Kids are downright complicated. Their hygiene methods can be repulsive, eating habits vomit-inducing, their playtime is serious -- and, boy, are they picky! It’s even worse when children happen to be bloodthirsty mutants with an affinity for wearing masks while torturing lost tourists. What can we say? Kids are weird. But in Plague Town, directed by David Gregory, co-written by Gregory and John Cregon, these kids are deadly! And when an American family visits the Irish countryside, they fall victim to a horde of these mutant children and their loony parents. If this wilderness horror plot sounds like something you’ve seen before, believe us, it’s not.

“I set up in a generic way, hoping that that would give you a comfort level,” says Gregory, a lifelong horror fan. “And then when things start happening, that’s when it becomes unnerving and disturbing and perversely funny in some ways.”

Perverse? Scary? Funny? This is our kind of movie. Read on after the jump for more on Plague Town from David Gregory, currently playing at the Philadelphia CineFest 2009!

It’s no secret that Plague Town echoes some wilderness horror like Hills Have Eyes, especially with the mutant factor…
When I wrote the script about eight years ago, the recent resurgence of wilderness horror hadn’t happened yet. I think it started with House of 1000 Corpses and, since then, the Hills Have Eyes remake, Wolf Creek, Wrong Turn, all these films that have used the exact same formula. It wasn’t an original formula, because of course the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre used it in 1973.

One thing though is that all of the other wilderness horror films are set in hot climates with the mutant families living in squalor with flesh hanging around the place, with rust and farm instruments. I wanted to be aware of those clichés and stray from them. We are in a cold climate and the houses that the people and children live in are cozy, nice houses. I wanted to play off what should be a comfortable situation in those houses, because you know there’s danger lurking around the corner.

Which cliché’s particularly did you stray from?
Usually there’s a female that goes through the torture, and in this case it’s the annoying obnoxious male, and the females don’t spend half the movie screaming. There’s no screaming in the movie at all. I just wanted to make it different, certainly not to put myself above those films. I like all of those films, but I just wanted to do it differently.

The first half of the film is a dialogue-driven talk piece; but in the second half there’s virtually NO dialogue…
Exactly. I wanted to start off with the first act as one type of a film and suddenly they are put in a situation and it becomes another kind of film. I wanted it to very much play like an indie film at the beginning with a lot of banter and talking and character development. Then we destroy them.

It looked like you used mostly practical effects…
The special effects team was headed by a guy named Tate Steinsiek. He really had his work cut out for him, because we really didn’t have a lot of resources to pull this stuff off. I was particularly demanding with him on how I wanted things to look. For example, the children, I wanted them still to look like children not Hills Have Eyes big monsters. I didn’t want it to seem like they were overpowering beasts. Even though they had disturbing appearances they still had to look child-like.

Then the death’s themselves, I wanted them to stand out and be unique, something you haven’t seen before. You expect death in a horror movie and so many deaths have been done over the years it’s quite difficult to do something that makes you go, “Wow, I haven’t seen that before.”

And I insisted we shoot on film. It was my first narrative feature and it had to be film.

How did this twisted concept even come to fruition?
There are a handful of killer children movies across the history of horror movies. There’s not that many. It seems like it’s a bit of a taboo to have children as the evil one. One of the problems that comes with that is if the children are the beasts, they are the ones that have to be killed, and I think people have a bit of a problem with that taboo. I don’t think it’s a taboo.

The extreme version of the idea that children can be annoying, for example,  if they are in a restaurant and they’re running around and you want them to settle down, but their parents think what they’re doing is cute because it’s their children. I think an extreme version of that is what this film is. [Laughs.] Obviously I don’t think those children should be harmed in any way. That was more kind of the inspiration for writing something as dark as this.

Any filmic influences?
I think the primary influence was David Cronenberg’s The Brood and also Jorge Grau's The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue. That had kind of the cold, wet, rural, soggy feel to it that I really wanted to capture with this film as well. My co-writer didn’t really have that much of knowledge of horror movies at all. He has a background in comedy. So I think the two of us together worked well to make something that wasn’t ripping off anything.

Seems like you are no stranger to the genre. As a fan, what are some of your favorites?
I’m particularly fond of the Penance from Roman Polanski but I have a diverse taste. I’m very fond of Blood for Dracula, Paul Morrissey’s film presented by Andy Warhol.

In fact, I actually got the guy who did the score for that to do one of the theme pieces we used in Plague Town. I was very lucky because he hadn’t done a musical theme since those films in 1973 and I assumed he was dead but I tracked him down for a DVD I was doing. He was so happy that I had heard of him. I showed him a rough cut of the film and in a few weeks he actually sent me a theme. It’s the piano music when they are walking around. It’s really pretty and sad and kind of like the music he did in Frankenstein and Dracula for Paul Morrissey.

I’m a big fan of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Suspiria and some of Dario Argento’s films.

What is your biggest fear?
Well nothing in horror movies scares me anymore. But I was just thinking the other night; I have an apartment in Los Angeles, and I’m on the top floor. I have a balcony. I woke up in the middle of the night thinking that someone was standing and looking in the window and there was no way for them to actually get up there. It wasn’t so much that there was an intruder that was scaring me -- it was that it is impossible to get up there, so how did he do it? Something supernatural must have happened for him to be able to get up there…