Norton has a B.F.A. in Cinema Studies from Sarah Lawrence College as well as an M.F.A. in Film Production from New York University's Tisch School of The Arts Graduate Film and Television Program and Maurice Kanbar Institute.  Not bad for institutions attended by Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese, respectively.  He currently teaches film directing at the New York Film Academy where he has worked since 2000.  He has taught Steven Spielberg’s son; his English teacher at New York University was Lee Kalcheim, noted scribe of LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH under the pseudonym of Norman Jonas; and he is friends with both Armand Mastroianni, director of HE KNOWS YOU’RE ALONE, and Lesleh Donaldson of HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME and FUNERAL HOME, to name just a few.  

His thesis film TOMORROW’S BACON won both the H.P. Lovecraft Award from the Rhode Island International Film Festival and the Best Short Film Award at the Hampton's International Film Festival in Long Island, NY.  It holds to this day the NYU record for most Tisch Awards and nominations given to any film made there.  His latest project, the highly praised PENNY DREADFUL, has won no less than 24 film festival awards after premiering at Universal Studios in Hollywood for Screamfest in Los Angeles.  The film is now available on a special edition DVD which also contains his TOMORROW’S BACON and a commentary with Norton which is hosted by Icons of Fright’s Rob G.   

Horror films have been an integral part of Norton’s life almost since birth.  I caught up with Norton in June 2007 at his Manhattan apartment which he shares with his adopted Pomeranians, Gordon and Oscar, both of whom are unbelievably well-behaved and given free reign of the premises.  Like Poe’s titular black cat, Pluto, they follow one’s footsteps with a pertinacity which is both endearing and humorous.  Neither of them appears to be the least bit scared by the images that proliferate throughout their enormous playground, the walls of which are almost entirely covered with framed horror film ad slicks in almost every dimension that posters are printed in.  It was difficult to locate an inch of wall space that was not populated by scenes from THE SENTINEL, AUDREY ROSE, DEMON SEED, DAMIEN: OMEN II, TERROR TRAIN, THE FOG and THE THING to name a few.  A 40” x 60” subway-sized poster of EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC, signed by John Boorman, sits in the center of the living room.  A poster of BURNT OFFERINGS signed by Karen Black and an insert of CURTAINS autographed by Lesleh Donaldson also populate the scene.   

Bryan was gracious enough to discuss his love of horror and his short film, PENNY DREADFUL.   

Jonathan Stryker: Where are your parents from and what do they do?  

Bryan Norton: My family is from New England.  My father's deceased, and my mother is a homemaker in Rhode Island.  My parents met on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, when they were teenagers. 

JS: How did you become interested in horror films?  

BN: I don't know, but horror films are my earliest memory, I’m talking about four or five years-old.  I remember someone taking me to the theater to see THE FOOD OF THE GODS, which is rated PG, but I looked at it recently and that movie is pretty hard-core.  I remember that vividly, and I must have been about seven years-old.  I was obsessed with horror films in a healthy way, not a creepy way.  I think that part of it was also that they were so forbidden, too.  I remember when FRIDAY THE 13TH PART II was released I was steadfastly denied the opportunity to see it by my mother, but my brother Brett took me to see it anyway.  I am a first generation VHS kid back when they used to release something like, say MADMAN, for $89.99, and that would be my big Christmas present that year, so even then I knew…  

JS: How did you manage to see so many horror films at a time before home video had yet to become prevalent?  

BN: I am the youngest of nine children, and two of my older brothers in particular were of age and would occasionally throw me the bone and take me to see something that I wanted to see, because my parents certainly weren't going to.  One of my fondest memories is of my brother, Robert, in a huge snowstorm in 1980 and on a Monday night, taking me to see THE BOOGENS at the Lincoln Mall Cinema in Lincoln, Rhode Island.  He doesn't remember this at all, but to me this was the biggest deal.  Another time my brother took me to see FRIDAY THE 13TH PART II because I won tickets to see it from a contest on the radio.  Even then, my parents said that I wasn’t allowed to see it, but he took me.   I did get my mother, though, to take my friends and I to see A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, and she was very angry because after Tina is killed after having sex with her boyfriend they refer to Tina as the 15-year-old, and we were 15 years-old, so I think that she thought that we were all having sex like that.  I don't believe that horror film fans have sex before they’re 18 years-old anyway. (laughs) 

JS: When did you realize that you would like to make horror movies?  

BN: Well, I guess my answer sounds pretty cliché, but I would start off by getting two VCRs and making montage clips from my favorite movies…this is even before camcorders became available…and there was a little system called “Direct ED”, it was like this home video system where you could add like a track of sound and I could make lots of cool montage movies with clips from FRIDAY THE 13TH and THE THING.  When I got a video camera, like everyone else working in film today, I made lots of movies with my friends and family and the stuff was probably horror.  Also, growing up on Martha's Vineyard, which of course was JAWS land… 

JS: Do you recall the filming of JAWS? 

BN: No, I have no memory of that.  I do have vague memories of them filming JAWS 2, like when they would take the signs for Edgartown down and swap them with the Amityville signs.  One of my tickets to getting my ass out of Rhode Island was to go to film school.  It's really funny though.  When I went to school, I thought that students were going to be just like me in that I thought that they would have the same passion as I did.  But, that wasn't always the case. 

JS: Why do you like horror movies?  

BN: I don't know, but I can tell you that if I didn't like them, I could very easily pose a huge argument against them.  I know that.  I understand completely why people are so vehemently opposed to horror films, you know, to say that they’re violent and bad, etc.  So, if I didn't like horror I know that I would be very articulate in the problems I have with them.  But, that being said, I like to be scared and my memories of childhood which consisted of watching scary movies was so much fun.  That's why I'm not that big of a fan of the stuff now that is not necessarily scary at all, but it's just sort of gruesome, you know?  I saw HOSTEL: PART II recently and I personally do not like to see women tortured, begging and pleading, and I sometimes believe that that material gives the horror genre a bad name.  It's what all of the detractors of the genre use as a weapon against it.   

JS: Did scary movies frighten you as a child?  

BN: I would like to romanticize and say yes they all did, but some did.   

JS: Were there any in particular that stood out that really frightened you? 

BN: BAD RONALD, the TV-movie from 1974, which really isn’t considered to be horror, really frightened me then for some reason.  John Carpenter’s THE FOG is pretty creepy.  I thought then and still think now that FRIDAY THE 13TH still has some great scares in it.  A lot of people don’t give enough credit to this film.   The scene where the girl goes back to her cabin and it's raining very heavily and she hears the voice in the woods with a child screaming, “Help me!”  I think that's very scary.  So, there were a lot of things that I found scary.  The FRIDAY THE 13TH movies stopped being scary after the second one, I think.  But definitely there were certain ones that I found very scary. 

 JS: Did you go to drive-ins when you were a kid?  

BN: (enthusiastically) Yes!  We're sitting in my kitchen right now staring at a 40” by 60” framed TENTACLES poster, and I remember vividly someone taking me to see TENTACLES.  I had older brothers and sisters and I could never understand why they would make me go sit on the roof of the car to watch these movies.  I guess it was so that they could smoke pot and have sex.  I remember the smell of the pot!  I sat on the roof of a purple Gremlin and watched many movies at the drive-in.  

JS: What movies did you see at the drive-in?   

BN: Oh, God, I remember seeing ROLLERCOASTER and TENTACLES around the same time… 

JS: Those were both released in June 1977 – and both featured Henry Fonda!   

BN: Yeah!  I'll bet that those were on a double bill.  You know, years later I had these videodiscs put out by RCA called CED’s, and I had THE AMITYVILLE HORROR, JAWS 2, and FRIDAY THE 13TH.  They were movies on a sort-of record that were read by a stylus cartridge, and would often have skips in them.  I remember having to throw them all away because I couldn’t get the players anymore.  At the time that we had CED's, laser discs were coming out and they were considered to be so exotic.  I used to save up my money and go to a store called Anne & Hope and buy CED’s.  I owned TENTACLES on CED (laughs hysterically).  I also used to get them at a store in Pawtucket, RI called Apex.   

JS: My, God!  I think I can count on one hand the number of people who I knew, myself included, who owned CED’s!   

BN:  It’s crazy!   

JS: I bought my CED player in April 1983 and used to get them at Sam Goody in Woodbridge Center Mall and at Music Den at Menlo Park Mall, both in Central New Jersey.  STAR WARS and POLTERGEIST were the first two I ever bought.  I then used to go to Habild of New Dorp on Winham Avenue in Staten Island, which was run like Needful Things (laughs).  I think Leland Gaunt was the proprietor (snickering).   

BN: But, getting back to the drive-in, I also saw MADMAN and AMITYVILLE II: THE POSSESSION.  We had two great drive-ins in Rhode Island which are no longer around.  One of them was called the Lonsdale Drive-In in Lincoln, RI and the other was the Rustic Tri-View Drive-In in North Smithfield, RI which later turned into an X-rated drive-in.  When I was a teenager, my friends and I used to sneak into the neighborhood behind it, walk through the woods and watch the movies from the fence.   

JS: In my area we had the Plainfield-Edison Drive-In, which was probably built in the 1960’s, and it closed in September 1984.  They had everything: THE FIRST NUDIE MUSICAL, THE GROOVE TUB, SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON, THE ROAD WARRIOR, ENIGMA, you name it… 

BN: Now, did your drive-in require that you listen on the AM radio, or did you have the hanging speakers… 

JS: No, we had the speakers.  In fact, I didn’t see the AM radio bit until 1997 when I saw BREAKDOWN at the Glendale 9 Drive-In Theatre in Glendale, AZ.   

BN: I have a lot of books on old movie theaters and drive-ins.  I wonder if we tend to romanticize the past and our memories of drive-ins as we get older.  I remember seeing a cut of CRITTERS at the drive-in and it had a completely different ending, which other people swear does not exist.  It was a totally different print of CRITTERS!  

JS: What type of horror film do you like the most?  

BN:  I wish I had a better answer, but honestly deep down in my heart I really like kids in the woods, preferably at a summer camp.  I don't know why.  I wouldn't have the balls to write that myself because of all of the shit that I would get.  But, you know, when they start sending Jason and Leprechaun into outer space, part of me wishes that they would go back to the camp.  I don't know, it's because that's something that we can all relate to, and it’s a little bit more realistic.  Just because something hasn't been done before doesn't mean that it's going to be great.  Let's face it: some of them weren't even that good.  Who knows?  I think that we could use a good, old-fashioned summer camp slasher and make it good and scary and have an original ending.   

JS:  Are you a fan of horror fiction?  

BN: Yes!  Actually, when I was in film school and trying to come up with ideas for my film, the teachers always told us to read a lot and I would always read the best horror anthology stories of the year.  But, you know, most of them are just not adaptable for film.  But, I read some good stuff. 

JS:  I used to love reading all of those Alfred Hitchcock compilations like “Stories to be Read with the Door Locked.”  I was introduced to some of Richard Matheson’s best work, like “Duel” and “The Children of Noah”.  Have you listened to any old radio shows, such as “Inner Sanctum,” Arch Oboler’s “Lights Out,” “Escape,” and “Suspense”? 

BN: Absolutely, and years ago I went and found the old Cape Cod Radio Mystery Theater which is on compact disc and for a while I even toyed with the idea of making one of the stories into a movie.  It was called “The Buoy.”  The sound of the buoy reminded of my experiences on Martha’s Vineyeard, growing up at my grandmother’s house, and the sound of the buoy and the foghorn scared the shit out of me!  I kind of want to do a New England ghost story and somehow tie-in that old Cape Cod Radio Mystery Theater feeling.  I’m not saying make it a period piece, you know?  I just like that old-fashioned kind of ghost story.  “Inner Sanctum Mysteries: The Complete Movie Collection” just came out on DVD late last year, which is great to see.  

JS:  Let’s talk about PENNY DREADFUL.  How did this project come about?  

BN:  I go to a lot of film festivals, and I love short films.  I am a film teacher here in New York and I teach short filmmaking.  I love horror films, and I think the short film and the short story go together really, really well.  Some of my students want to make these dramas, but they should really be features, and it's hard to sandwich a story like that into 20 or 30 minutes.  You know, sometimes it just doesn't work.  A lot of the horror movies that they make today feel like short movies that could very easily be 30 minutes in length, but they're stretched out to 90 minutes to get a theatrical release.  I could have made PENNY DREADFUL into a feature, but I decided to go for career suicide and made it as a short film instead (laughs).  I wanted to make a short film.  I wanted to go back to film festivals again.  I had been there a few years prior with a short film I did called TOMORROW’S BACON. I wimped out – it wasn't really a horror film, but it did very well worldwide in festivals like Horrorfest, Screamfest and Shriekfest and I thought, wouldn't it be great to go back with a legitimate horror movie and cash in my horror chips?  I knew Warrington Gillette, I knew Betsy Palmer, I had found that house on 4 St. Luke’s Place where they filmed the exteriors of WAIT UNTIL DARK with Audrey Hepburn which scared me.  It looked like I was going to get time off from work, and I had so many former film students who owed me a favor.  I started thinking what if we were able to put this project together quickly?  And, with the really good idea for anything which would try to subvert the clichés, and that's how it happened. 

JS:  Was Betsy Palmer always your choice for Trudy?  

BN: Yes, she was always my choice, but she didn't want to do it at the beginning.  Well, she did want to do it, but she wanted to do it in a much different and very exaggerated way.  I wanted her to play it straight, like one of these dime-store psychics who are littered all over New York City with the neon “Palm Reading” lights.   I did research on all of this, and these “psychics” are really a front for real estate.  They rent space as a business, and they have their family live in the back rooms.   Betsy's interpretation of how she should play this was with a Romanian accent and she was going to wear a jeweled gown with a lot of extravagance, and I'm trying to explain to her that this is not the kind of person who does five-dollar psychic palm readings.  So, she kept saying yes, then she kept saying no.  But then my friend Julie Corman, who produced movies like CHOPPING MALL, told me that she could get me Lee Grant.  And, Lee Grant won the Oscar for SHAMPOO and was in DAMIEN: OMEN II, but I really kind of wanted Betsy because she played Mrs. Voorhees, and she's horror film royalty.  And so, thankfully, she agreed to do it.  And it was great, because we also had Warrington Gillette who played Jason in FRIDAY THE 13TH PART II and they had actually never met before, so it made for great press.  Also, I knew that the film would be coming out on the 25th anniversary of the release of FRIDAY THE 13TH.  So, I think that's a good deal of press right there.   

JS: How did you come to cast the rest of the film the way you did?  

BN: Without trying to be jokey or hommage-ey, if that’s even a word… 

JS: Warren Harding had “normalcy,” so I think you can coin “homage-ey”… 

BN: I know that when you make a film one of the most difficult parts is trying to get people to see it.  So, I cast people who had done other horror films because I was thinking about the future press releases, and also I was a huge fan of the people’s work and I wanted to work with them anyway.  One of my good friends, Peter DuPre, was in one of my all-time favorite slasher films from 1981 called EYES OF A STRANGER, and this is a film of a lot of people don't remember.  And, my friend Lesleh Donaldson, we had a large part in it for her that we had to cut at the last minute due to production problems.  Warrington I knew, of course, from FRIDAY THE 13TH PART II, and Sebastian Lacause who plays the lead in the film was very big on Broadway at that time playing Rocky in THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW, and he had done a bunch of small parts in some movies like SHOWGIRLS, ERASER, and BOOGIE NIGHTS.  Emily Vacchiano came to me through a big casting here in New York.  I got her through Breakdown Services.  She was on an episode of THE SOPRANOS just last year.  For her character, it was a toss-up between Emily and a very beautiful African-American actress named Carla Greene, who was in SHADOW: DEAD RIOT, as well as Spike Lee’s INSIDE MAN.  The role was not race-specific.  But, I liked both of them very much, and we ended up giving it to Emily and she’s wonderful in it.   

JS: When Don Coscarelli was prepping and shooting PHANTASM in 1977, STAR WARS was released and the Jawas looked just like the hooded creatures that live in Morningside Cemetery, so naturally a lot of people thought that the director was ripping off George Lucas when PHANTASM opened some two years later.  Likewise, your film is coming out at a time when another feature-length film called PENNY DREADFUL, which was part of the After Dark Horror Series that came to DVD recently, is out.  Can you believe the timing on this?   

BN:  I know!  (laughs)  Most people don’t know this, but the term “penny dreadful” is actually a legitimate literary term referring to cheaply-printed horror stories, and although the term itself does not appear in my film, it is there to describe a short horror story.  The theatrical film, PENNY DREADFUL, is called that only because it has a character named Penny in it!  Some people have asked me why I don’t turn my film into a feature film, and I have some ideas about that, but deep down I want to keep it in the short film format.  But, the film has been shown in so many festivals in Japan, Australia, and Canada, places that I can’t get to go to.  Occasionally, I will get calls to bring the film to be screened.  Surprisingly, it has done well at some non-genre festivals, and I also won at the New York Vision Fest, here in Manhattan.  So, score one for the good guys!