(audience clapping) How's it goin'?
Thanks for bein' here. It's good, it's goin' good.
Now, you work, I wanna get right into this
'cause I've got a lot Okay.
to talk about.
You work in the horror genre,
you love the horror genre. So far yes, yes.
And you've always loved horror movies,
is that correct? Yes, yes I always have.
Ever since I was a little kid.
You just find that genre Well,
The most fascinating?
Yeah, I think I got hooked on it
because when I was about five and this babysitter
named Kiki, Right.
Who looked like Squeaky Fromme.
Right, right And when she was supposed
to be babysitting me, taking me to the library or something,
she'd sneak me off to the movies and dump me there.
So she could go get high with her boyfriend.
(audience laughing) Right.
And she didn't care what I watched.
So only I got to see all these
gnarly movies really young. Right, right
And got obsessed because it was always this concept
with a monster taken away a beautiful girl.
Right. I was like,
that's good by me.
That's good. I like that idea.
It sounds cool.
And, you grew up in kind of an unusual environment,
your family was in the carnival business, is that right?
Yeah, it didn't seem weird at the time, but like--
And I don't mean carnival cruise line,
I mean. No.
(audience laughing) I mean, carnival.
And we don't mean good, like good carnival.
We mean like, gnarly, nasty, midway style, you know.
All the carnies that are no teeth, they're on parole,
high on crystal meth, running the tilt-a-whirl.
(everybody laughing)
With your kids.
Don't you want the guy running the tilt-a-whirl
to be on crystal meth?
That's yeah, Yeah.
You'll be in charge of the giant centrifugal machine,
"All right!" Kids are like,
"Can I get off?"
and he's like. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Runnin' the crank. So you're living
in that environment, Yeah.
And you didn't know that that was a strange environment.
No kid would, they would think
this is probably how all kids live, right?
Well, me and brother both had to do this all the time
and we hated it, we thought it was boring.
[Conan] Right.
Because we'd just be there all,
you know, the carnival is great,
except not seven days a week, all day long.
You're like, "Oh dear God," you know?
Right, right. So.
And so you stayed inside
and you watched a lot of television, is that right?
Yeah, I never left the house.
I hated going outdoors.
I wanted to be in air conditioning at all times.
Right. (audience laughing)
So what I would do is,
I didn't know, this was weird either,
I would just sit there all day,
I would never leave the house
and then one day I was, you know like fourth grade,
the teacher's like, for some reason,
"How much TV do you watch?
Everyone write down how much TV a day you watch."
And everyone writes down,
I don't know, half an hour, an hour.
And I wrote down nine hours.
(audience laughing)
Because it was, I would get up early--
That was the truth, was nine hours a day?
No I wasn't trying to be, you know,
I'm in fourth grade you're not trying to be funny,
well maybe some people, not me.
Yeah, I desperately was, yeah, but.
But I would get up extra early before school
so I could watch TV. Right.
And then I would run home from school as fast as possible
and sit there until I fell asleep.
I just put in nine hours a day.
And did that, I mean.
I literally would get up and watch the crop report
'cause it was the only thing on TV that early,
when they used to have the crop report.
The Crop report before report is underrated, by the way.
It's like, "Oh, mom, soy beans
are not doin' well in the Midwest."
Did that alter your sense of reality that you would watch
that much TV? It did, it did, it did,
because sometimes I think back on stuff and I confuse
my own life with TV kids' lives.
Right. And I'd be like,
"Man, that was great when we had the potato sack race,"
(audience laughing) and I'll go like, "Wait, no,
that was like The Brady Bunch."
(everyone laughing)
I can kinda relate to that, yeah.
Because the worst ones for like 20 years,
I thought I had a sister named Marcia
that I hit in the face with a football.
The, "Oh, my nose!" Right, right, right.
I felt bad for a long time. And it hurt you, yeah.
It wasn't me now.
Now you're making a horror scene.
When you're making, you wanna make it
as horrific and scary as possible.
How do you know when you've achieved
a truly horrific horror scene?
When do you know you've scored a hit?
Well, yeah, that's the trick.
But someone said something to me yesterday.
I was at somewhere and they just seen the movie
and there's this one particular scene
that if you see it, you will definitely know.
And she said, "I loved the movie, I loved the movie.
But in that one scene, I threw up in my mouth a little bit
when I saw that part."
(audience laughing)
Which is disgusting to be sure.
But I was like, "I guess that's a good review."
Yeah.
In your world, that's like two thumbs up.
Apparently.
How much did you throw up in your mouth?
She said just a little, enough to swallow it back down.
All right, all right, all right.
(audience laughing)
Wow! I'm assuming she didn't--
I'm unplugging this now.
Does this come out?
I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Now you, don't be sorry.
You're on the right show.
(audience laughing)
You work a certain theme, which is,
you like to have a bad clown,
an evil clown in your movies. Yeah, so far, yeah.
A clown who's truly an evil person.
Where does that idea come from?
Well, clowns are just pathetic.
(audience laughing)
Whoo! And they're disgusting.
They're always filthy.
And even just the other day,
I was driving, stopped at a red light, look over,
there's this filthy clown holding open house sign.
Makeup's running down his face, he's filthy.
Right. But yet, they're always
parading for clown rights.
They're out there there with their little umbrellas
and filthy chihuahuas and their little cars,
like, "We wanna be treated like equals."
Where are these parades?
(everyone laughing)
All up and down Broadway. I haven't seen
the clown rights parades.
Remember when Shakes the Clown came out,
Right, right. everyone was off at Bobcat
'cause he's making fun of clowns and they're horrible.
So you like an evil,
did you have a bad experience as a child?
Yes I did.
(audience laughing) Yes I did.
I didn't remember this,
but my dad was obsessed with his Super 8 Camera
and I just saw these films recently, and it's him.
Well actually, he's filming and it's my mom
trying to hand me to Ronald McDonald,
but it's like kind of a weird looking bad, Ronald McDonald.
It might've even been a woman.
Right. And I'm screaming in terror
and they just keep pushing me towards this clown.
And I'm like fighting them off.
And so you knew even then something was wrong.
Well, this is like freak with the giant red hair
and with a big M.
What's wrong with? When the hairs
goin' like this, oh. (audience laughing)
Well that's all the time we have.
That is all the time we have.