James Wan & Leigh Whannell on Dead Silence

"Beware the stare of Mary Shaw,

she had no children only dolls,

and if you see her do not scream,

or she'll rip your tongue out at the seam."

Looking for a movie that nods at the old Hammer horror films, and winks at Simon & Garfunkel, while sending up the Saw torture flicks? If so, open your eyes (and ears) to Dead Silence, opening in theaters nationwide tomorrow.

To explain: Director James Wan says that the vibe he and his collaborator, screenwriter Leigh Whannell, went for was in homage to the Christopher Lee supernatural classics; set in a town called Ravens Fair in tribute to the old AM radio standby Scarborough Fair; and starring a ventriloquists dummy named Billy, after the trike-pedaling doll from Wan and Whannell's 2004 debut, Saw.

"Dead Silence [acknowledges] sort of a by-gone era of horror," says Whannell. "You know, horror is this durable genre; you can't kill it. It's never going to die. You cut the head off the flower and it just sprouts somewhere else. I feel like horror over the last few years has sort of gone through these various sub-genres. For a while it was slasher films and then the Asian horror remakes. Now, thanks to films like Saw, these more violent films are in."

Wan agrees, and adds, "Leigh and I set out to make a [different movie]. After Saw, there was a lot of pressure for us to come up with something that was really groundbreaking and shocking and all that, and I think in a lot of ways, psychologically, we went against that. We were like, 'You know what? We're not going to do that. We're going to do something that people are familiar with, and we're going to tell that story a bit different.' We found a new twist for a story that people are used to.

"We came up with the story of a vengeful ghost, which we're all familiar with, but then we found a new angle by making it a story about the ghost of a ventriloquist, and to make the villain a woman instead of a guy like you tend to see in a lot of Hollywood films. And of course, bring those creepy puppets we love so much!"

The movie is set in modern times, but the town of Ravens Fair is stepped in old campfire myths. The scariest historical horror of all is the yarn of Mary Shaw (Judith Roberts), a 1930s era ventriloquist who went insane and was accused of murdering of a young boy. The elderly woman was, according to local legend, hunted down by enraged townspeople who cut out her tongue and killed her. They buried her along with her handmade collection of vaudeville dummies… and 70-some years later, she returns to wreak havoc on the living.

"It smells like a very conventional film that you're very familiar with," Wan says, "but then you look at it and you go, 'Why in the world would they build a frickin' [performing] theater at the edge of a lake?!' Why? So that later it could become this dark, old creepy haunted house! We see it 70 years later. There were ideas like that, which we came up with to be a bit different from everything else that's out now."

Ryan Kwanten – "An Australian soapy star" as Wan calls him — plays Jamie Ashen, a young widower who heads home from his city life to Ravens Fair seeking the comfort of his family and hopefully the answers that hold the key to his wife's untimely death. Once reunited with his stroke-stricken father (Bob Gunton) and his sexy new stepmom (Amber Valletta), Jamie digs into the town's bloody past and finds more than he bargained for.

I admit to Wan that I haven't heard of his star actor before, but he assures me that Kwanten is pitch-perfect in the role. "When we were looking for the lead, he came in and he gave the best audition. Ryan has a cult following because of the soapy that he has done, and he's actually very big in the UK and Britain.

"He had the right look, was the right age, and everything just fell into place. He was just the right guy, and it's such a hard role to fill for anyone. Because ultimately, everyone knows the star of the film are the puppets. So it's hard to sell to an actor, and to find someone who's really enthusiastic about it and really liked it."

Veteran actor Bob Gunton was also very gung-ho. "Bob literally came in and auditioned. I auditioned a lot of guys, and I'm such a big fan of Bob's work, and so I was shocked that he would come in and audition for this role," Wan marvels. "I'm like, 'I love you!' So he came in, right, and he was the one guys who came in and said things like, 'James, what do you think about this?' He's from an old-school, theater style of acting [so he brings a lot to the table]."

While Whannell spent most of his time on the set of the Saw sequel, which was shooting at the same time as Dead Silence, he still paid a lot of attention to the fruition of the story he wrote. "What we wanted to do was, kind of set a film in [an older] world but have it be scary for modern audiences. To their credit, Universal is ...I think they sort of raised an eyebrow at us at first thinking we were going to go off and, you know, have this film where Vincent Price was creeping around and they'd be a laughing stock. But we pulled it off. I think it's definitely of that era in time but yet it's still creepy."

Wan reinforces the notion that Dead Silence is a movie for audiences with grown-up tastes. "I have a lot of older actors in my film, this is not a teenage movie, man. This is not Hills Have Eyes 2, with a lot of younger people running around. Not that Hills Have Eyes is bad, but I'm just saying you get a lot of these horror films aimed specifically at teenagers. My casts tend to be a lot older. If you look it, like, Judith Roberts, Bob Gunton, Michael Fairrman — they're mature. They're not teenagers. They come from a different school of acting."

Dead Silence also has a more sophisticated appearance than Wan's directorial debut. "Because I had a bit more money to work with, I wanted to shoot a more beautiful-looking film," he explains. "You know, Saw was shot in 18 days. It was so rough and tumble, the whole film was shot hand-held and you know, when people say, 'That film looked so rough,' it was kind of tough for me to take because I didn't have any money to do it right, and no time. So with Dead Silence, I was able to control a lot more, visually. The film does not look saturated or bright per se; I love dark films, so this has a very dark, cold feel to it.

"If anything," the director continues, "I wanted to harken back to the old black and white Hammer movies and The Twilight Zone. So I sort of kept it monochromatic to some degree… then there's a moment in the film that flashes back to the late 1930s when I wanted it to be very colorful. It has a very Hammer horror look to it: The streets are constantly fogbound, the characters are rowing their boat across a foggy lake to get to a theater that's sitting right on the edge… that's what I mean."

To me, it sounds a little like the works of Mario Bava, so I ask Whannell about that.  "The Hammer horror films, and as you mentioned Mario Bava, are very theatrical horror films. It's an interesting thing to take a look at because there's not been people who would say the Hammer films were really scary, especially now. You would be hard-pressed to find kids who find any of the old Christopher Lee horror films scary. They just don't think things like that fog machines and big matte paintings of the full moon in the background cut it anymore."

I ask Whannell: "Will the modern audiences even know who Mario Bava was? Do you think they'll say, 'Oh look: James and Leigh invented something brand new!' ?"

Whannell laughs and says, "No, I don't think that. I think especially the younger audiences who are more casual film-goers, you know… they don't troll Ain't It Cool News every day and have massive DVD collections. Those kids are probably going to be very unaware what a lot of the references in the film, and that's cool. As long as they think it's cool, as long as they enjoy it, it doesn't really matter if they know the source.

"[For instance] I can sit down and watch a Quentin Tarantino film and enjoy it without having to know every single little cinematic reference that he makes. You know he's this encyclopedia of cinema so I'm never going to be able to keep up with it. But I think that Dead Silence is more than that. And I think the main thing that we hopefully tapped into is it's pretty universal it seems, fear of dolls. I can't tell you everything... but after the film started advertising and the theater trailers have been showing on TV, we've been getting so many people coming up to us saying, 'Oh, those dolls!'. It's interesting; if something scares you, you just know there's millions of other people in the closet out there that it scares as well.

"James and I both have always just been creeped out by dolls. The old movies we love, even things like Poltergeist which basically has that one doll... it's always been something that's kind of creeped me out and it's been under utilized recently."

That should be, "until recently." Now you can see all the dolly deadites in Dead Silence, in theaters nationwide tomorrow.

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Interviews by Staci Layne Wilson