Following South by Southwest’s "Directing the Dead” panel last Saturday, FEARnet conducted exclusive interviews with several of the filmmakers who participated, including Neil Marshall, Ruben Fleischer and Ti West. While all of the directors were gracious and generous with their time, after West’s spectacular breakthrough last year, The House of the Devil, we were particularly interested in speaking to him. Inevitably, the conversation turned to his next project, a film called The Innkeepers. While you can look for an expanded interview in weeks to come with the director about his career thus far and his feelings about the state of the genre in general, West offered a few insights about the upcoming project, and contextualized it in the trajectory of his expanding, distinctive body of work.

FEARnet: It seems as if there may be a finite audience for moodier and more atmospheric horror films. It that okay with you, or are you interested in sort of courting the mainstream with your vision?

Ti West: I’m trying. I mean, I want my movie to be on 3000 screens as much as anyone else’s. But it is a career for me, but it’s much more a lifestyle to where a movie takes up more or less two years minimum and becomes a mark on your permanent record for the rest of your life. So if you care about what you’re doing, you don’t want to have two years of misery and then a movie you’re embarrassed by. Unless it’s an amount of money that you can retire from or something that’s going to make your life so worth risking that, it’s so traumatic making a movie - and when you’re making a personal movie, it’s that times ten. So I’m not someone who’s just trying to make something “cool” for the audience, and to be miserable over it isn’t worth it.

How far along are you on The Innkeepers, and how locked-in are you to doing it next?

That happened very fast. It happened at Sundance: I wrote the movie very recently, I went to Sundance to see MPI, I said, ‘I have this movie and I’m bringing it to you first because we did The House of the Devil, and it’s a similar size and I think we can do it. We have a hole to do it with Glass Eye Pix in April and May and it’s going to be really good.’ They were very supportive, so we’re going to do it. We’re finishing up casting right now and I leave very soon to shoot the movie.

Where are you shooting the film?

Connecticut. It actually takes place in the hotel we were staying in while shooting The House of the Devil. It’s about a lot of my experiences there. So as similar as The House of the Devil is in the same kind of suspense fear terror scary kind of stuff, I think it will be scarier, but there’s a lot more talking in the movie. This is more of a group of people, so it will be similar in the sense that there will be these really intense, slow-paced scary scenes that are hopefully suspenseful and scary. But there will also be a lot of relatable humor, and my feeling is that if you like the movie, you would watch it again because of the people you like in the movie, not because of the scary stuff. But I do plan on it being ‘scary-scary’.

Were you emboldened to take further the style you used for your other films after the success of The House of the Devil?

Well, I’m not going to repeat myself, so the movie’s not going to be like The House of Devil. It will be very different; the only thing that will be the same is that because it’s a ghost story, ghost stories only work when they play out in a very structured, three-act pace. So it will have that kind of The House of the Devil pace, but it’s not one girl walking around, it’s not about isolation, it’s not about any of that. It’s definitely more commercial than The House of the Devil, but I think it still has a very indie sensibility that is going to make it unique. There’s a lot more talking, there’s a lot more jokes, and I don’t want to say there are more scares, but the scares are different, and the way the horror pans out is a lot more structured. It’s hard to explain, but I’ll just have to show you.