On a phoner last week I had the distinct pleasure of chatting with Susan Montford, the writer-director of the upcoming film WHILE SHE WAS OUT, which is a nasty thriller starring Kim Basinger as an upper class abused housewife. On a last minute Christmas trip to the mall, she is threatened by four punks and is forced to fight against the gang to survive. While simple enough in plot, WSWO promises to be a dark and very violent revenge film!

SpookyDan: It looks kind of like a horror movie, but it looks more like a seriously f*cked up thriller!

SUSAN MONTFORD: It’s a horror movie/thriller. I would say that it’s a thriller story, but the kills are very much in the horror genre. I am a big fan of horror, I was just thinking about this, as a kid growing up in Scotland every Saturday night it was like horror fest with the Hammer films. There was also a TV show called Tales of The Unexpected, and it was the thing you looked forward to every week when you were a child. Horror really went into my subconscious at a very early age. As I grew older my favorite film become Eyes Without A Face, it’s such a beautiful film! For me horror is a great way to access certain emotions and that’s why the images that you see as a child in films just stay there and they don’t go away. Later they try and find their own ways to get out.

BD: Do you like to shoot the gore scenes; is it fun or a pain?

SM: It’s a combination of both, using both props and visual FX can be a bitch to get it just right with the proper amount of fine tuning. It’s very much just trusting your eye to know what is too much. It was a difficult process to get the FX right. There’s not too much VFX , just with the kills, but its always done with a combination of practical and VFX because I wanted it to look very real. It has such a sense of heightened reality to get it pushed to the right look

BD: This looks like a hard 70’s revenge nasty film; will people be cringing the whole time?

SM: No they won’t be cringing the whole time, just when I want them to… it’s sort of a reverse genre film. In the film Kim Basinger plays an ordinary housewife trapped in an unhappy marriage. When she comes across these thugs, you think that it’s all going to go horribly wrong, but in fact, she fights back really, really hard! For me it was fun to have a woman, play a real woman, she’s not young, and quite fragile although very beautiful. It was fun to have the woman get to do the things that guys usually get to do in the movies.

BD: The trailer kind of reminds me of The Last House on The Left…

SM: That’s a huge compliment, thank you. Last House is one of my favorites! It is similar while it is different. At the end of Last House, you have the parents taking their revenge; in this it’s very different!

BD: Now you just said some magic words! You are a chick who said A: Last House is one of your favorites, and B: the fact that you take the comparison as a compliment… that makes you one of the coolest chicks in Hollywood!

SM: No, I think that there are lots of women that are really into horror and dark thrillers! Women have babies, which is about the most gory and visceral thing a person could ever see. I just think that it’s a common misconception that goes back to the ‘50s that women are just these dainty little flowers that can’t handle horror.

BD: I completely agree with you that there is a huge female horror fan base. But why do you think it is that there are not more female filmmakers that are making the serious edged horror?

SM: I kind of feel that there are not a lot of women that are getting a chance to make films in the first place. I was born in Glasgow, in a very violent city; I was just kind of raised around it. I live kind of dainty …yet in my head I am wearing big giant boots and chomping on a cigar. In my mind I think that woman just aren’t getting the opportunities. But for me this was a story I had to tell that I had to make.

BD: How did you get the chance to break in and make this film?

SM: I moved to Hollywood to make a Manson Family film with Vincent Gallo starring as Manson. We were locking up the locations when 9-11 hit. At that point the film really just fell apart and never really came together again. The studios just were not into making a film about him while all the terrorist things were happening. It was also a fairly expensive and complicated script. I would still like to make the Manson story, now I have been envisioning it as a TV series, like The Sopranos!

At that point I was just thinking that the easiest way to get something made was to just write something really simple that I could make for $500,000 rather than $50 million. So I wrote the script, very quickly actually, based on a short story that was really gripping. At that point I was ready to make this movie on credit cards in the backyard, I was going to do anything to get this movie made, that’s when Kim Basinger came onboard. I was lucky that she did come along because I would have done it with an unknown. At the time though, I had changed my mindset to just be ready for anything, and things started to come together. CAA called and told me Basinger was interested. Everything went forward from there

BD: So now that it’s finished and about to come out, what’s next for you?

SM: I have a bunch of projects; I would still like to make the Manson story, now I have been envisioning it as a TV series, like The Sopranos! But first up is Sex and Rockets, based on the writings of the Rocket scientist Jack Parsons.

The incredible story of Jack Parsons is one that could be insanely cool! The dude was a founding member of Jet Propulsion Laboratories – JPL - back in the late ‘30s, and one time head of the California branch of the magical order the Agape Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientalis, a black magic sect founded by Alastair Crowley! Well I hope that we can someday see a Manson Family TV show, but Sex and Rockets sounds quite amazing. Stay here for the up to the minute news on what’s happening in horror, and look for While She Was Out in theaters This Friday. - SpookyDan