From the creators of the cult hit, Dead Birds, comes the psychological, horror film Red Sands, which follows the story of a group of U.S. soldiers who face a deadly supernatural force after they destroy an ancient statue.

Bloody-Disgusting: The terror starts in RED SANDS when a statue is destroyed, is this something that was inspired by maybe something like THE EXORCIST?

Simon Barrett: Oh, shit. You know, I’m kind of an idiot savant when it comes to my film knowledge. I mean, I try to watch just about every weird little horror movie that gets released, to the point that I’ll get really excited over these totally obscure, foreign, shot-on-video horror films that I can’t even get my friends to watch. On the other hand, when it comes to the classics that everyone’s seen a dozen times, I have these huge gaps in my knowledge.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I saw the original version of THE EXORCIST when I was a kid and don’t remember it very well at all. I didn’t make the statue connection until you asked that question. I should probably watch that movie again. I remember it being good, but I was like, eleven years old. I could have been unconsciously influenced by that film; I’m sure it made some sort of impression on me at that age. On the other hand, William Friedkin and William Peter Blatty could also be stealing my ideas through a time tunnel. That’s also a possibility. I usually wear a tinfoil hat to prevent that sort of thing, but I left it at home today.

BD: Where did the idea come from?

SB: Well, back in like, April of 2003, when we first invaded Iraq, um, again, the big news story for a while was how coalition troops allowed the National Museum to get looted, and all these 5,000 year old Mesopotamian artifacts were stolen or destroyed. And people were pretty outraged about that, because I guess they needed something specific to focus on and “us invading this country for ill-defined motives while Osama bin Laden hangs out in Pakistan” was too general. So it was a lot in the news.

I was consuming a fair amount of news media at that time, which isn’t really a healthy thing to do, and I remember hearing about all these ancient relics getting destroyed, and kind of pondering how we’d invaded, like, this area of the world where all these major religions sprang from, with very little awareness of that region’s culture, or its history. So I kind of thought it was an interesting concept to use these pre-Islamic Arabic legends to write basically a haunted house movie, because that mythology hasn’t been overly utilized in American horror cinema before. And in Afghanistan, where RED SANDS is set, some people do still believe in djinn, particularly in the rural areas, but that’s totally obscure to us.

At the same time, there were news stories about how the funding for the war was being misappropriated, and how our soldiers didn’t have proper armor and could get lost because their communications systems would fail. And I was talking to some friends who’d been over there and experienced that kind of thing. I found that to be a very fascinating, compelling, scary concept that just sort of automatically lends itself to a horror plot, you know, being isolated in an unfamiliar land. Particularly in Afghanistan, that region’s been at war for so long, I liked the idea that it’s full of these wandering ghosts waiting for soldiers to come upon them.

So the script went through a lot of incarnations – I finished my first draft in April of 2004 – but that was always the idea, trying to comment on the interesting aspects of our culture clash with these Middle Eastern countries without being, you know, overly preachy or boring about it. Using it to tell a horror story. Because I’m no political theorist, but it’s more interesting to me sometimes if horror films have some relevance. Like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD or CANDYMAN or whatever. Except not as great as those films. But trying.

BD: The synopsis is pretty vague, what more can you tell us about the film?

SB: As a horror movie fan, I personally prefer vague synopses. Like, I recently saw MARTYRS, which I loved, and I was really happy that I knew almost nothing about it before watching it, so that its twists weren’t spoiled for me. So I’d rather just say, you know, RED SANDS is about a group of U.S. soldiers stationed in Afghanistan in 2002 who encounter a supernatural force. That’s probably enough information for your readers to decide whether or not they want to risk their time watching our movie, right?

BD: Did your screenplay make it to the screen in tact, or were there some changes that strayed from your own person vision?

SB: There’s always going to be changes. A screenplay is not a work of art in and of itself; it’s a blueprint for a work of art. I mean, I get David Mamet or Aaron Sorkin not wanting a word of their scripts altered, but I’m not those guys, on a lot of levels, I guess. My scripts are designed to be filtered through the creative instincts of a talented director, editor, cast and crew. You just hope that every change is going to be an improvement, is all.

But in answer to your question, I’d say about two-thirds of what’s in the film follows my original vision. That’s a pretty large percentage, actually, but of course, being a screenwriter, there were some changes I regret. I mean, for one thing, the title, obviously. The title of my script was THE STONE HOUSE, which I thought was appropriately ominous and vague, and we kept that title until late in the post-production process, when we heard that Sony’s marketing department hated that title but had a really good poster art concept if the title was changed to RED SANDS. And we just kind of said, “No, please.” And they were like, “Ah, we already did it, actually.” And we were like, “Um. Okay, then. RED SANDS. Nifty.”

That probably sounds fairly insignificant – I mean, I can’t objectively argue the advantages of THE STONE HOUSE as a title over RED SANDS. They’re both pretty ambiguous.

In terms of changes to the script itself, those kind of fell into two categories. Alex and I communicated extensively and were in agreement about all of the rewrites I did, meaning that the difficult changes to the script were either things we had to alter because we couldn’t afford to shoot them as written, or changes that the other producers requested we make.

In the first category, the biggest deal was that we had to cut out a couple of scare set-pieces based on our schedule. A good thing about working with Alex again is that we’d run into the same situation on DEAD BIRDS, which had the exact same budget and shooting schedule, incidentally: $1.5 million and 21 days, which I know sounds like a lot, but is a very small budget for productions of this scope. So, given what we’d learned on DEAD BIRDS when we weren’t able to get some shots that we needed, we looked at the script well in advance with our 1st AD and our line producer and tried to find solutions before production began. I mean, for example, I rewrote the opening of the movie at least ten times, because the introductory scenes I came up with would have taken an entire day to shoot, so they kept getting vetoed. And then ultimately I wrote a scene that everyone approved, but then the effects didn’t really work on the day of filming, and the scene wasn’t all that good to begin with, so it got cut out of the movie. Which I’m good with, but that part of the process was sort of complicated. I learned a lot about actual producing, that’s for sure.

Then, later, we had the studio kind of step in and request changes in the editing room, mostly to scene sequence, so some scenes don’t play quite the way I imagined they would, and some of that’s a little disappointing to me. But they’re the bosses, and they gave us the money to make this strange little horror movie pretty much the way we wanted to, so you can’t really complain about any of that. And I know a lot of people, like our post supervisor, feel the studio’s changes really improved the film. I can’t be at all objective about that. But definitely some things feel a bit off from what I wanted them to be.

BD: What type of horror film is SANDS? How violent is it?

SB: That first question isn’t so simple to answer, which is probably why the film took so long to get financed, because RED SANDS is a somewhat unique horror film. It’s a surreal war thriller, but on the other hand, there is a supernatural element to it, which makes it sort of a creature feature. I mean, we don’t cop out on that. So I guess it’s a psychological creature feature war movie.

Jeez, I wonder why we had a hard time getting this financed? I mean, just listen to that smooth sales pitch.

As for the violence, like DEAD BIRDS, it’s not really a gorefest. And again, we had some effects not pan out, so some of the gory stuff unfortunately didn’t make it into the film. But it’s still pretty violent. I enjoy writing that sort of thing, and Alex enjoys filming it. So it won’t disappoint anyone in that regard, I hope.

BD: This is said to be an unofficial sequel to DEAD BIRDS, is that true? What’s the plans for the third film?

SB: We’ve been lousy at clarifying this. RED SANDS is not really a sequel. It has an ostensibly different supernatural mythology than DEAD BIRDS. However, RED SANDS and DEAD BIRDS are both scripts that I conceived as being similar, both thematically and in other ways. For one thing, they’re both obviously period horror stories dealing with conflicts in our country’s history. DEAD BIRDS was set during the Civil War and used the institution of slavery for some of its horror stuff, and RED SANDS obviously is set in the time shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, when a lot of people were criticizing our military response. I’ve always thought it’s interesting to set a horror story in a time and place where people are already on edge.

We’ve had a lot of conversations about what the third film will be. Our agent thinks it should be futuristic, and I have some cool ideas there, but it doesn’t fit with my original concept. The thing is, I do have a script written for the third film in the trilogy, and Alex wants to do it, but I’m not convinced we can get it made. It would be set in 1586, right when this country was first being settled by the British, and is much more of a horror-action thing, with a lot of disease horror and mutation elements. But because that script has more action and gore than DEAD BIRDS or RED SANDS – like, on a zombie apocalypse movie scale - it’s more difficult to get financed. It would be a significantly larger film; we’d need about ten times the budget of RED SANDS to film this one. And getting the money to shoot RED SANDS wasn’t exactly easy.

So, if you want to see the third film in the trilogy, go rent the RED SANDS DVD, I guess. Or buy one! Or several! They make excellent coasters.

BD: What are some of your favorite moments in the script?

SB: I’m probably the least qualified person to judge my work, of course, but I have a special fondness for any moments in the script that got cut out during the production process. Like if you have a bunch of kids and then one of them dies, you can tell your remaining kids that you love them all equally, but really you love the dead kid the best.

BD: What are you working on now? Do you ever see yourself directing?

SB: I’ve directed a few shorts, but I do plan to direct something on a larger scale. We’ll see if that ever happens. In terms of my immediate projects, I just finished a deal to develop an internet series called death_chain, which would be a fun slasher horror thing, you know, with nudity and gore, not as serious as RED SANDS or DEAD BIRDS. But that’s a television-style deal, meaning that I haven’t even delivered scripts yet, and then the studio might just decide to not film anything. So I’m not counting on that, although I’d love to see it happen and think it would be quite successful.

I’m also working with Adam Wingard, who directed POP SKULL and HOME SICK, to independently produce a serial killer drama that I wrote, which is right now called A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE. We start shooting that in March, so I’m pretty busy with that right now. We’re doing that very low budget, for just $75,000, totally outside of Hollywood, just to be productive. It should be interesting.

I’ve also been writing a young adult novel that I’m really proud of, and I have some more scripts in the works that I’m trying to finish. Hopefully that will all get done soon. I keep neglecting my writing for these other projects.

BD: What is your dream project?

SB: I have so many that it would be dull if I tried to enumerate all of them. Right now, I just hope my novel doesn’t suck and I can keep writing these weird movies that some people seem to enjoy. That’s more than enough for me.