THE COLLECTION, creators Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton will be the first to tell you, is a different film. Whereas the first introduced us to the masked madman— an almost human spider trapping his prey— in a shroud of visual black, THE COLLECTION is an often lush, gleefully twisted affair. The Collector, in all manner of surreal color, is on display for those who dare enter to see.

In the film, a young woman (Emma Fitzpatrick) is taken by The Collector amidst a bloodbath, as the original’s Arkin (Josh Stewart) escapes. Being of wealth, Elena’s father and a team of mercenaries coerce the newly free man to take them into the killer’s home, an abandoned hotel, constructed to be one of horrors.

FANGORIA: THE COLLECTION is quite immediately a much more colorful film. Was that a result of bigger budget, or rethinking visual approach?

MARCUS DUNSTAN: We had some more toys, and it was a little bit of all that. Also, conceptually, it just had to be a different movie. It had to be not akin to even the first one. It had to be its own, individual experience. We wanted to take advantage of all the trust and leeway we were given to go off and make this, and go off into our dreams. I have such a love for SUSPIRIA and the Technicolor system used there, and INFERNO, and I thought “What if some action characters walked into the hotel from INFERNO and the damsel in distress from SUSPIRIA wasn’t in so much distress all the time, and what if a male lead had a little more middle finger in him? What if you put it in that color palette?” So, it was only fitting to call it The Hotel Argento, because that’s where it was coming from in our imaginations; to pay homage to that great giallo feel.  I also think, for horror, found footage and some of the more down and dirty approaches which are very effective on a visceral level, left a wide door open.

PATRICK MELTON: There was a lot more. If you ever want to turn off a Hollywood executive, start talking about Italian horror movies from the ‘70s [laughs]. So, we didn’t talk about it, we just did it. The hotel is his lair and we didn’t want it to be like a SAW movie, kind of dirty and all that. We’re trying to give The Collector a certain personality, and so in that would be the way that he decorates. We tried to evolve it from the basement up and get more colorful as he goes from “hell to heaven.” And some of it had to do, because we had people all over the place, just distinguishing the rooms and the levels. Another part is obviously his love for the Italian horror movies.

It’s fun, people are aware that when Lucello, they just went into that hallway with the mannequins and at the end of that hallway is that blinking red light. The savvy audience goes, “oh, that’s not going to be good!”

DUNSTAN: Red means dead!

FANG: While you are differentiating yourselves from the SAW movies, there are moments in flashbacks and very quick edits that feel reminiscent. Do you ever feel obligated to have a visual touchstone to your past, in a way?

DUNSTAN: Well, on a technical level, the look of SAW started with a 2:40:1 matte and then became 1:85:1, 1:85:1, 1:85:1. It was also short on film. It started out on a digital format, actually, and then graduated to film. So, okay, they’ve done every color palette. They’ve done gold, they’ve done rose, they’ve done emerald, so how can we take that step up and play with color, but look different. That was the fight to do 2:40:1 anamorphic Super 35mm, and let Sam McCurdy and [camera operator and HATCHET 3 director] BJ McDonnell operate and photograph this place.

That was a big fight, because anamorphic is tough, but it allows you to go into the movie. You know you’re in the movie. You see the sheen of it, those impossible, beautiful lens flares. It helped us feel bigger and reach back to the era of the movies that we fell in love with and inspired this.

FANG: You mentioned INFERNO’s hotel and Argento, but the hotel in the film also seems a callback to H.H. Holmes.

MELTON: Oh yeah, completely. I come from Chicago, so we’re all familiar with what old H.H. used to do back in the day. That was how we described it, I think, when we were first pitching it to the producers on what it could be. After seeing what he’s done in this farmhouse in two hours [laughs]. “What? How’d he do that?!” What would his house look like? It should have these hallways that lead to brick walls and all sorts of bizarre things and passages and such. It was interesting, because we ended up having to build that to a certain extent. We shot at an abandoned elementary school, which is cool because elementary schools always have those really small hallways for little kids. So, that worked out really nice. But the first place we actually looked at was the mansion of Asa Candler, who was the heir to Coca-Cola. He was this really rich, eccentric guy who lived in Atlanta and had this house. It was H.H. Holmes. He had all these weird passageways and his master bedroom was above the ballroom so he could watch the party before he would make a dramatic entrance.

So, this house got turned into an insane asylum after, because it was just too big; too big and ridiculous. Not an insane asylum, a mental health facility. Emory University owns it and they just wouldn’t let us shoot there. It was really neat, we ended up just taking the look and feel of it and putting it in the location, the elementary school. It was probably beneficial in the long run, because it was kind of small and it would’ve been hard to shoot there. But, it was all inspired back to H.H. Holmes.

FANG: Not to give anything away, but there are moments toward the end that are very playful, almost frustrating with an unmasked Collector and what you don’t show. It feels like you enjoy keeping him at a distance. Are you interested in exploring him in that sense and revealing more?

DUNSTAN: That’s what’s so great about Michael Myers in HALLOWEEN. That’s what’s so great about JAWS. You’re in the water, you’re a victim. You’re in the wrong house, you’re a victim. So, the more you know about a killer, it sometimes really just takes the balls off the universality of where you could be vulnerable.

MELTON: It could be deflating. We were talking about we’ve all seen horror movies, or serial killer movies, and there’s the moment where they get to the reveal and it’s always so deflating. “Oh, it’s that guy.” Sometimes, when you get too deep into the origin story of your killer, you’re telling too much. A. You’re not going to be sympathetic. “Oh, he had a shitty childhood.” Sometimes, it’s better to keep them silent. I thought THE STRANGERS was so effective in telling you nothing.

We knew about that during the whole development process and the studio was so adamant that “we need to know the motivation, we need to know the motivation” and he’s like, “No, it should just be when they ask, it’s because you were home.” It was just chilling that you didn’t know, and then you never saw their faces.

DUNSTAN: There could be disconnected youth targeting you just to do it. Your Friday night was going to a buffet, watching a movie. Theirs is destroying your life.

FANG: You guys are fantastic scenarists, but after a multitude of SAW movies and two COLLECTORS-

MELTON: Where do we go from here?

FANG: Totally, you must hear that all the time.

DUNSTAN: A lot of it is just turning up the volume on real life scenarios, or trying to always go back to that point where a bully poked you in the chest and where your mind would go for what could be justifiable in that moment. Whenever we see something we care about get hurt, how badly do we want to stomp on that entity. The movie becomes the playground to unleash it and to give life to that death.

MELTON: It’s also, early on trying to think of a theme, like where it takes place. If it’s in a certain location, everything can spin out of that. SAW 6 was supposed to be a zoo, the abandoned city zoo. It often doesn’t become that, in the end, but there was a lot of set pieces and stuff where the lead character is watching things through glass. So, this one, we knew we were going to end up at this demented hotel and everything would just come out of that. Plus, in designing we had the bottom floor as hell and then we’re getting higher to heaven where everything is much more lush and colorful. It’s a process, and we’ve been through it before. Sometimes, it works better than others.

FANG: It was nice to see the influence carry over to the soundtrack. The mysterious Abby has a bit of an Italian theme.

DUNSTAN: Yes, we’d hang out while Charlie [Clouser] was composing and listen to Goblin. Also, where he creates, he has all the albums on display that he’s worked on. Sound wise, we had this goal to create the bastard father of THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL. Literally, in the opening credits song, you have that strong backbeat like “Closer,” and then in the end is “The Day the World Went Away” when we take out all the dialogue and just becomes about the looks between these two desperate people. Man, he started working on that cue first and spent nine weeks always going back to it, taking away, putting more in. That was masterful. He’s a guy that I think he’s still 15 years-old in his heart. He just rocks back and forth with a cigarette and some Starbucks and you just watch these sounds come back that are instantly a part of forever.

FANG: Abby’s cue is fantastic. She’s strange, at first. She’s almost reminiscent of Emily in THE BEYOND.

DUNSTAN: A lovely story about Erin and how an actor can come in and instantly own something, and educate you on how much further that character can go. In my head, I was going to Carol Kane and a little bit of Amanda Plummer, but it should be more delicate, it should be more frail, but there’s something in there that when it has to get loud, it does. And so, she auditions. She came into a room that was way too bright to think of anything dark and she does this full bore scene. Another actress out in the lobby heard her through the wall, picked up her pages and threw them. After that, we ended up tripling the size of her part because she was just too good of a thread to be an appearance. This was a character, this deserves to be that. 

For more on THE COLLECTION, see Fango's review here.

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MOVIES/TV - Fearful Features