Dennis Bartok is a man who jumped into the horror scene recently with his first fully written and produced feature film Trapped Ashes, which is an anthology of scary stories by some of the genre's leading directors!
CONDUCTED BY: Dan AKA Master of Horror
EDITED BY: FrighT MasteR
ORIGINALLY POSTED ON: 10/07/06
Tell us a little bit about Trapped Ashes and your writing chores on the anthology?
TRAPPED ASHES is an anthology horror movie in the vein of old Amicus movies like TALES FROM THE CRYPT and THE HOUSE THAT 
DRIPPED BLOOD or Mario Bava’s great BLACK SABBATH. Basically there are a group of tourists visiting a Hollywood movie studio and they get trapped inside the decaying set from a notorious 1960’s thriller called Hysteria, something that Roger Corman or William Castle could have made, and to get out, these people have to tell their weirdest and most disturbing stories. The individual segments were directed by Ken Russell, Sean Cunningham, Monte Hellman and John Gaeta, and Joe Dante directed the wraparound material that connects the episodes, all the stuff on the movie studio tour. In many ways it’s a horror movie for people who love horror movies but it’s also grotesque and twisted and very erotic in its own right. Lots of gratuitous nudity and intestinal parasites. And there’s a very strong art house vibe to it as well it’s not an intense scare-ride like SAW or HOSTEL, it’s more like falling backwards down the rabbit hole, the kind of feeling you get from David Cronenberg or David Lynch films, very disorienting and hallucinatory. Maybe acid horror is the best way to describe it.
Is this the first feature length film you've written?
This is the first one I’ve produced. I sold several scripts before including a monster-themed project called Jenny Hanniver to Fox but I got tired of waiting for the movies to actually get made so I went out and raised the financing for TRAPPED ASHES myself with my partners Yuko Yoshikawa and Yoshifumi Hosoya, who were great to work with, incredibly dedicated to getting this film off the ground.
Was it hard to write in the anthology format and would you do it again?
Writing for the anthology format was actually great fun, I’ve always loved collections of supernatural stories by writers like Sheridan Le Fanu and M.R. James, so this was a chance to do something in that Gothic tradition. As far as doing it again I’m already developing my next project called THE KNIVES which I’ll be directing, it’s the story of 3 knives and the really nasty things they do to people. It’s also about ancient Roman mystery religions, girls with really hot butts, the Japanese art of flower arranging and the world’s rarest jazz record and (of course!) lots of Blood and Sex.
Is there a Trapped Ashes sequel planned or are the producers waiting to see how well the first installment does?
We’ve already kicked some ideas around for a sequel in fact there’s an episode that was cut from the TRAPPED ASHES script called Amber Beads; it involves the same lead characters Henry and Julia who are featured in the Jibaku (Evil Spirit) episode. Monte Hellman is scheduled to direct the Amber Beads segment, hopefully as an extra for the DVD release.
Have you had any contact with Sean Cunningham and Joe Dante and what's it been like working on a film with them?
I’ve known Joe for many years through my former job programming for the American Cinematheque, a non-profit film theatre in 
L.A. Joe helped us organize our first retrospective on Mario Bava and loaned us a lot of rare horror Sci-Fi film prints over the years. I knew he was a fan of the Amicus anthology films, in fact he loaned us a print of DR. TERRORS HOUSE OF HORRORS at one point which we unfortunately damaged (but were luckily able to replace!), so he was a natural for this movie. I think he did an incredible job with the wraparound material; it’s really the skeleton that holds the whole movie together.
We got in touch with Sean through a friend of my co-producers Yuko and Yoshi. He read the script overnight practically and responded immediately. He’s a very intuitive filmmaker and really likes to feel his way through the material he also brought in some really far-out references like the insane early 70’s Euro/horror flick LA BETE and the Japanese anime LEGEND OF THE OVERFIEND, for example.
Who are some of your writing influences?
As far as influences I already mentioned supernatural writers like Sheridan Le Fanu and M.R. James. The Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa who did CURE and CHARISMA is another favorite. I’m also a big fan of Charles Hoy Fort who wrote The Book of the Damned and Wild Talents in the 1920’s, these huge, non-fiction compilations of weird occurrences like rains of frogs and fish from the skies. He’s sort of the godfather of crypto zoology and the X-Files kind of stuff. There’s also a great book published in 1897 called The Book of Dreams & Ghosts by Andrew Lang, it’s another non-fiction compilation of freakish happenings and strange hauntings all over the U.K., very poetic and disturbing stories, but all supposedly true.
You've been involved in some capacity or another with quite a few horror documentaries, how did they come about?
Most of those feature Q&A’s that I did while I was working for the Cinematheque interviewing directors like John Carpenter, Ridley Scott, Monte Hellman, so I wasn’t involved with putting the documentaries together, I’m just featured doing discussions on them.
Has there been talk of major distribution for Trapped Ashes or will there be a theatrical run first?
We’re talking with distributors right now. We had a great world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in front of about 1,000 rain-soaked horror fans during Midnight Madness, so we’re building on that momentum and trying to get word out to the hardcore genre fans.
Special thanks goes out to Dennis Bartok for the interview and my buddy Brian "Horror Pimp" Harris.
