Interview with JM Logan

“That was my desk. She came in to do some reshoots.”

Josh Logan, director of “The Relic'' and winner of the April ATX Short Film Showcase, turned

his phone toward his laptop webcam. It’s the “Annabelle” doll, sitting pristinely on an office chair.

She’s not terrifying in real life, according to Josh, but his fifteen years of experience in effects

makeup versus my zero years might be tipping the scales.

Perhaps it was fated that Josh would be captivated by the horror genre. He was born in 1974--the

same year the original “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” was released--and his adolescence was the “sweet

spot” during the horror renaissance.

“We got a VCR for Christmas and that whole idea of being able to watch movies anytime you

wanted to watch it was amazing. And there was a video store that was like two blocks away from me and

I spent all of my summers between sixth, seventh, eighth grade just renting piles of movies,” Josh said.

Josh also spent his formative years riding the city bus to the ZACH Theater in Austin. He

assisted in nearly every department and that range persisted throughout his career: writing, directing,

special effects, and composing to name a few. So what makes a “good” horror villain?

Considering my younger self was petrified by the Grinch, Shrek and the Wicked Witch of the

West--maybe there’s a theme here with brash, green baddies--I proposed we make a tier list to figure that out.

First up, Leatherface, in honor of Josh’s birth year and his subsequent work on “Texas Chainsaw

Massacre: The Next Generation.”

“We’ll discover this as we go along, but I’m not really into slasher horror. I think that there's

enough of that kind of horror already out in the world,” he said.

There’s an undercurrent of fantasy horror, as well as Josh’s personal connection to the films, that

place Leatherface on the A-tier. In a similar vein, the next villain, Jigsaw, strikes a cord for reasons other

than his magnitude of bloodshed. Josh and Tobin Bell, who plays Jigsaw, are longtime friends. His

understanding of the character and philosophical approach snagged the “Saw” serial killer a spot on the

B-tier.

As a seasoned professional in special effects makeup, I was curious where Josh would place the

“Evil Dead.” Evidently, the S-tier. Twelve-year-old Josh was terrified of the original.

“I have no problem at all with dowsing people in many gallons of blood because I think it’s a

pretty horrifying image. But the effectiveness is really how they're used and how they're limited,” Josh

said.

That concept of restraint that makes the reveal in Josh’s short “The Relic” so much more

satisfying. The protagonists burst into the cabin and the audience is fed tidbits of their exact mission and

group dynamic. How long have they known each other? What exactly is their goal? The one thing the

audience can be sure of is that the bloody, wheezing stranger they dragged with them is of high priority

and that Jacob really needs to grab those lanterns. It’s in the final three minutes that we actually see what the group is up against: a faceless, multi-limbed, squelching god.

“I really subscribe to the kind of more alien philosophy of monsters, which is show as little of it

as you possibly can and let the audience's imagination fill in the rest,” Josh said.

The deity was constructed almost entirely out of bubble wrap and trash bags. All powerful beings

that could wipe out humanity are definitely Josh’s favorite. He loves the Cenobites from Hellraiser,

despite all the body horror.

“It’s about this search for the forbidden information that we're always so fascinated with as a

species. Like the hunt for that missing piece of information that we need and, you know, however that

applies to our own psychology.”

Michael Myers doesn’t quite scratch Josh’s itch to understand--or perhaps understand how little

we know--about the universe. He’s stuck at the bottom of our list on the D-tier, waving that knife around

at a brisk walk, at best. When Josh feels like matching pace with Michael, he reads endlessly about space.

“I can probably tell you most of the astronauts that are on the ISS right now. So having an

understanding of things that happen outside this planet, I think is the most fascinating thing that there is. And that's one of the reasons I'm really drawn to cosmic horror, because when you start to dig into the fact that we cannot understand how large space is or how long time is, you sort of untether humanity from having any even breath of importance to the universe. And so cosmic horror, at its core, is about that.”

We’re a “short term aberration” as Josh put it. Some giant cosmic being could wipe us out in an

instant. It’s delightful and debilitating and altogether scarier than any serial killer, especially in the

aftermath of the pandemic. “The Relic” reflects that even more so, considering it was made in 2020 with a tiny cast and crew and a majority of their rehearsals conducted over Zoom. The Infected from “The Last of Us” encapsulate that fear perfectly, as well. Those S-tier villains remind us that nature holds the reins, as much as humanity wants to push back against it.

Alongside the widespread loss and newly contextualized fear from COVID is an entirely

restructured way of filmmaking, especially for Josh who spent ample time working in Los Angeles before

returning to Austin. There’s an effectiveness to the development phase that exceeds the hours he’d

traveled from the San Fernando Valley to agencies on the west side.

“You end up spending three to sometimes four hours of your day in a car. And when you're just

going down for a 45 minute meeting or a 20 minute pitch, it damages your psyche. Those people who are in those offices, you know, if they know that you've traveled two hours to come see them, maybe they got a bomb dropped in their lap 20 minutes before you got there and they don't want to hear your pitch and they're not in a position to listen to whatever it is you have to say. But they humor you because you're there.”

Josh’s currently working on a Viking oriented monster feature film. If he can make a movie to

justify his current favorite song, “The Devil & The Huntsman” from Guy Ritchie’s “King Arthur: The

Legend of the Sword,” that’s a win in his book. Its medieval yet modernized appeal might just save him

from Vecna--if I’ve convinced him to watch season four of “Stranger Things.” Although he’s sworn off

composing himself, (“I actually scored five feature films, and then determined that it’s a terrible job for

me and I was really, really bad at it”), he loves the process and power of film music. Antoni Mairata

composed his last three shorts. Music overall is a large part of Josh’s background. His parents, Berkeley

hippies, exposed him to a lot of music and his favorite theater instructor introduced him to an extremely

special villain: Sweeney Todd.

“To me, musicals were like ‘Oklahoma’ and ‘South Pacific.’ I didn’t understand that musicals

could be dark. And of course at that time period, I was super into horror movies, so you give me a horror

musical and it just blew my mind completely.”

As he finishes the script for his next film, Josh hopes to film in the fall. He’s excited to

collaborate and utilize new resources via the Austin community. Setting out to sea, he realized, is the

closest he’ll get to an alien planet.