Neil LaBute has trod a pretty singular path throughout his long career in the arts. The playwright-turned-Hollywood-director-turned-horror-fanatic is associated with a different assemblage of hyphens than most artists, his career being largely defined by the success of controversial plays (Fat Pig) and films (In the Company of Men), but also critically reviled ‘failures’ (his Nicolas Cage-starring remake of The Wicker Man) and some intriguing anomalies (Nurse Betty).

LaBute shifted his trajectory a bit after a decade of making provocative but critically acclaimed films like Your Friends and Neighbors and The Shape of Things, instead turning to schlocky genre territory with horror. His aforementioned Wicker Man remake, though certainly much more fun and entertaining than its feedback would imply, received an infamous amount of mockery and hate to the extent that it’s honestly surprising LaBute continued with the horror genre, staging Dracula for the theater and creating and writing the immensely fun TV show Van Helsing.

After more than 15 years since The Wicker Man, LaBute is back with another feature horror film, House of Darkness, starring Justin Long as a man hoping to hook up with a woman (played by Kate Bosworth) after driving her home to a very creepy, gothic mansion. The writer/director spoke to MovieWeb about what he learned after Wicker Man, how the horror genre is conducive to his style, and how House of Darkness fits into his oeuvre.

Neil LaBute’s Turn Toward Horror

LaBute’s first film, In the Company of Men, was a disturbing dark comedy about two bored businessmen who decide to find a vulnerable woman and do whatever they can to emotionally hurt her. The filmmaker and playwright followed this up with other acclaimed films, but his misanthropic world of middle-class yuppies and romantically confused, sexually frustrated Americans seemed miles away from the kind of folkloric horror seen in the ’70s masterpiece The Wicker Man. That’s why it was so odd for many fans when LaBute took on a remake of the British classic, and then shifted a sizable amount of his artistic focus toward horror-centric projects.

“Horror gets right down to the black and white of all that, and allows you to really indulge,” said LaBute. “When you’re doing something that’s a little more white collar and socially appropriate, it’s often kind of like esoteric warfare, as opposed to outright warfare. So you get your hands a little dirtier [with horror], and I think it can be a lot of fun.” It’s true — the notion of outright horror is actually essential to LaBute’s work (the horror of sexual relations, the horror of capitalism, the horror of harboring the same potentially hateful and harmful human nature as everyone else), but it is generally an abstract notion in the background of his more sophisticated, intellectual films and plays.


Related: House of Darkness Review: Neil LaBute Mines Fun Horror From a One Night Stand

Nonetheless, the ‘low culture’ art of horror reared its terrifying head in his career, which makes sense considering how formative the genre was for LaBute. “My mother was someone who loved to be scared,” said LaBute, “so she would see all kinds of scary films and took me to them as well. And so I got to do that at an early age, and that made a big impression. When I got a chance to try and create some horror of my own, it’s because it was something that I really wanted to do. So I dived in.”

From The Wicker Man to House of Darkness

Even if his new film is the very good House of Darkness, mentioning The Wicker Man is seemingly inescapable when attempting to speak of LaBute and horror in the same breath. LaBute loved the horror genre and the original movie so much that it’s almost a shame to see how much mockery has been made of his passion with The Wicker Man. Known primarily for one of the wildest Nicolas Cage performances (with Cage beating up women while wearing a full bear costume and screaming “Not the bees!”), responses to The Wicker Man remake would have mortally wounded the careers of most other directors.


In addition to the myriad mocking memes, the film didn’t even earn back its $40 million budget, and yet here LaBute is, promoting his return to feature film horror with House of Darkness despite what some might call a serious past blemish. For the record, his Wicker Man deserves a reappraisal as a fun glimpse into the nightmares of authoritative men (an island of powerful women where a man has no control certainly is a kind of hell for many men), but LaBute has certainly learned a lot from the reception of that film 15 years ago and has put these lessons into practice for House of Darkness.

“There were a lot of cooks in that particular kitchen,” said LaBute of The Wicker Man, “and when you have people who have a lot of different opinions and a lot of different approaches, you can often just bland out that broth a little bit.” Translating any artistic vision from the nebulous headspace of a creator into a concrete, collaborative environment like film is always difficult and rarely accurate, and even harder when there are countless studio heads and producers who have conflicting input. LaBute elaborated:

You have this thing in your head, and you end up creating this other thing, and the distance between those two is less than or greater than each time out. It’s a little different, that distance, but in this particular case [of The Wicker Man], there were a lot of people with input into what it is. Is it horror, is it a comedy? I mean, of course there were elements of everything. You can’t have a guy running around in a bear suit without expecting a few snickers, but knowing that we were going to kill him in the end, we thought we could allow for that.

LaBute is in Control With House of Darkness

House of Darkness was an entirely different situation. “In this case, I certainly, for better or worse, had just complete control over the kind of thing I’m trying to create,” said LaBute. “Some people may say, ‘Oh, well that was a play,’ or, ‘That was boring,’ or whatever, but at least I can tell you that’s what I intended to do. Less so in the other situation. I think I just had more people to be beholding to.”

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LaBute’s exactly right — there’s really no mistaking House of Darkness for anyone else’s film, a result of “having more control,” as he puts it. Over the course of a potential one-night-stand, a man discovers that his hopeful hook-up is hiding something more than just a spooky sister; the film’s winding conversations, which manage to conceal layers of meaning while maintaining a natural flow, are pure LaBute in style and substance. “It was a lot of fun to do something that feels like a bad date,” said LaBute, “and a date that gets certainly worse than that.”

Like nearly every LaBute piece, nobody is a traditional protagonist or antagonist, and everyone’s virtues are outmatched by their capacity for cruelty. LaBute has been called cynical and even misogynistic for his portrayals of toxic people, especially men (which he agrees are “more relevant now” in the post-#MeToo era), but really he’s just doing what all dramatists do — creating conflict to reflect truth. “We’re all capable of extremes, and I think we veer toward extremes in film and television. In theory, we’re trying to create something that’s a little larger than life, but it’s fun,” explained LaBute.


“Conflict is drama,” said LaBute of his unlikable characters. “They’re fun to write. They’re fun to watch. A group of nice people sitting around isn’t that interesting.” A group of people certainly sit around in House of Darkness; they’re not so nice, but they are pretty interesting. Saban Films will release House of Darkness in theaters on September 9, 2022, and on Demand and Digital on September 13, 2022.