ELLIOTT KALAN is the writer/creator of MANIAC OF NEW YORK, of which Volume Three: DON’T CALL IT A COMEBACK debuts this coming Wednesday, January 18th.
Keep watching this blog for details about the special new release event to celebrate MANIAC OF NEW YORK at COMIC UNIVERSE in Folsom PA.
Elliott was kind enough to take time away from his busy schedule to answer questions related to MANIAC OF NEW YORK and other topics . . . . . . .
POP CULTURE PODIUM: Elliott, assuming that you are a fan of ’80’s slasher horror films, what movie is your favorite?
ELIOTT KALAN: I’m sorry to say that no ’80’s slasher movie has ever really lived up to my dream of what I want them to be.
When I finally watched them in my late teens, I was surprised at how surprisingly tame these movies really were! It turns out the whole time the real monster was me!
That being said, the original TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, despite technically being from the ’70’s is a movie that really gets close to the feeling of terror I always imagined. Maybe because it’s not a traditional slasher in how real and not fun it feels, but I find it so inspiringly scary. That scene where Grandpa is trying to hit Sally with a hammer? That’s not just scary because of the threatened violence, it’s scary because of the universal threat of old age! Whew! What a nightmare!
PCPODIUM: Who is your favorite slasher villain? And, did you build traces of that character into Harry The Maniac?
KALAN: Having said the ’80’s slashers never really lived up to my horrible visions, I do love the concept of Jason Voorhees. There’s something so inherently frightening to me about a killer who doesn’t talk, who barely reasons on a human level, and is essentially unstoppable (until the end of the movie when they need to stop him).
There’s definitely traces of my idealized dream version of Jason in Maniac Harry, along with the inevitability of It from IT FOLLOWS, another favorite horror movie of mine. The blankness of the mask; the utter inability to feel any emotions other than anger, curiosity, and pain: those were all certainly influences.
At the same time, Maniac Harry’s backstory and ultimate identity - - which we’ll see hints to in DON’T CALL IT A COMEBACK - - are completely different than Jason’s. There’s something about the moment a slasher monster gets a name and a background that makes it less scary to me. Like, “Oh, he used to be an inescapable elemental of death, but now I know he has a birthday and a social security number.” Maniac Harry is a different sort of creature than that.
PCPODIUM: I’d heard or read somewhere that you were unhappy with FRIDAY THE 13TH: JASON TAKES MANHATTAN and the brief NYC scenes in that movie— and that MANIAC OF NY is your rebuttal, a better version of that movie. Can you confirm that or reveal the real reason/motivation for creating this work?
KALAN: That was certainly part of the early inspiration for MANIAC OF NEW YORK, this feeling that New York had yet to have a horror story that really took advantage of the city itself. I grew up in New Jersey about a half hour away from The City (as everyone in Jersey calls New York), and it just lived in my mind as the most exciting, vibrant, alive place on earth. (I wrote about this in an essay titled “City of Mundane Fantasy” for a book called NEVER CAN SAY GOODBYE).
So when I first saw the posters for JASON TAKES MANHATTAN, I had all these visions in my head of the things that could happen there, with a deathless monster unleashed on this crowded center of the world. The movie grew in my head until I finally saw it and was, as anyone who saw it would be, immensely disappointed by the lack of actual New York in it.
So for years after, I thought about what my version of that story would have been like. But I felt I couldn’t tell a story like that without a reason. The older I get, the less entertained I am by simulated carnage and mindless fake violence. If I was going to justify telling a story of massive murder in New York, it had to be about something real.
And the thing I kept coming back to was my disgust at the way our country handles the threat of gun violence. Love of guns is just so ingrained in a large enough percentage of Americans - - and they have enough money to back up their demands politically - - that our response to the very preventable problem of children being murdered en masse isn’t to remove the weapons that made this possible, but to force the children to get used to living in a world where sudden death is a reasonable expectation. It all crystallized when a politician floated, I believe after the Las Vegas shooter killed so many people, that the policy solution was we were going to have to teach more people first aid.
The perverse viewpoint that another person’s life isn’t worth giving up my thing I like to have, really disgusted me and that became my guiding motivation for the story. Satirizing a country where sudden, mass violence is considered something to just accept and deal with. If you’re paying attention to it you can see that from the very beginning it’s (MANAIC OF NEW YORK) been a somewhat political book - - and DON’T CALL IT A COMEBACK makes it even more explicit.
Hopefully readers are enjoying MANIAC on an entertainment level first and foremost. But the best stories - - and especially the best horror stories - - are about expressing some vision of the world we live in.
Horror is perhaps uniquely potent at allowing us to grapple with the things about life that we can’t understand. And beyond wanting to see a better slasher-takes-Manhattan story, holding up that mirror to how we mishandle violence in America was the real motivation for taking idle violent daydreams and turning them into the actual, published story of MANIAC OF NEW YORK.
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