Steven Katz Interview – Writer of Wind Chill

When a pair of college students (Emily Blunt, Ashton Holmes) share a ride home for the holidays, they break down on a deserted stretch of road and are preyed upon by the ghosts of people who have died there.

Horror.com's Staci Layne Wilson was on the set in Vancouver, during the shooting of Wind Chill. Here's one of the interviews.

Q: How did this idea of having basically a two-character horror movie come up?

Steven Katz: Joe Gangemi and I do a lot of horror writing and we’ve been kicking around a ideas for a lot of years and one of the things we’ve been really interested in lately is working in the J-horror vocabulary. We started kicking around ideas that would kind of relate to that and just through a series of emails, this idea came up. For a while, I was calling this the smallest haunted house ever made; two kids in a car and the car is haunted.

Q: So is it the car that’s haunted?

SK: You’ll see.

Q: What sort of elements from Japanese horror did you use?

SK: It’s not a direct copy at all, but at the same time it’s mood and creepiness; it’s not a very violent movie like Hostel or Saw, on the level of violence. It’s more of the line of The Grudge, The Eye, The Ring.

Q: Was there some sort of central metaphor you were going for or was it just to make it scary?

SK: Well, I don’t have a name, but there is an overall of sort of ‘don’t trust your first instincts;’ there’s actually a lot of that in this movie, so it’s kind of hard to talk about.

Q: Are you on set because there’s a lot of rewrites going on?

SK: No, not at all; you know they were shooting on this old mining road called The Brenda Mines in a town called Summerland. It was cold at night, and I started hearing about how horrible it was; I thought ‘Oh my god; I wrote a script that’s sending people up there suffering, so I have to suffer with them, just to watch. Greg [Jacobs, director] has been really great about letting me be involved in the process. Joe was up here for a period of time; Joe skipped the really hard stuff, though; he didn’t share the same level of guilt. But, I’m Jewish, so I have Jewish guilt.

Q: So were people cursing you out for putting them on that mountain?

SK: Yeah, ‘curses on you!’ No, they were surprisingly good about it. But, I’ve never been so cold in my life; I’m never going to write another story with snow. I may never write another story with rain; everything from now on will be set in Hawaii.

Q: So the people in the audience are really going to feel how cold they were.

SK: Yeah, it’s really serious, cause you see their breath shoots out, and the snow is real. I just re-saw The Shining, and you know that great scene where Jack Nicholson is walking through the maze; that was obviously shot in a studio, cause you can’t see anyone’s breath. When you see this, you’ll see their breath.

Q: So this is a good indication of what it’s like up in the mountains?

SK: Yeah, like scenes in here, we had a cold box in there so you could see their breath. So this has been a real suffering crew and cast, suffering for everybody’s entertainment for the sake of horror.

Q: Was it hard writing for only two characters, primarily?

SK: No, it’s kind of great, and kind of a pleasure. The characters are really rich and really blessed with great actors here.

Q: I heard the film was originally called Frost Bite?

SK: No, it was always called Wind Chill; Frost Bite was something the studio floated around for a heart beat; we like Wind Chill. Tony Gilroy, who did the Bourne movies – I ran into him at a premiere, he told me ‘I don’t know what that movie’s about, but that’s the scariest title I’ve ever heard.’

Q: A lot of movies now a days seem to have that franchise theme; is this just a stand alone?

SK: We conceived it as a stand alone; there’s a great villain and if somebody wants to bring him back sort of like a Freddy, or all the other repeat guys, that would be great. But it was definitely conceived as a one shot.

Q: Was it a spec script?

SK: Yeah.

Q: Where did the concept come from?

SK: It was – I don’t remember what the original email said, but we were just kicking around ideas. Joe told me this story about when he was working at a retirement home for priests and the priest was giving the last rites to two kids who had died on the side of the road one night. And so I thought, ‘wow, that’s kind of a scary image of that.’ And other images we had, we kind of put it all together.

Q: Are you from the East Coast?

SK: Yeah, I’m from New York, and Joe lives in Philadelphia.

Q: So the Poconos are right in the middle.

SK: Yeah, but this is set in Delaware.

Q: Did the script change a lot after your first draft?

SK: Structurally no, but there were a lot of character issues we had to deal with.

Q: What prompted that?

SK: Just sort of the way the process works, so there were some images we realized were just a bit outlandish, stuff that just wouldn’t work out. So we got rid of those and keep it manageable.

Q: Have there been many re-writes, or has it pretty much stayed to script?

SK: There’s been a lot of work, but it hasn’t been massive; like I said the structure is pretty close to the first draft. There were a few more flashbacks in earlier drafts. But this is going to be shockingly close to our original conception.

Q: More or less supernatural?

SK: It’s maintained its supernatural quality, nothing’s really changed at all.

Q: Are you a fan of the supernatural?

SK: Yeah, I love it and I’m just writing horror movies better. Both Joe and I are Bram Stoker Award winners; one for Shadow of a Vampire (Steven) and one for Whither (Joe Gangemi, co-writer).

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