) who decide to sneak into the house of their small town’s mortician, Vaughn Ely (Quaid), while he’s away—or so they think. What they find sets off a nightmarish chain of events they may not survive…

FANGORIA: Congratulations on the movie and its theatrical release.

MARTIN GUIGUI: Thank you so much, man. It has a long history. We started working on it in 2003. I had a movie at the Austin Film Festival called SWING, and during the Q&A at the screening, some guy in the middle of the room raised his hand and said [in thick Texas accent], “My name’s Bruce and I’ve got a screenplay and I think you should direct it.” [laughs] That was Bruce Wilkinson, who turned out to be not only the writer but the angel who helped get the movie made, because he put up the lion’s share of the funding. But it didn’t shoot until last year becasue we worked on the script for many years, I was busy, it was tough to get the right actor, the planets had not aligned…

FANG: BENEATH THE DARKNESS is your first foray into horror. Was it an adjustment going from comedies like National Lampoon’s CATTLE CALL to a movie like this?

GUIGUI: Well, I like challenges, and you know, filmmaking doesn’t change, the process doesn’t change; I just like great stories. And as you can see in BENEATH THE DARKNESS, I love comedy, I inject it into everything I do. I can’t help but see the world in a funny way. When Dennis [Quaid] and I got together to talk about the movie, we agreed we would go in that direction, find sort of the funny bone for the Vaughn Ely character, and that would be even creepier than having him play it straight.

FANG: Quaid does a great job as the psychotic mortician. What led to the decision to cast him against type?

GUIGUI: Well, we had talked to a couple of different people. We had considered Willem Dafoe, and Ray Liotta was also in the mix. Then Bruce—he and his wife had talked about it, apparently one of them had dreamed about Dennis Quaid playing the role. So they brought that idea to me, and I thought, “Well, Dennis is an all-American guy, that might work in a really cool way.” We didn’t think he would do it, but we got him the script through a friend of mine, and he loved the character. I think Dennis loved the idea of playing against type; he has always wanted to play a sinister character, he’s just never been asked to [laughs].

FANG: Was Vaughn’s electric cigarette his idea?

GUIGUI: Yes, it was. That’s really funny that you keyed in on that; not a lot of people ask about it. He smokes that cigarette anyway, it’s part of his life. He told me he wanted this character to have some sort of a vice; it was either gonna be athletics because he’s an ex-quarterback, or it was going to be liquor; it was going to be something. There’s a scene where he’s lifting weights on the porch, and that was early in the shoot; it may have been the first day of shooting. And after we shot that, we talked about it, and I was like, “You know, that works, but there’s something missing about him. Anybody can be into their physique, like in AMERICAN PSYCHO, the way Christian Bale played that whole nepotistic thing about being into his body. And then it just happened organically. He had the electric cigarette on the set, and accidentally used it in one of the scenes. I ran onto the set and said, “You actually want to have that out here?” He was like, “Yeah, I like it.” I said, “Well, OK, let’s try that.” And after that it was only a matter of not overusing it. It was just a happy mistake.

FANG: The four main kids are very likable—bringing to mind another film shot in the Austin area, Robert Rodriguez’s THE FACULTY. Was it difficult to flesh out the high-school characters to where they were sympathetic and believable?

GUIGUI: When we cast the movie, we went through about 300 teenagers and younger actors to find those four. It was very tough to find not only what you just described, but also actors who had good chemistry with each other. I was able to find that in the casting process because I anticipated that would be the case, and when we got to Smithville and started casting the extras to play those parts in the high school, we also went through hundreds of kids until we found the right faces and the right personalities so they would match in and around our stars.

FANG: In the production notes, you say that the Texas winter made shooting conditions difficult. That said, better working in central Texas during the winter rather than the summer, don’t you think?

GUIGUI: [Laughs] Yeah, I’d say that. When we shot in November and December, we were really fortunate that, for the most part, even though the temperatures would fluctuate, like when we were shooting the football sequences and some of the outdoor scenes, some of those days it was 88 degrees. For the most part, it was a magical shoot. We were very blessed that we never got any rain, we didn’t get any insane heat; it worked for the movie. We knew—and you could feel it on the set—that magic was going on, that lightning in a bottle was happening in more ways than one. The crews down there are great; I’d shoot a movie down there anytime. Actually, I’m up for a potential film to [shoot] in Texas in the spring with Tommy Lee Jones, a film called WRECKER, which is another wild, wild ride, a very entertaining psychological thriller.

FANG: You’ve said your lights were shot out by some local yokels while you were doing a night shoot at the cemetery. Other than that, were the locals accepting of you shooting a horror-thriller in their town? It is the Bible Belt, after all.

GUIGUI: Yeah, we visited 12 different cities and townships in Texas, and it was hard finding a community that would be embracing of this story, a local high-school football-star hero who’s a mortician and turns into a serial killer. It wasn’t easy, and here’s the kicker: When we looked around in Smithville, the police chief himself, his name is Rudy, when he heard we wanted to do this movie there, he loved the script and said, “Yeah, absolutely! In fact, if y’all need to shoot at the [police] station, [you can film] wherever you need.’ When he opened up like that, City Hall did also, the mayor, the school superintendent and everybody else. I mean, Smithville really opened their arms to us. That made a big, big difference, and made it easier to get all the things we needed. And we threw a big party at the end of the shoot, a benefit that Dennis Quaid and his band played, and they raised thousands of dollars for something called Blue Santa, which gives all the kids in that county toys they otherwise wouldn’t get for Christmas.

FANG: BENEATH THE DARKNESS is by no means a gorefest, but the violence you do have is very effective. Do you think the power of suggestion is more frightening, or did the script simply call for it?

GUIGUI: The script called for it, but the answer is that it’s both. It was written in a way that you just feel it, especially [in one key murder]. Bruce did a great job of setting up the audience to really not want that to happen, and then when it does, it makes you realize, “Holy shit, now we’re in for a ride.” In my opinion, the movie really starts there. Even though we know this guy is a psychopath, we don’t know how vicious he is. In my opinion, the minute that scene happens, that’s when the audience is engaged and we just want to know what’s going to happen. I wanted to shoot it in a way that would give you the uncomfortable feeling of anticipation and create a tone of suspense. I do believe that what you don’t know is going to happen, and what you can’t see, is much scarier than what you do know and you can see.

FANG: The movie has not only a classic feel, but kind of a ’70s/’80s vibe, with the neighborhood kids knowing something’s going on, but no one believing them. The original FRIGHT NIGHT, for instance, springs to mind.

GUIGUI: Right, right on. The writer always wanted to give it a timeless feel, [to use] an old-school world, small-town values so that it could be believable, rather than totally contemporary. It’s funny, I never intended for it to be like DISTURBIA or I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER; those weren’t movies I was even looking at to model this film after, but people always make references. I was really looking to make a movie about a guy who really could be your neighbor. And the focus is the teenagers, that little love story going on, the ghost, redemption, coming to terms with who you are, his guilt… But what I really wanted to do was make a movie about a unique psycopath, and I knew that what would ultimately drive the film was a memorable villain.

FANG: The film juxtaposes the supernatural with real-life horror. Did you find those aspects difficult to balance?

GUIGUI: That was the hardest part for me. I wanted to just make a straight psychological horror-thriller. The writer was pushing for that ghost aspect, and I was never crazy about the concept. But it’s funny, you know; people like it. In my opinion, the only reason it might work is that we can all identify with something that can happen to you when you’re a kid and you’re first exposed to death. It’s a pretty cloudy world, and it’s through the eyes of a kid that we see that ghost. So I understand the writer wanting it in there; he had lost his brother when he was younger, and for him it was a personal story, so it was important to leave that in there for him. It was a cathartic experience for him.

FANG: One of your next projects is RIVERSIDE, another horror film, though one with a much bigger budget than BENEATH THE DARK. What can you tell us about that?

GUIGUI: It’s a real wild ride. You’ll see people getting killed in ways you could have never conjured up in your wildest imagination. It’s a bit of a franchise like FINAL DESTINATION in that way—I think they’re going to make more than one—and it’s also teenage-driven. It’s a really good script, which is what always drives me to making movies—finding great stories or something unique, something I haven’t seen before. Kind of like the audience; we’re always looking for something different and original, and RIVERSIDE is definitely something new.

FANG: Another of your future projects is RAGING BULL II. Why take on such a high-profile project that would seem like a fool’s errand?

GUIGUI: Well, I’ve got nothing to lose. I’m the other Marty [laughs]. Actually, it’s one, to really know more about it, when that was first offered to me, I said no because of my respect and the sacredness of the first one. But it got continually pushed and pushed on me by Joe Allegro, who held the rights and had originally packaged the first one. He said, “You’re the guy to do this, it’s a great story…” He convinced me to read the [Jake LaMotta] book, and after I did, I realized it was an important story, a great story about where the rage comes from. It’s about Jake being chained to his bed when he’s 11 years old and his father beats the shit out of him, and then his father lets him loose in an alley at midnight so he can make money off Jake’s fury. And as an 11-year-old, Jake could beat the crap out of anybody. It’s the most violent bare-knuckle fistfighting you’ll ever see, in the 1930s Bronx.

So it’s kind of like THE GODFATHER PART II that way. Would we want Scorsese to direct it? Of course. Will he? No. I’ve stepped up only because I really believe in the story, and after meeting Jake LaMotta, I realized, you know, Jake’s 90 and he feels he wants to set the record straight and answer questions that weren’t answered in the first one. So we’ll make a really good movie, but we don’t feel we’re competing with the first one. We feel like we’re sort of just setting the record straight.

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