Jay Baruchel on Getting His Brutal Horror Film Random Acts of Violence To the Screen

Despite his Hollywood success, Jay Baruchel remains a fan first and foremost. The former Montrealer literally wrote the book on Habs fandom, and his love of cinema and even metallic prog-rock add up to an eclectic set of influences that wouldn’t immediately be obvious to those who know him solely from his comedic roles in This is the End, Knocked Up, or Goon. Those fans will likely be thrown for a loop with Random Acts of Violence, a brutal new film about the intersection of creativity, violence, and artistic responsibility that Baruchel directed, co-wrote, and stars in.

Baruchel is bursting with energy during our call to discuss the film, and with good reason — this is a film he and co-writer Jesse Chabot have been working to bring to the screen for nearly a decade. Based on the 2010 comic by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, Random Acts of Violence is the story of comic book creator Todd Walkley (Jesse Williams), who along with his wife Kathy (Jordanna Brewster), assistant Aurora (Niamh Wilson), and his publisher/best friend Ezra (Baruchel), embark on a road trip from Toronto to New York Comic Con, only to find a series of bloody murders along the way. Someone has been recreating the brutal Slasherman murders from Todd’s comic in real life; is it a coincidence? Or some sort of deranged tribute?

With over-the-top gore and an unrelenting tone, Baruchel’s sophomore directing effort (following Goon: Last of the Enforcers), is not the sort of horror-comedy you might expect given his involvement (spoiler: he actually hates them). It’s almost a meta version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre but updated for the social media age, where it’s never been easier to share content and engage with creators, for better or for worse.

We discussed the long road to getting this film made, why horror-comedies don’t work, his thoughts on the current theatrical vs. streaming debate, and much more. Random Acts of Violence is out on video-on-demand services and in select theatres now.

Bad Feeling Mag: How does it feel now that the movie is finally coming out? It seems like it was quite a trek to get it done.

Jay Baruchel: Oh man, every movie is a miracle. Like, the shittiest movie that you’ve ever seen is somebody’s baby and was made with a great, great degree of difficulty. It feels amazing, man. It’s just like, it’s been Christmas Eve for years for me, right? Like, I’m just full of anticipation and really proud of this thing. And I’m just really, really eager to get it out there, you know? I don’t have children, but I assume that this movie is as close to a child as I have. And so I’m really excited for it to go and be the person it’s going to be, but also scared of how mean the world will be to it. [Laughs]

I know that’s any movie, anytime. By the way, we designed the film to garner a strong reaction. We always knew going into make this specific thing, like, best-case scenario, it’s a movie that people adore. And if they don’t adore it, they fucking abhor it, and that’s what’s happened so far, which is really cool. [Laughs] There’s been very few middling reactions on this one.

How did you settle on the tone for the movie? People see that you’re attached and might think it’s a horror-comedy, but it’s very far from that.

Oh, definitely, yeah. And I think, you know, I understand the inclination to go into that movie and expect Shaun of the Dead or something. I’ll be honest, there are no horror-comedies that I like. I think This is the End, maybe is a horror-comedy? And I like that film a lot, but I’m obviously a bit biased. But I think most sorts of hyphen-comedies are just comedies. Rare is the action-comedy that’s actually got action that would hold up against the straight-ahead action movie, right?

It’s the same with a lot of horror comedies. The horror is never fucking scary. And so we tried to make a movie that did to people what our favorite films did to us. And [co-writer Jesse Chabot] and I, for whatever combination of reasons, both like really strong medicine, and even if that weren’t the case, basically, to me, the greatest sin a horror movie can commit is to not be scary. If you fail at everything else, the only real thing it has to be is scary. And so, to have a horror movie be interesting and all this different stuff is great, but if it doesn’t actually scare you, I don’t know that it’s a fucking horror movie or I don’t know that it’s successful as a horror film. And so, we really wanted to ask ourselves like, yeah, “What’s harsh and what’s scary and what could actually fuck with people in a way that was truthful to us and hadn’t been overdone?” And so we were like, “Well, we know what the violence should feel like and what’s scarier than the creative process and artistic responsibilities?” So, as scary as anything out there is, looking at yourself and not being pleased with what you find is, I would argue, just as scary, if not scarier.

I think the meta aspect of the film is really interesting. There’s that speech that Todd gives at the beginning where he’s sort of lamenting what he’s putting out into the world and how it’s being received; was that something on your mind when putting this film together?

Absolutely. But it’s never black or white, right? So, you know, while I know that, yeah, I put something out and it’s open to interpretation, and that’s the world and it should be. However, this concept that you have no responsibility for what you put out into the world I think is horseshit. [Laughs]

When I was a kid, it was a pretty binary, facile debate about this type of stuff, you know? And it was in the fallout of Columbine. And on one side you had the absurd idea that Doom and Antichrist Superstar made two guys shoot up a fucking high school, which is insane and absurd. But you had, I think, an equally absurd rebuttal to that, which is, “No, I can say whatever I want and I’m not accountable for any of it.” And that’s just as stupid. [Laughs] This is why we vote behind a curtain because we all have the opportunity to keep our shit to ourselves, right? But when we voluntarily put it out into the world, well, you are inevitably responsible for it to some degree or another. And, now, to what degree? That’s the fucking question. That’s the heart. That’s the debate, and so we thought that that was kind of, you know, fertile conflict to mine a story from.

What does it feel like to be releasing a movie during this weird period? Most theaters are closed but I see that you’re doing a drive-in appearance with the film, which is amazing.

It’s fucking super weird, you know? The drive-in thing is super cool. And it’s all the cooler because I’ve never seen a movie at a drive-in before. [Laughs] My first drive-in experience will be a movie I directed, which is kind of cool. That’s pretty neat.

It’s as weird as everything else is. Everything is weird now, grocery shopping is weird now, everything’s weird. In terms of the sort of VOD versus theatre of it all, you know, if it ends up being safe for people to go and watch the thing in the theatre, then awesome, but I also never was precious about that in a pre-COVID time because I don’t believe a movie isn’t a movie if you watch it on TV. And some people do, and fine, and that’s for them, but like, I was a working-class kid, and so I didn’t get to the movie theaters all that often. When I could afford to I would, but I always had money for Superclub Videotron. If I look back on 38 years of movie watching, the vast majority of movies I watched, I watched at home or my friend’s house. And so all of my most influential film going moments in my life, almost all of them happened at home.

And so, it’s this idea that like, a band isn’t a band unless you’ve seen them live. What the fuck is that? You’re telling me the six months of the year that I listened to the same CD in my Discman, that that’s meaningless? That’s insane, right? And plus, we’re a small movie, we’re not Marvel or Harry Potter or some fucking thing. So this is like, not that far away from what it would be if there was no COVID. So, at the end of the day, the thing is the same — work hard on a movie and try to be truthful and it gets out there and people will find it.

Were there any specific films that you looked at over the years as touchstones when you were putting this together?

Oh, definitely. I’d say the kind of biggest influences in this movie…there’s a bunch of us in the mix, there’s you know, the editor, composer, cinematographer, director. And we each come in with our own sense of inspirations and influences and blah, blah, blah. But for me, I came into this knowing that I wanted it to be…so, the Scorsese Cape Fear is a huge, huge, huge influence for me. It was a huge influence on Goon 2, not that anybody would be able to notice that from watching Goon 2. [Laughs] Like, if I told people what I’m trying to do, and my source movies, [it would be] indiscernible, like Goon 2 is Eisenstein’s October, Scorsese’s Cape Fear, and Heat, and nobody, I don’t think, would ever see any of those in that movie.

So, what those are for this would be The Red Shoes, the British film from the 40s, which is not a horror flick at all, but it has a sort of color and energy to it that I thought was really correct for this. It definitely has some sort of, it’s got some pinkish hues in common. And then White of the Eye, a weird crazy flick from the 80s, but a big steadicam flick, and that was the kind of big inspiration for what our camera does. And then for the violence, in modern cinema, I don’t know that there’s like, harsher examples and more successful examples of realistic on-screen violence than Irreversible and David Fincher’s Zodiac. So, those were our touchstones for how to approach the kills.

What struck you about the comic? It’s a one-shot issue from 10 years ago that few people probably saw when it came out. What was it about the story that resonated with you?

Oh yeah, great question. I think it was, we dug the concept of a horror thing, of a violent, kinetic, horror thing being born out of a sort of intellectual kind of debate. We like the idea of what you put out in the world coming home to roost, and I think that this sort of like — I don’t want to use a word like “cerebral,” but I don’t know what other word to use. But there was something about it that was philosophical in an interesting way.

And I think that may come from…Jesse [Chabot] and I went to high school together, we went to F.A.C.E., which is a fucking fine art school. And so we had been discussing artistic theory since like grade nine, you know? And so this kind of analytical and lateral approach to that stuff was something that was drilled into us at our school. And I think that seeing a horror movie, or reading a graphic novel that was like that rarest thing that was horror that capitalized on a fear that hadn’t been done to death, right? There are a million fucking scary houses, there are a million scary space stations. There aren’t a million scary stories about the creative process. And that was something that we thought was like, really, really cool, and seemed to be truthful.

Without getting into spoilers, but would you ever envision revisiting the Slasherman universe down the road? Someone else could put on that mask and continue the terror.

You said it! The entire thing is about the cyclical nature of inspiration, right? And without giving too much away, the end of our movie is definitely something that can inspire a whole bunch of weirdos. [Laughs] So, that is something we’re kind of interested in, which is this idea of like, imagine a sort of fanboy culture that could come as a result of this. And, you know, basically, what would 4chan do with it? And I think that’s pretty fucking horrifying.

Random Acts of Violence is out on video-on-demand services and in select theatres now.