The Rules These Horror Power Producers Swear by

If you’re a producer in the competitive horror landscape, a piece of advice: get an early look at every hot script you can.

That’s one of the trade secrets of Spooky Pictures partners Roy Lee and Steven Schneider, who leverage their relationships to get scripts like Damien McCarthy’s Hokum “a minute early,” as Schneider says.

Surely, it was more lead time than that. But whatever the case, they read Hokum early enough to make an offer before other producers had their ducks in a row, and they also had the financial backing to make it happen thanks to their longtime friend and producing partner Ben Ross, head of Image Nation Abu Dhabi. So, they could move fast.

Released by Neon, Hokum film ended up grossing $25 million on a $5 million budget, and is one of three movies Spooky and Image Nation teamed up to release this year, including two fall festival entries: Casey Affleck’s The Company at Venice and Guy Nattiv’s The Liberation at Telluride and the Toronto International Film Festival, which wraps up this week.

Lee, Schneider and Ross don’t land every script they want, but the percentage is high.

“Agents avoid getting things to us when they’re friends with the other producers, because they know the client would pick us over everyone else,” says Lee.

Indeed, Spooky is known around Hollywood for giving filmmakers favorable terms, per multiple sources familiar with their deals.

“The word that we use the most is fair, and we use it all the time,” says Ross. “When we started our careers and we were on the other side of the table, people were pretty crappy to us. We vowed to treat people the way we wished we had been treated back then.”

In the horror sphere, young filmmakers — who have little leverage — are sometimes are asked to sign deals that give producers the option to make their next movie, too. That’s flattering, but it can chafe filmmakers who end up with a breakout hit and are now tied down to a specific company for their next feature rather than being able to take it on the open market.

“We don’t require that. We would only want to work with people that want to work with us, and we have consistent repeat business without having to contractually require that,” says Lee.

Ross and Lee came up together as assistants, while Schneider, the producer of the Paranormal Activity franchise, formed Spooky Pictures with Lee in 2020 after being longtime collaborators. The trio went into production on their first feature amid COVID, the Maika Monroe starrer Watcher. As the rest of Hollywood was shutting down, they were able to ramp up given the small size of their films.

Given their output, you’d think these guys would be in constant contact — Zooms and texts with each other all day long. But part of the way they are productive is by limiting meetings together. Zooms with the three of them rarely last 15 minutes. They prefer to see each other on set, working.

“Spooky Pictures — it’s horror, it’s genre, but our taste tends to be pretty broad within that overall mandate,” says Schneider of their philosophy. “It’s not like we’re looking for three boxes to tick when we get a screenplay.”

The trio have a stable of young filmmakers in their roster and pride themselves on finding new talent early. They are in post-production on Curry Barker’s Anything But Ghosts, his roughly $5 million follow-up to Obsession. There’s also potential wunderkind Alexander Ullom’s 4 X 4: The Event, due out next year. The filmmaker’s $80,000 debut It Ends recently grossed $1.1 million globally, but 4 X 4 will be his true coming out party as a filmmaker.

While their sweet spot is projects under $10 million, an exception will be Barker’s upcoming The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for A24, which they note will have a bigger budget.

And Lee continues to produce bigger projects outside his work with Schneider and Ross, including this weekend’s Resident Evil, from his Weapons director Zach Cregger. The Weapons script was so good that it famously sparked a furious bidding war. I ask how often the three of them read something that gets them as excited as something like a Weapons. (Only Lee produced that one).

Lee quickly says over the past decade, it’s been three or four a year.

Schneider admits he reads something he gets incredibly excited about once a week. “I’m a work in progress on that. The guys have been trying to manage and control my appetite for a long time,” he says with a laugh. “I tend to look at stuff and — in my head — fill in the bits that are not all the way there. Roy doesn’t have that problem.”

Ross is somewhere in between.

But of the stuff that moves them like Weapons, how often do they get it?

Lee says with a laugh, “I’ve 100 percent gotten every one that I actually absolutely love.”