The cult filmmaker behind the "saw" series and repo!, darren lynn bousman, is crafting a new kind of immersive storytelling experience

Doom Along the Way

The way Davis tells it, Jonathan Kasdan basically willed Willow back into existence.

“He waxed lyrical about the project for some time, and he hooks you in with that. He’s used to selling stuff, I guess, selling scripts, and very much sold me on the idea that this could work,” Davis says. But still, he harbored a bit of doubt. “As an actor, you hear a lot people do this in your career. I’ve learned over the years never to bank on anything until you’re sitting on set for the first time actually shooting it.” Anything could doom it “along the way, along the path of development.”

That could easily have been Willow’s fate, getting tangled up in tantalizing possibilities, but never actually happening—the same fate as efforts to make sequels out of Beetlejuice, Gremlins, or other retro favorites that have generated noise about reboots but no results. Jonathan had assembled a coalition of believers, starting with Willow’s original’s creators, but he needed more, particularly within Lucasfilm and Disney. The advent of the Disney+ streaming service certainly helped by creating a hunger for content.

“The one other person who I knew was on the record as saying he really wanted it was George,” says Jonathan, who adds that he never discussed it with Lucas—who has taken a hands-off approach to projects since selling the company to Disney—directly. “As it’s always been explained to me, he saw the acquisition by Disney as an opportunity for more stories in the Willow world. I think that the first time that was mentioned to me was at a Writers Guild event the night that The Force Awakens came out.”

“Ambushing” Ron Howard

Not long after that conversation in the Canary Islands, Solo was plunged into crisis. It was losing its filmmakers, and shooting was nowhere near finished. In this midst of that anguish, the further adventures of Willow actually took root.

Tension had built up between Lucasfilm and Solo codirectors Miller and Phil Lord over the pace of the production, resulting in The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street filmmakers leaving the project. That falling out is its own long story, but it put the Han Solo stand-alone project in free fall with principal photography already underway, but no one at the helm. Lucasfilm needed to recruit another director.

Kennedy had a meeting in London scheduled with Howard, and both Kasdans joined her. They had a shared mission—which wasn’t talking about Willow. “We were asking him if he’d be up to come into Solo,” Jonathan says. “It was a moment of real pain, I think, for everyone involved.”

But not for Howard, who wasn’t formally involved in the production at that point. “It felt like there was definitely a lot of pressure,” Jonathan says. “Ron was really someone we were looking to help us finish the movie in what had become a really unfortunate situation…. We were all working very hard to try to make the thing work and to get the movie back on track. He happened to be in town, and we got him face-to-face and presented him with the situation that we were in.”

The meeting, held over breakfast, caught Howard by surprise. It was, essentially, an ambush. “Ambush, it was!” Howard recalls now. “I had no idea what I was walking into there.”

My So-Called Quest

So, Jonathan got busy typing. He fashioned an ensemble story that would see an older Willow heading back into the unknown with a group of young fighters to save a handsome prince (Dempsey Bryk) who has been kidnapped by sinister otherworldly forces. Ruby Cruz plays one of the rescuers, the sword-wielding princess Kit, whose brother has been stolen. Those two are the grown children of Queen Sorsha (Joanne Whalley, reprising her warrior princess character from the original movie) and Madmartigan, Kilmer’s redemption-seeking knight.

The other members of the fellowship include Jade, Kit’s closest friend and battle trainer, played by Erin Kellyman (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier), Tony Revolori (The Grand Budapest Hotel) as the somewhat whiny aristocrat Graydon, who is betrothed to Kit, and Ellie Bamber as Dove, a lovelorn kitchen worker who sneaks along on the quest because she’s carrying a torch for the lost prince. Adding muscle is Amar Chadha-Patel (The Wheel of Time) as a prisoner named Boorman, who has special knowledge of the dangerous lands they’re venturing into.

Jonathan had merged sorcery and magic with the souls of still more of his long-ago favorites—the teen comedies of John Hughes, and another pop-culture relic from the 1990s, the short-lived but beloved Claire Danes coming-of-age series My So-Called Life.

Val Kilmer’s Return

Kilmer wanted to participate in the project, but he has lost most of his ability to speak after a battle with throat cancer that left him breathing with the help of a tracheotomy. A persistent question Jonathan has faced is: Will Madmartigan return?

“I approached Val the moment there was any momentum around this. I told him instantly that I wanted him to be a part of the story. He really wanted to be, and he was determined to be. And like a lot of things that happened, COVID made him flying to Wales in that moment very hard,” Jonathan says.

Top Gun: Maverick found a way to work Kilmer’s Iceman character back into the story while incorporating the realities of his physical challenges, and Willow has found a way to do the same, although that meant Kilmer couldn’t be out in the cold, windy, muddy wild. Instead, the disappearance of Madmartigan has become one of the mysteries of the show.

“It seemed too sad to all of us, and frankly not right for the story we were telling, that Madmartigan was dead. And as a result, he is not in this world. He comes back by the end of the season in as meaningful a way as we felt we could, while leaving the door open to continue to build it out,” Jonathan says.

Still, Madmartigan brought an energy, an edge, that was vital as a contrast to the earnestness of Willow. The new series still needed that. “He’s the guy who calls bullshit, he’s the guy who says, ‘Yeah, I’m not doing that,’” Jonathan says.

To fill that Madmartigan-shaped hole, Jonathan came up with another character.

Deep Breaths

“With any kind of giant project like this, you always think, Well, this is the end. This is the thing that will stop us from doing it,” Jonathan says.

But they had made such progress, and the fandom had begun to rally. The excitement was there. Disney+ was counting on the show, so Lucasfilm remained determined to keep it alive. “This is really a testament to Michelle Rejwan and the moment when she did her hero bit for the thing,” Kasdan says. “She said, ‘We’re not going to let this stop us, and we’re going to turn it around quickly, and we’re going to get up and going.’”

Rejwan laughs when told about her “hero moment.” “He said that?” she asks. “It was just circumstances beyond our control, unfortunately…we had to react quickly, but also keep everyone invested and moving forward. And thankfully, we had such an incredible crew and cast that was so devoted to this. Warwick, who had been waiting 30 years to return to this role… It was a true labor of love in every sense of the word.”

From torture to roadshows

The road to ”Tension” began about a decade ago, when Bousman felt demoralized by his job—coordinating the intricate and bloody deaths of his fellow human beings on camera.

A film director, Bousman had taken over the Saw film franchise—where flawed people are killed in brutal and ironic ways by a moralizing psychopath called Jigsaw and his followers—in 2005. Saw II was his first big movie, but the work was nothing like it appeared on screen. It was monotonous and drab, even comical at times. “Most people would probably be bored to tears if they had to be on set at one of the Saw movies,” Bousman told Quartz. “It’s just doing the same things 100 times.“

After shooting Saw II, III, and IV back to back, he tired of a being a cog in the Hollywood machine. “Once again in my career I was becoming bitter,” he wrote in a blog post, alluding to an earlier period, between film school and landing the Saw franchise, when he was similarly disillusioned and wrote a mean-spirited script called The Desperate. (That was how he first earned attention from Lionsgate, which produced Saw.)

As in that period in his life, Bousman said once more, ”I had to do something dangerous.” He wanted to recover the rush that came from exploring the darker side of humanity. Last year, in a 45,000-sq-ft warehouse in Los Angeles, California, he did. Bousman, with producer Gordon Bijelonic, masterminded a live experience that was part haunted house, part escape-the-room game, and part immersive theater.

He transformed the warehouse into the headquarters of a nefarious cult called the OOA Institute. More than 50 actors and countless crew members brought the production to life, using what they’d learned about the attendees to blur the lines between reality and fiction.

The script for the show, adapted by writer Clint Sears, clocked in at more than 400 pages because of the many directions the storyline could take. (An average film script is around 90 to 110 pages—around one page per minute of screen time.)

Theatergoers had to hand over their phones and personal effects at the door, which was yet another way to alienate participants during the production. ”It’s called ‘Tension’ because we’re making you uncomfortable,” Bousman said. “This was a psychological mind-fuck. It doesn’t work if you’ve got your cellphone with you.”

A new way to connect with audiences

In a digital world, where movie magic can be dissolved with a text, plunging viewers back into reality, Bousman became addicted to a theatergoing experience that forced audiences to unplug and be present. He wanted to push that further by making them part of the narrative.

“We’re looking for raw emotion,” said the futurist Faith Popcorn, founder of the consulting firm BrainReserve, who said that creators like Bousman are tapping into a larger, societal shift, that includes other odd experiences, like crying rooms in Japan and rage rooms in Dallas, Texas (paywall), where customers can pay $25 to destroy things, unfettered, for five minutes.

It’s also in the portrayals of rampant violence and sex in science-fiction and fantasy works like the TV show Westworld, in which people live out their dark, twisted fantasies. Aside from the robots, Westworld is a lot like “Tension” in that it makes the spectators central characters in a story. Only in this case, the spectators are not characters, but real people.

“We are very small ghetto version of that,” Bousman said, of the HBO show. “But my hope is that this will be something that’s a living, breathing, changing piece of art.”

“Tension” also harked back to the oddball films that Bousman made after the Saw series—campy horror musicals like Repo! The Genetic Opera and The Devil’s Carnival that few believed in but he and his team. Repo! nearly ended upon the cutting room floor because the backers didn’t want to release it. So Bousman and his cast and crew embarked on a 20-theater North American roadshow in 2008 and discovered, firsthand, that the film had a cult following. Audience members came to the rock opera dressed as characters from the movie—in full dress, makeup, and even tattoos.

In 2012, he organized another roadshow on a larger scale, this time for The Devil’s Carnival, which led to some seriously devoted fans. “It became this eye-opening experience,” said Bousman. “The whole purpose of art or filmmaking is connecting to the audience and we figured out this new way to connect with the audience by making it an event.”

For Bousman, his latest project was a rebellion against everything cinema had become in the digital age: disconnected, formulaic, and devoid of emotion. “People have forgotten the power of connection, the power of being present, the power of having a real human interaction,” Bousman said.

And, from a practical perspective, it relied on multiple revenue streams—tickets to the live event were $125, then there was merchandising, and a film is on the way—which made it easier to fund. ”To me, that’s the future of entertainment,” he said.

Roughly half of ticket holders to “Tension” went back a second time, Bousman said. The entire run of the 12-week show was sold out. (It counted high-profile theatergoers like Anthony and Joe Russo (paywall), the brothers behind Captain America: Civil War, and Neil Patrick-Harris among its fans.) Kristin Brown, 26, traveled alone nearly 1,500 miles from Corpus Christi, Texas to see the show, despite her mother’s insistence not to attend this cult thing. But after spending months of obsessing over “Tension” from afar, Brown—who co-hosts a horror podcast—said “there was no way I’m missing this.”

Devotees like her and Derek Stevenson, the man who wasn’t sure if he had joined a real cult, were invited back for a free, final showing in November. “These actors were such a big part of my life,” Stevenson said, when it was all over. “You have withdrawals for a little bit. You miss it.”

A follow up to “Tension” is already in development. It’s another live experience called “Lust,” which is now being teased online. Pre-production on the original movie, co-written by Scott Milam, also starts in March.

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Career[]

In 2004, Bousman pitched an idea for a movie called The Desperate to various American studios, who complained that the screenplay was too violent and the plot was too similar to Saw, a thriller released the same year. Eventually, camera operator David Armstrong, who had already worked on the first Saw film, suggested showing it to producer Gregg Hoffman. After showing it to his partners, Mark Burg and Oren Koules, they changed the script into Saw II. Two months later, Bousman was flown to Toronto to direct the movie.

During the production of Saw II, Bousman directed the music video for Mudvayne’s single Forget to Remember, which appeared as the main track on the soundtrack album. Saw II was a financial success, and Bousman was signed on to direct Saw III, released on October 27, 2006.

After Saw III, Bousman announced that he would never direct another Saw film, so he would be free to prepare for his project Repo! The Genetic Opera, written by Terrance Zdunich. Despite this, on February 19, 2007, Leigh Whannell announced that Bousman had signed on to direct Saw IV. Bousman explained that before shooting could begin on Repo! The Genetic Opera, there was a gap of time during which the songs were being pre-recorded, enabling him to direct Saw IV during that period.

Bousman taught film director newcomers in the Horror Film Boot Camp, which began on May 7, 2010, and ended on May 9, 2010, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He also directed an episode of the horror anthology show Fear Itself, entitled New Year’s Day, and the remake of David Cronenberg’s Scanners. Later, he helmed the psychological thriller Ninety, based on a screenbook by Scott Millam.

Bousman directed the 2010 remake of Mother’s Day, starring Shawn Ashmore, Deborah Ann Woll, and Briana Evigan. In 2011, he helmed the film 11-11-11. The following year, he reunited with Terrance Zdunich and directed The Devil’s Carnival, the first installment in a short film series. On May 13, 2013, Dread Central announced that Bousman would work on Sacrilege, a religious-themed horror film. In 2015, he participated in the anthology movie Tales of Halloween, produced by Epic Pictures. He also directed The Night Billy Raised Hell, written by Clint Sears.

In 2016, Bousman directed Abattoir. It was described as «the best 2016 horror movie you didn’t see» by Bloody Disgusting but otherwise was not well-reviewed. Abattoir premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival on June 7, 2016. Two years later, Bousman collaborated with Clint Sears again and directed St. Agatha, a religious horror film set in the 1950s.

In 2019, Bousman turned down the chance to work on a Broadway show in New York City after Chris Rock insisted he direct Spiral: From the Book of Saw, the ninth movie in the Saw series. Bousman stated that the new installment included less violence and gore, expressing the conviction that these elements were merely a gimmick for him back when he started working on the Saw films but would now serve the story in a meaningful way.

In 2020, he directed Death of Me, starring Maggie Q and Luke Hemsworth. It was filmed in Thailand and released by Saban Films on October 2, 2020.

See Our Take on Abattoir Right Here!

Wicked Horror: How do you feel, having had a lot of experience in the splatterpunk kind of torture cinema, about the genre seeming to shift away from that in favor of less visceral fare.

Darren Lynn Bousman: I love that topic. I think that horror goes in a three-sixty. So, what was popular in the seventies fell out in the eighties. And then that turned into the two-thousands and it found its way back with the Saw movies. Meaning that, in the seventies, there were these, what were called video nasties, really intense films from The Last House on the Left to The Hills Have Eyes. Just really intense genre fare. And then those kind of fell away for other films. And by the early two-thousands and late nineties you were dealing with a lot of teenagers in peril. You would deal with things like—I’m completely blanking on the title, but there were, like, five of them. You dealt with a lot, like, high school horror. And it stopped becoming so in your face. But then, a few years later, these torturous movies come back. I think that everything is just a fashion. Things fall out of fashion and then they come back. They were hot around the seventies, they fell out, then they come back. So, I don’t think we’re done seeing those extreme, vicious, violent movies. I think they fall out and I think, once something’s popular, the market becomes saturated with them. And then the audiences become bored of them because they’ve seen so many of them. You know, Saw is popular, and then there’s a thousand other movies like Saw that get made. And people say, “You know, I’ve seen that. I’m done. I’m going to move to something else.” And then it’ll find its way back. I think, for me, another kind of thing with that is, you know, we grow up. When I was twenty-five or twenty-four making Saw, I used violence as a gimmick. Now, I’m forty-one. I’ve got two kids, I’ve got two dogs, I live in a house and I’m affected by violence much more than I was as a twenty-five year old guy. So, my movies still have violence. The new Saw movie has a ton of f*cking violence. But I no longer use it as a gimmick. And I think part of that is just to do with my maturing and new life experiences.

Immersive Theater[]

In addition to his career as a movie director, Bousman began developing immersive experiences in 2016 and has co-created five experiences to date.

The Tension Experience (2016)

The Tension Experience, created by Gordon Bijelonic and Clint Sears and directed by Bousman, was launched on September 8, 2016. The ARG immersive theater production took place over nine months, with participants unlocking secrets through various interactions in an alternate reality game. The event culminated in multiple two-hour live immersive experiences at a secret location in Los Angeles. The Tension Experience was set in a 45,000-square-foot warehouse and employed over 40 actors who followed different scripts depending on how participants reacted.

The Verge described The Tension Experience as a «dramatically engaging, layered story experience that breathed new life into the ideas of transmedia storytelling.» In 2018, independent film and television production company AGBO announced a partnership with The Tension Experience to develop new immersive experiences and expand the production to more cities. The first planned project was a permanent casino destination in Las Vegas.

The Lust Experience (2017)

The Lust Experience debuted in 2017, following the success of The Tension Experience. A Bloody Disgusting review said: «The Lust Experience was a story surrounding an ancient cult that was actively recruiting new members» and «Bousman and Sears pulled every string they could to push us to our mental limits.» Haunting described The Tension Experience and The Lust Experience as «two interconnected multi-year alternate reality experiences that preyed on the emotions and thrived on the dedication of a loyal and widespread group of followers.»

Theatre Macabre (2018)

Theatre Macabre was launched in Los Angeles in 2018. The eagerly anticipated immersive experience had a thousand-page script. It was inspired by the Paris Théâtre du Grand Guignol, which, in 1897, «specialized in grotesque shows that explored society’s darkest taboos.» Bousman told Daily Dead: «It is the most intricately designed and choreographed show that we’ve done, where there are endless possibilities when you walk through the door. Anything can happen based on your choices as a participant.»

iConfidant (2020)

iConfidant, a socially distant immersive ARG, ran for six weeks in 2020, culminating in a «multimedia, multi-platform experience centered around the theme of connection» on June 6, 2020. Participants joined a month-long journey, exploring friendship, deceit, and mental health, entering what Bousman described as a «rabbit hole allowing participants to enter a bizarre and distorted world.» No Proscenium said, «the amount of work behind iConfidant is stunning,» and noted that the show raised over $4,000 for Movement for Black Lives.

One Day Die (2020)

One Day Die was a 90-minute guided online séance experience in October 2020. Slashfilm.com described it as an «intense, R-rated experience.» The immersive show saw participants receive a mysterious handmade box sent by the show’s creators that must remain sealed until the experience commenced. Participants then enjoyed «a spooky evening from the comfort of their own homes.» In October, a run of sold-out shows saw Bousman announce two additional encore shows in early November. Daily Dead said: «Darren Lynn Bousman is one of the most inventive creators in the immersive entertainment space today and the fact that many of his events run for a limited time, means you have to catch them before they’re gone forever.»