The critically acclaimed series, The Wire, may have recently wrapped, but Michael K. Williams hasn't put his dark side to rest. His unforgettable portrayal of stick-up man Omar Little has catapulted him into two film adaptations that horror fans are already circling with morbid curiousity: Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic drama The Road and Michael Cuesta's Poe-flavored Tell-Tale.
If you can't proceed without arguing that The Road doesn't truly count as horror, I'd like you to count on one hand how many other books you've read lately in which human infants constitute one of the four food groups. (Though in all fairness, a person can only live on canned peaches for so long.)
Horror adaptations are always dicey, since what bleeds on the page often looks pretty silly filtered through the monocles of studio execs, and strained through the twisted knickers of the MPAA. Can a novel as relentless and devoid of contrivances as The Road even be made into a film? Will viewers accept Tell-Tale's modern re-tooling of the chilling tale they adored in seventh grade? Williams isn't shy about telling you why both of his upcoming films bring enough new meat to the table justify their existence.
First of all, filming The Road was no cushy green-screen affair. "We filmed on location at Lake Erie, in the state park over there," he says, "While it was very beautiful, in the context of our scene, it could have been a very scary place. It was no joke: We were in the elements, and it was freezing." The experience left a mark on him that still lingers. "It's made me reassess the little things I take for granted, like shelter, food, water and even companionship and human contact," he says. "It was crazy to be scrounging and killing for the things we take for granted in everyday life."
In the film, Williams plays a drifter who finds himself at odds with the stars Viggo Mortenson and Kodi Smit-McPhee over a shopping-cart laden with potentially life-saving supplies. Those who've read the book remember this encounter very well, and those who haven't are currently covering their eyes and yelling "NO SPOILERS!" Don't worry, your ignorance is still completely intact.
Due to the isolation of the characters, Williams encountered few other actors while filming, and his contact with the legendary McCarthy himself was limited to notes and suggestions delivered via director John Hillcoat. The experience has left him with an unshakable optimism for the film's ability to shatter audiences. "There's a lot of graphic stuff that you'll see here. To read and imagine it may be better, but to actually see those things portrayed with actors and human faces is going to be pretty dark and pretty scary," he explained. "Within the ugliness, like cannibalism and all that craziness, you see all these levels of humanity. Yet you can't kill the human spirit, no matter what happens, that will to love and be compassionate is ever there in the darkness."
As for Tell-Tale, many of us groaned when it was revealed
that Cuesta's adaptation would not be an exercise in good old-fashioned
Gothic terror, but a modern gambit about a man whose recent heart
transplant comes with nasty baggage. (Sort of like how Return to Me
would have turned out if Robert Loggia had written it instead of
co-starred.) But if Williams' own love of Poe isn't offended, then
maybe mine shouldn't be either. "First of all, Josh Lucas is an amazing
actor, I really enjoyed watching his work," he says. "The Tell-Tale Heart is my favorite of Poe's stories, and while this is set in modern times, the story and the emotion is the exact same."
It helps to know that Williams is a horror fan himself from way back, and like many of us, he spent a little too much time with Jason and Michael Myers to enjoy many of life's simpler pleasures. "To this day, I can't go camping," he confesses, "I can't! I'm a grown man and I still can't do it. I'm fine in the daytime, but when that sun drops and I can't see my hand in front of my face anymore, that's a wrap." In most fans' eyes, remakes occupy the same dubious I'll-believe-it-when-I-see-it world that adaptations do, but Williams approaches them with an open mind. "Why should a new generation be deprived of all that horror, and years of trauma and nightmares? It shouldn't be limited to us," he says, citing Rob Zombie's Halloween as a great example, "I though it was amazing, I flipped! It still frightens the s--t out of me."
Has Williams wandered for too long in dark places then? "I guess I've gotten used to equating my good work with dark traumatic stories, but that's just where I'm at," he laughs, "Maybe I need to go through a nice, funny love story set in Hawaii to balance things out."
