By chance a few months ago, I started following horror writer Adam Cesare on social media. The title of his most popular series intrigued me: Clown in a Cornfield. Then last week a publicist reached out and asked if I would review Last Night at Terrace Lanes, which I did and enjoyed. Then I noticed the screenwriter’s name: Adam Cesare. Same guy, different cornfield.
We spoke Friday night about his approach to writing low-budget horror after becoming a Young Adult Horror novelist. It turns out that Mr. Cesare is a theater kid, but I promise that neither of us burst into song. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Derek: How did you get involved in this film? It wasn’t your initial story…
Adam: It’s an interesting project. It goes back years in a weird way, and then the actual project came together quickly. I’d met Jamie Nash, who directed the film, at a convention six, seven, eight years ago. It’s been a while.
I was there selling my books – this is before Clown in a Cornfield came out. Prior to those books, which are out through Harper Collins, I was an indie author out there selling my own fiction at various horror conventions. Jamie came up, bought a book, and I never actually met him that first time. He left ten dollars on my table and took a book. Then he DM’d me afterwards, saying “hey, I was running out of the convention and took this book. I hope that’s okay.”
And I was like, “You’re Jamie Nash. I’ve seen a bunch of your movies.” I’d seen a lot of the collaborations he’d done as a screenwriter with Eduardo Sanchez. We struck up a conversation, and then a friendship. Jamie’s an interesting guy. He’s very much a multi-hyphenate. He does a lot of stuff, but he’s predominantly a screenwriter. But he was looking to get into indie publishing, putting his own novels out.
We shared information. I went to film school, predominantly screenwriting and film theory. I like movies and I’m interested in movies, so yes, let’s talk about screenwriting, and I’ll tell you publishing. We struck up a friendship through that.
We wrote a number of spec scripts together. Jamie’s very very prolific. He writes scripts very fast and just such a pro screenwriter. He’s like a professor of this stuff. I think scriptwriting is a numbers game, especially when you write specs. So we’d written a few scripts together and had a nice creative relationship.
These scripts went out through his manager. We took meetings and stuff like that. We actually got to pitch a few big budget projects based on our specs. Not like anything happened, but I got kind of busy with the Clown in a Cornfield books and pivoted over to Young Adult horror writer with a book a year. So we didn’t do a lot.
Two years ago now, he called me and said, “hey, do you want to write a script very fast?” I was very busy; my baby had just been born two months beforehand. I think. The timeline’s kind of hazy on this because I had a newborn in the house. The question of “do you want to write a script very quickly?” The answer is no. I say no to more stuff than I say yes to these days because I’m only one person.
Then he said, “well, these producers have a bowling alley, and they want to make a bowling alley horror movie, and I would want to direct it.” And I thought, “oh, that changes things.”
I had visions of Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-rama. That went through my head. A regional, locational horror film set in the same Frederick, Maryland bowling alley we’re going to shoot it in? That’s very appealing.
That’s basically it. On the other side of that, where my involvement wasn’t, the producer Carlo Glorioso and his company had been in contact with different investors. They had commissioned an outline, a pitch, from Jenna St. John, who’s a wonderful writer. But she couldn’t do it. I don’t know her super-personally, but I think it was like me – the timing in her own life wasn’t right. They’d commissioned the pitch but they couldn’t commission the script.
I looked at the pitch – cultists in a bowling alley. And we had the bowling alley. So we set to work. It was a fast turn-around on the project in that Jamie’s pre-production and my writing were going pretty much hand in hand. It was a very close working relationship, so it was good that Jamie and I were friends. We already had a shorthand. If they had hired someone else or this movie was getting made in any other way, I don’t think we could have. Because we were able to work so fast and collaboratively.
Derek: That comes through. I thought the beginning of the movie, establishing of the characters, was almost like the beginning of a musical. This movie is a tight 75 minutes, which I appreciate, so there’s not enough time to dwell. You establish all these people in just a few lines of dialogue, and some of them are sacrificial lambs. It’s a murder cult. Not everyone is going to get out alive.
Adam: I’m a big fan of… well, it’s Jamie and I both our kind of aesthetic. Jamie leans heavier on comedy than I tend to, and when my comedy comes in it leans heavier on humanism, and I think that comes from that. I think these characters that are sketched very quickly, are characters I like and have sympathy for, to a certain extent.
I was thinking about George, the barfly, played by Wes Johnson in the movie. He only gets – he might have a couple more lines in the script, but he only gets four or five big lines in the film. But I was like let’s use every part of the buffalo here and give him a fully fleshed out backstory in those four lines.
They’re also telling you the story of the place, and I guess that’s where that musical theater element comes in. It’s like Our Town. Terrace Lanes is the title character in a way, and we want to give you a snapshot of what this place is. It means different things to different people, and the different people that are in it.
For some people it’s kind of a prison, and it getting knocked down for condos is almost like a fresh start. For some people, they’re going to be adrift and destitute without this place. So we wanted to introduce them really quick. I like that – the idea of it almost being a musical. I’m a Broadway baby, so it’s probably where I get half my ideas.
Derek: I mean this as a compliment, it’s also not showy dialogue. Like I think only Bruce has a moment of really out there dialogue. And I’m not going to lie – I looked up the history of bowling last night.
Adam: I think with anyone else that monologue wouldn’t work. But Ken really sells it. Ken’s character Bruce, that idea of having a bowling alley conspiracy theory is pretty great.
Derek: It feels so real. The kids feel like kids, and Bruce is the kind of guy that isn’t just going to open up. So it’s a weird, anti-showy part. Was that conscious on your part?
Adam: Well, the third Clown in a Cornfield book comes out in August, and I wasn’t thinking of myself as a YA or teen author. I released that first book and it did really well, and I looked back on the rest of my work and there’s kind of sympathetic teen characters all throughout my work, for fifteen years.
I was a high school teacher for a number of years. So when I’m thinking, who are interesting and sympathetic protagonists to me? I think of teenagers. Those four characters, and then everyone else just gets populated in that world of… I love bowling alleys. I love third places, bowling alleys and bars, those places that have built-in communities around them.
Derek: And you’ve got a lead with an historic role. Your lead, Francesca Capaldi, was the voice of the Little Red-Haired Girl in The Peanuts Movie.
Adam: She’s been working for a long time. She’s still a teenager but she was a child actor. She was on a big Disney Channel show called Dog with a Blog. I think she predates my involvement, too. I think that was part of the package – “we’ve got Francesca interested. We have this pitch.” And then it was basically Jamie and I coming in and saying, “okay. You guys are crazy enough to hit the ground running – they’re going to knock the bowling alley down.”
That was literally our finish line. Movies like this can’t shoot forever anyway. But we definitely couldn’t shoot forever because they were going to knock that thing down and build condos, which is the story in the movie.
Derek: Again, this movie is so spare, but was there any talk about poking at gentrification?
Adam: For sure. Before we even got in and started looking at Terrace Lanes, learning the story of the building itself… I didn’t know the story. Once I sat down to write, and knew the story, that they were going to tear it down for luxury high-rises or whatever, nice new probably pricey condos, replacing this blue-collar middle-class entertainment center, I thought “this is lame! That’s going to make it into the movie!”
You keep keying in on that idea of spareness and how quick everything is. Jamie and I are interesting guys for this job, directing and writing this. We both watch a lot of horror movies. Jamie watches a lot more than I do, because he can watch TV while he works, but I’m just a hyper fan of horror movies. I’m in my office right now, talking to you, and I’m surrounded by thousands of horror movies on disc. It’s just that I’ve watched so much, so many of these movies of this budget level and how this movie got made and movies like this. You keep watching them, and let’s face it, 90% of them aren’t very good. They’re done with a cynical view. “We’re going to make content but we’re not going to spend any money on it.” I’ve watched enough of that stuff because I’d seen a cool poster and wanted to give it a try. I love this stuff and I know the pitfalls, and I think Jamie knows the pitfalls of a picture like this.
We were even angling to get it down to 70 minutes. There’s something to be said for if you don’t have a lot of money and you don’t have a lot of time, you shouldn’t use a lot of time. You shouldn’t stretch to have a lot of time. You shouldn’t pad to make your film hit that magic 90 minute mark. Within our means, let’s make this move as fast as we can, let’s deliver on the premise of doomsday cultists taking over a bowling alley and trying to kill everyone inside.
Whatever the film’s faults, and everyone’s entitled to their opinion, they can take the film however they take it, there’s almost no arguing that it does what it says on the tin.
Derek: Honestly, I probably will pick this up if you get physical media. I think it’s a shame that kids today don’t get to experience the double feature at the movies. This would have been perfect for that.
Adam: Oh, yeah. You can watch two of them! It’s like an old RKO 60 minute programmer! And it’s a siege movie. There’s an urgency in that genre, too, in what you want to do with it. Even in the writing of it, even in my drafting of it, we had that idea that time is money and we don’t want to bore people. Get in, get out. But still wanted to do all the things I like to do normally with fiction and with characters, so everything’s just accelerated.
We went on to talk about the virtues of Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama, but all you need to know is it would pair up nicely with Last Night at Terrace Lanes.
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