Late Night Classics – Tales from the Hood

My introduction to the horror anthology was George A. Romero’s 1982 titan team-up with Stephen King, Creepshow. What I love about the format is the way it weaves a number of different tales into one, and in doing so, it gives fans the feeling they are watching several movies wrapped into one. Even if one or two of the stories are not up to par, there is always another vignette or two that can balance out the final product. Being the 80′s child that I am, some of my favorites are Creepshow 2, Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, Nightmares, and The Offspring.

The 1990′s were just around the corner as the horror anthology took a sabbatical as the genre was trying to find its identity. Darin Scott, who had co-written the ferocious little number, The Offspring [From a Whisper to a Scream], used the chaos and tribulations that the City of Angels went through in the early 90′s as a jumping off point for an inner-city fable that should be used in schools as a history lesson. Tales from the Hood is a powerful piece of filmmaking with a message, one that never forgets to have fun while educating people about the real life terrors that people go through on a daily basis. It’s time to go back to the hood with producer and writer, Darin Scott.

Jason Bene: What were some of the anthologies that inspired you to make Tales from the Hood?

Darin Scott: I’m a major horror anthology fan. I’ve always loved them ever since the Amicus horror anthologies Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror. Almost all of them I liked. There are one or two that I thought were kind of weak, but I just always loved that format. Of course, Dead of Night, which I didn’t see until I had seen a bunch of the more modern ones – is brilliant. It was made in the 40′s and it’s the first horror anthology. It’s a fantastic movie and it really started the whole format. Most people don’t even know about it because it’s in black and white. It’s a great horror anthology. They didn’t really make them for like twenty years until Amicus started cranking them out. The first one I actually saw was Tales from the Crypt, but then I sought out all of the others. Asylum was another great one. Another one that I liked was The House That Dripped Blood.

Jason Bene: Were there any that you were trying to avoid that did a diservice to the format?

Darin Scott: You know what, even the ones that don’t come out as well I don’t want to rag on. My first movie was a horror anthology [The Offspring]. People really like that movie. If you look at the reviews and comments on IMDb, it has been getting a lot of reaction lately because MGM finally put it out on DVD in the United States. A lot of people have been seeing it on DVD and cable for the first time now and they are like, “Boy, this is a nasty little movie.” It was. It was brutal.

Jason Bene: Was Tales from the Hood a wink to the blaxploitation films of the 70′s?

Darin Scott: To tell you the truth, no. It really wasn’t. To me, the inspiration for this movie was the Amicus horror anthologies and Dead of Night. I wanted to do it in an urban context and wanting to have a little social relevance to the stories because that’s what made it special about being urban. We dealt with social issues with a real effort to balance the real issues out there, but we don’t want this to be a preach-a-thon. We want entertainment first with a hint of social commentary.

Jason Bene: The film is timely. Southern California was hit with three divisive events in the early 90′s: the Rodney King beating, the riots that followed, and the O.J. Simpson trial. Those things split everyone right down the middle and it was a weird period because everyone was uncomfortable.

Darin Scott: There was a lot of racial conflict going on. It was on everybody’s mind. We wanted to make this a little different. I think that’s one of the things that sets Tales from the Hood apart. All horror anthologies and short horror stories have always been morality tales, so to me it was just taking it one step further to turn the morality tales into socially relevant tales. It wasn’t a hard squeeze, and I think we were still able to tell really fun and really scary stories that stood on their own and entertained people. I will still say to this day, I’ve had several pictures that grossed more at the box-office than Tales from the Hood did, but I don’t have any other movie that more people seem to recognize and seen to have enjoyed. When I bring up the different movies that I have done, people’s eyes seem to light up more often with Tales from the Hood than anything else.

Jason Bene: Anthologies have never done well at the box-office. How did you, Spike Lee, and Rusty Cundieff believe that the time was right to do one?

Darin Scott: I’ll tell you exactly how it came about. I was on the set of Love and a .45 in Austin, Texas and I was talking with a producer friend of mine who had come to visit me on the set about what I wanted to do next. He said, “What do you like?” And I said, “Well, I’d really love to do another horror movie.” I love horror anthologies. I’ve done one, but they are a tough sale. People think its all been done. At that point, Creepshow had been done and Tales from the Darkside. It was exactly a hot genre by any stretch of the imagination. I remember taking a walk on the country road in Austin and it just hit me. I told my friend, “I really love Tales from the Crypt. I ought to do an urban version and call it Tales from the Hood.” He said, “That’s a great idea!” A couple of days later I called up Rusty, who I had just done Fear of a Black Hat with a couple of years before. I said, “Hey man, we ought to do an urban horror anthology.” He really liked the idea and I would say that it was mostly Rusty who really pushed hard to say let’s have social commentary in it. I come from a pure horror background and he made the case for that and he was right, we can make the stories a lot better.

When I got back from doing that movie he and I sat down and we brainstormed for probably for a day or two at the most. We came up with the four stories and we went out and wrote them. I wrote the script in probably two or three weeks max; it didn’t take us that long. Rusty had a contact with Spike because I guess he had liked Fear of a Black Hat. We sent it to him and he got right back to us and said, “I love this. It’s a great idea. I’m going to try and set it up for you and I’ll be executive producer.” I want to make sure Spike gets his full appreciation. He protected us. He didn’t interfere with us creatively; he let us do what we wanted to do. He gave us a few notes and protected us. We took it to Universal and a couple other places, but Savoy Pictures were the ones who were willing to pull the trigger on the film and not just put it into development. In a pretty short period of time we were making the movie. I would say we were making that film within a year of me calling Rusty. That was really cool.

Jason Bene: On paper, something as simple as ‘the shit’ doesn’t sound very funny, but Clarence Williams III made it hilarious. I saw Tales from the Hood in the theaters and every time he said ‘the shit’ people busted up laughing. How did you get him onto the film? Could anyone else have made it so funny?

Darin Scott: Not as funny as he made it. When we were writing that we thought it was amusing, but we didn’t think it was going to become the signature line of the movie by any stretch of the imagination. When he got on the set and started rehearsing, he just grabbed a hold of that and really just ran with it. That’s the thrill of working with great actors. We had wanted him from the beginning and we had seen him in many things. He made the mortician character both scary and fun. He just loved ‘the shit’. He played with it and every time he would do it we would just crack up because it was great. When you work with really good actors it’s always much better than what you heard in your mind. You thought when you wrote it if it’s done this way it is great. Then you get a really good actor and he does it way better. It sounds way better and it feels way better and you are just like “oh my God, you just turned me from a regular writer to a genius through your performance.”

Jason Bene: In the first segment you got Tom Wright, who I remember as ‘The Hitchiker’ in Creepshow 2. His character takes a realistic assault that very much echoed the Rodney King beating.

Darin Scott: That’s what it was about. I would say more than any other story, that one had a direct echo of things that were going on at the time. We were definitely thinking about the whole Rodney King situation when we did that first story.

Jason Bene: It deals with a lot of things that people don’t talk about like the ‘Blue Code’, where regardless of nationality or race, you don’t rat out a fellow cop even if they are doing something criminal.

Darin Scott: We talked to cops about that. We had cops who worked on the film. We had a black cop who was telling us what goes on is worse than what we depicted. They were under tremendous pressure. You talk to a lot of them and they had completely taken on that mindset. I had a black LAPD officer argue with me one time defending racial profiling. I was like, “Wow, you have really been brainwashed buddy.”

Jason Bene: You have this African-American cop on his first day. He knows what is right and wrong. You can tell without going into length that they are going to pound into his head that you protect your own. You have this man who is a city councilman and a black rights activist who was outing bad cops, so the officers go out of their way to take him down.

Darin Scott: All of this was before ‘Rampart Street’. There were people who were like, “You know, you are being too hard on the cops. Stuff this corrupt doesn’t happen, you are exagerrating.” The whole ‘Rampart Street’ scandal was worse than anything that we had in Tales from the Hood. There was nothing that we depicted that does not happen. It doesn’t happen every day. Most cops are fine public servants and they’re risking their lives and we appreciate what they are doing. It’s the bad ones that make it harder for them. They should really be more angry with the bad cops than the public is. The police in Los Angeles have improved leaps and bounds since the mid-90′s. We are talking about the Daryl Gates era back then. They went through a lot of crisis with ‘Rampart’ and that caused the police force to have to change.

Jason Bene: You take a look at the effects of domestic violence on families in the next tale. There is no way that a guy known for doing comedy on In Living Color, David Alan Grier, should be that freaking scary.

Darin Scott: He was brilliant from the first audition. We were shocked when he first came in auditioned that performance. This is a funny, goofy guy that I have been laughing at for years, and he’s scary as hell. We thought it really drove the point home that someone who seems harmless worked because so many of the people who perpetrate domestic violence are people who you would never guess. You can’t tell if someone at work or other situations if that’s the guy who is going home to go upside his wife’s head. You just don’t know. They are not all walking around with wife-beater t-shirts that say, “Shut up bitch!” It kind of showed you that this is everywhere. It’s a problem that all levels of society and all levels of income.

Jason Bene: The young boy sees him as a real monster, and we don’t get a sign of it until the abuse begins. You even see that he has a tattoo that says ‘Monster’ that is hidden under his sleeve. Sadly, these monsters do exist in real life.

Darin Scott: I was very proud of that story. Screaming Mad George was the make-up effects guy on that particular story and he did an incredible job.

Jason Bene: Corbin Bernsen plays a David Duke clone name Duke Metger. You really believe he is a bigot who has hate in every pore of his being.

Darin Scott: Tom Metger is the name of the guy who was the head of the White Aryan Resistance, so we just combined his name and David Duke’s to create that character. The thing about that particular period of time was that David Duke ran for Governor of Louisana and he lost, but the thing that was really shocking to us was this guy who was the head of the Ku Klux Klan got sixty percent of the white vote. He lost basically because forty percent of the whites and all of the blacks voted against him. Most of the whites in Louisana wanted a Klansman as their Governor and that was pretty shocking to us.

Jason Bene: The dolls made me think of the Zuni doll in Trilogy of Terror. I am sure that was part of the plan.

Darin Scott: Absolutely! I love Trilogy of Terror. That one always terrified me. In my home, I have the Tales doll going against the Zuni doll, and of course, the Zuni doll would kick its ass. The Chiodos Bros. did a fantastic job with the dolls in that. It was a lot of fun.

Jason Bene: The painting on the wall with all of the trapped souls of the slaves reminded me of something that would have been seen in Night Gallery.

Darin Scott: That was inspired by Night Gallery.

Jason Bene: The African-American image-maker whose job it is the make Duke look good in the eyes of voters gets his comeuppance for selling out.

Darin Scott: He’s in it for the money. He brought a great swarminess. It’s social commentary. We are not trying to point fingers at black people or anything else. Racism is still a big issue in the United States with a black president. It’s still a big issue. Very few films or projects deal with it because it’s a turn-off to people. They are uncomfortable with it and don’t want to discuss it. It’s always been horror and science fiction, in particular, that could deal with social issues that people didn’t want to deal with. Rod Serling was the guy who made me want to become a writer. I worshipped the guy. He had gone to CBS with this idea to do an anthology series that was going to deal with all of these different social issues and they turned him down. This was a guy who won every writing award possible in the 50′s. They were like, “Nobody wants to deal with that stuff.” He came back at it as it being a sci-fi, fantasy, and horror series. They were like, “Okay, we like that idea. That’s commercial. Okay, we ‘ll let you do that.” He just used those stories as a vehicle. Not all of The Twilight Zone stories are social commentary, but I tell you something, a large portion of them are. That’s my favorite show ever. It’s impossible to overestimate the influence of Rod Serling on my work creatively. It’s just massive. That’s one of the things that we did with Tales from the Hood was try to do what he did, to do entertaining stories but at the same time, touch on these social issues. The last episode is about black-on-black violence.

Jason Bene: It is never right to say the ‘N’ Word, but when Corbin calls the black dolls “Niglets”, I laughed my ass off.

Darin Scott: There is a great story to that. I don’t even remember what we had in there. I know we did not have that in the script. Corbin was doing the scene and that was improvisation. I love Corbin, he’s a great guy. He’s super cool. He’s chasing these things around and they are pissing him off and he goes, “You Niglets!” The scene ends and we start cracking up. He’s looking at us and he goes, “Are we okay guys? Is that okay?” He was afraid we were going to be offended and we were like, “That was awesome!”

Jason Bene: The final story is hardcore and is basically an urban version of A Clockwork Orange. Did you want to finish strong with something that had no humor?

Darin Scott: Absolutely. It is the most impactful one I thought it was a pretty scary story. It tied back in the connecting story. We’re huge fans of A Clockwork Orange and we used it in a little different way. The most innovative thing was the use of actual footage from burnings and lynchings from the South. Those were real photos and they are really shocking, especially the ones that have people and their families with smiling children standing around watching it.

Jason Bene: Like it’s a BBQ in their backyard or something.

Darin Scott: Exactly. Hey, we are going to a lynching.

Jason Bene: The sad thing is it wasn’t that long ago. I felt like I was in The Museum of Tolerance, and if that doesn’t make a gang member question his or her choices in life then nothing will. You have this Neo-Nazi confronting a gangster and asking him who are you killing, you are killing your own.

Darin Scott: Rick Dean just did a fantastic job playing that part. He really elevated the writing. He was a really great actor and was a friend of mine who unfortunately passed on. The star of the episode, Lamont Bentley, died in a car accident a few years ago. Rosalind Cash passed away a few years after we did the movie from cancer. That episode was the most serious and all three of the main actors died. We thought that in terms of its social content that we tried hard to balance it. We did a lot of CGI for back then. There are a few effects in there that if we could redo with modern equipment it would look better, but overall the stuff came out really well. I never had more fun making a movie. That movie was just a blast. We built almost all of the interiors on a two story warehouse in Downtown L.A. near Little Tokyo. We had huge sets all over the place. We had the stuff that we shot at the Inglewood Park Cemetery, which was a half a mile from the house that I grew up in where my parents still lived at the time. We just had a ball making this movie. I was like a kid in a candy store. We were blowing stuff up. I was able to work with KNB, Screaming Mad George, The Chiodo Bros and all of these different make-up houses. There was a different creative feel to the make-up in each episode. We hired three or four different vendors, so they all have a unique feel.

Jason Bene: Why was there never a sequel?

Darin Scott: I have been trying to do a sequel for a decade. I have been close a couple of times. We almost did it in 2002. Russell Schwartz wanted to do it over at Universal for a division within the studio that would become Focus Features. Before he could get the deal done he left and Focus turned into more of an arthouse unit. I have tried over the years repeatedly to get the rights from them because there are people who are interested in doing it. It’s done incredible business on video over the years. It’s popular. It’s a good title. It grossed over ten million at the box-office. Much smaller movies have had three of four sequels, but we haven’t done one because Universal refuses to give up the rights. They don’t want to do it, but they won’t give up the rights. It has remained in limbo all of these years.

I want to congratulate Darin Scott on his latest film, Dark House, for winning the Fango FrightFest competition. Dark House is currently a rental exclusive at Blockbuster Video and will be available to purchase on DVD September 28, 2010.