Bereavement Director Stevan Mena On The MPAA and the Boundaries You Shouldn't Cross In Horror

After watching the fairly savage new horror film, Bereavement, I didn't know exactly what to expect when I met its director, Steven Mena -- but I was fairly certain there would be at least three piercings on his face. Instead, Mena is about as down-home and wholesome in appearance as possible. The kind of guy who you would imagine delivering you milk in the 1950s with a wink and a smile, not the guy who directed a movie where a woman is roasted alive over an open flame.

A prequel to Mena's 2004 effort Malevolence, Bereavement is the story of a psycho killer named Sutter (Brett Rickaby) who kidnaps a young boy (Spencer List) to keep as a quasi-protégé while Sutter murders victim after victim in his slaughterhouse. Movieline spoke to Mena about his thoughts on the MPAA -- an organization that banned the original poster for Bereavement that featured a young boy holding a knife (that answer might surprise you) -- as well as the state of horror movies today: Why is there so much gore? What are the boundaries, if any? Why can't horror movies today emulate a movie like the original Halloween (a film with surprisingly little blood), which Mena calls the best movie of all time?

After seeing this movie I have to ask, why do you seem so normal?

[Laughs] You know, I never get that!

How does this type of movie come out of such a normal-looking guy?

I guess an abusive childhood? No, I don't know. I'm actually at heart pretty cowardly about a lot of things and I think, because of that, I have a lot of thoughts in my head with regards to horror. I'm always trying to scare myself. I think because I've got all of these crazy thoughts in my head, it just kind of translates into the horror genre.

How do you view death in horror films? A lot of movies have a "wink, wink" aspect to it. Bereavement certainly does not.

Horror and comedy don't mix. In fact, if you look through history, some of the worst-performing films that come out are horror-comedies. I think people want one or the other. My style of horror film is definitely non-humorous because I take the subject matter very seriously. I've just shown somebody being stabbed through the heart; I can't turn around five minutes from now and make a joke out of it. Because then I've negated all of the emotions I've created in the film. Let's take the greatest film of all time, Halloween: He [director John Carpenter] never lets up with the pressure. He's constantly layering with more pressure. And that's why people love that freaking movie: because it never let up and it never stops knowing what it is.

I can make the case that the original Halloween is not a graphic movie, as opposed to Bereavement, which is very graphic.

That's a good point. That's a very good point. And there's a reason I chose to go that route. This film is an exploration of insanity. As I was approaching this material I realized there's no way that I can sugarcoat this. There's no way that I can turn away the camera every time someone's being killed. Because, sooner or later, the audience is going to say, "F*ck this." Either show it or don't show it. The only way to tell this story, which takes place in a slaughterhouse where people are being murdered and butchered, you have to have some sort of realism, some level of gore, in order to tell the story.

How did Halloween get away with not doing that?

Because it's a very different type of emotional experience when you're watching that film. It's more suspense, but it's very single-layered. In other words, you know nothing about the killer, you know nothing about his motivations. You're just in it for the thrill. It's what leads up to the murder that's fun -- that 10 or 15 minutes of, "When's he going to come out?" I don't think you need the gore there because the suspense is king. Here, the story was king more than the suspense.

Do you wish you could get away with your film not being as graphic? You mentioned audiences expect it now.

That's a really good point, because the audience really has changed. And they've matured so much. They see so much just on the Internet these days, it's really, really tough to scare these kids. And they're so smart. So it's almost like now, if you pan away from the action it's become, "Oh, it must have been a budgetary constraint. Oh, he couldn't afford the effects so he went with the Alfred Hitchcock [technique], 'Look away and just use the sound effects.'" They're too sharp for that. When you see a horror film and you see people being murdered but you don't show the murder, people feel like you're holding out on them.

Did you pay attention to what happened with Lucky McKee and The Woman at Sundance?

Actually, my friend is Andrew van den Housten, so I paid very close attention. He was a producer on that movie.

Can you take horror too far? Would you ever want a reaction like that?

I'll tell you my thoughts on that. Yes, you can go too far in certain circumstances, and that's when you combine exploitation with graphic horror. There's a very specific reason why I don't show nudity and murder at the same time. Yes, there is a nude scene in the film, but I never mix the two. Because I do feel that's in poor taste. Once you start bringing in the element of rape and anything that's violating women in that respect, along with murder, that's where you cross the line. I think there's a place for one or the other, to do it tastefully. But I think once you mix both you're dealing in exploitation and it almost becomes pornography. And I think that does cross the line, because then you're at a point where it's like, you know, what is exactly the entertainment value here? If I can show you these murders and give you a back story of why this is happening and then offer an evaluation of it at the end -- to say, "the reason for this exercise is this" -- there is some level of premeditated thought on why I'm making this movie. Once you start raping and murdering girls, you kind of cross the line in the sense of, "Are you having fun with this? What exactly is your intention here?"

Your poster was rejected by the MPAA because a child had a knife in his hand -- similar to one that wasn't rejected for Kick-Ass. Is that a double standard?

Well, that's an interesting point. I was really upset about it when it happened. And I called the MPAA and they said, "We get so much blow-back from the exhibitors because they don't want to show these posters. We think we should preempt that and not put this poster through because we know what the exhibitors are going to say." And I'm like, "Screw that. Let the exhibitors make their own decisions. Who are you guys?" But, they did compromise. We switched the knife to [the adult's] hand, which I think is even more horrific because now it's like he's leading him to his death. So they approved that, but now -- I won't name who -- we have an exhibitor who won't put the poster up in any format. So that exhibitor is basically validating what the MPAA warned me about, so the MPAA was right in that sense. I understand they have a thankless job, but they do, on some level, understand the industry.

So why did the exhibitors not care with Kick-Ass?

When there's that level of money involved and there's a studio involved, there's so much more at stake there. So much more at work. I'm not going to put up a fight. I can't. It's easy to brush someone like me under the rug. I thought the poster was acceptable. There's no blood. There's no gore, no Saw with fingers getting cut off. There's just a subtle technique that just encapsulated the whole plot of the film.