Watson: When I first got the script, there were a couple of little things that needed to be worked on and stuff like that, but I had never done anything where I was so involved with a movie. I think really it was just the character, just so much of what's going on with him, and you're thinking some of it might be going on in his head, and some of it might be in his head, but it's kind of this guy facing these fears that he's had since he was a child, and just never being able to get over them. And in some ways I think a lot of people can relate to that, because everybody's had fears when they were younger, and whether they faced them or not growing up as adults is one thing, so I just thought that there's things in my own life that maybe I can draw upon to make it work. And then the other thing was working with Stephen Kay, who I'd known for about five years before we did the movie. With him directing it and also Sam Raimi being involved, those are always pluses when you get to work with people you always get to work with.Did you have any reservations about moving into horror movies?

Watson: I think some people interpret it one way, [but] I love horror films, so getting a chance to do one, you always want to be involved with stuff that's good, and it's always a crapshoot, because you never know how things are going to turn out. But I think when it came to the script, there was stuff that needed to be done, because you always wonder, "OK, well, has this been done before?" There are so many horror films that are just ripoffs of another, and you're always ripping off somebody, but I was never worried about doing a horror film because of the genre, being stuck in that as horror film actor, because I've obviously done other things that are so opposite of this.What changes needed to be made to satisfy your initial reservations about the script?

Watson: Well, the one thing that I always said and nobody ever talked about was that the Frannie character, everybody wanted her to be a real girl, and I said, well, why would a real girl be out at 2 o'clock in the morning riding her bike around? I go, "She can't be real." That was something that Stephen and I fought over quite a bit that everybody, obviously, once we finished the movie, said, "You guys are totally right, yeah, this totally works better." And just little things like that. Then, you know, working out the end as well, of "What are the things that actually made him afraid of the boogeyman?" And so trying to come up with all of those things. It was a difficult thing trying to come up with an ending for it. I still think there's always stuff that we could have done to make it better, but sometimes you just kind of have to step away and let everybody else do their job. It was just little things like that, like the Frannie character, making her something basically like a ghost in the film, and them just wanting to make her real, which I never understood. I was like, "It's impossible. No little girl's going to be out this late." But that was a simple fix, and it also made everything a lot better with that relationship. Doing this movie was probably one of the best experiences I've had, just because with every job you take, you're always going to learn something, and hopefully I'll have some great jobs in the future, but this is definitely on the top of my list.What's interesting about the material is that it transcends the sort of "slasher" origins of the concept.

Watson: It's not a slasher movie at all. I mean, it could have been done in a [different] way, but we got a PG-13 rating, which every studio is trying to get these days, because a big chunk of the audience is young kids. I mean, it's also young adults as well. The whole thing about the movie is that it's visually fun. Kids are going to see it because they want to get freaked out and scared, but I think young adults or anybody between 20 and 30 is going to see it in a different way than the kids are, everything being more in this character's head and all of the internal stuff that's going on with him that I think a lot of people can relate to. Obviously not in the same way that, you know, this guy is freaking out and thinking there is somebody chasing him all of the time, because I basically have almost a mental breakdown.How do you cultivate the film's suspense on set? Does it require getting into the mindset of the character or applying a specific "horror movie" mentality?

Watson: Well, for me, because most of the shoot I was by myself, it was something I never had to do before, but I really just had to put myself in a very dark, dark place. It's strange, the process for that, because I'm thinking about really great things in my life during a scene that's really dark, and I'm freaking out. It kind of just depends on the day and which scene we are doing that day. Some of the stuff came out a little more emotional than other things, and some of it hit the cutting-room floor, but it just kind of depends on what happens that day. I think that to try to prepare so much for something like that is just going to kill you in the end, so you've got to let some of the spontaneity happen, especially when you're not working with anything that you're actually seeing and just trying to imagine what they're going to end up putting together or what this character is actually seeing that the audience doesn't get to see that much. So it was difficult. It was quite a challenge, but I was happy to take that on.How much of the boogeyman was real and how much CGI?

Watson: I finally just saw the final cut two days ago, and we had a guy that was there that actually was in full makeup, but he's not in any of the movie anymore. So it's kind of taken over a lot by the CGI. It's so hard to make a CGI effect believable, but I wasn't really worried about that. I could sit there and commit as much as I could to this film, but if the special effects don't work, I just look like an asshole.Is it better for you to play a character who is singularly focused on the end of the movie, or one laced with ambiguity?

Watson: When I first came on board, I was like, "The only way that this can work is if it's in this guy's head." And we played with that quite a bit, and obviously there's a couple of different ways we could have ended this movie, but the thing that I always wanted to do in the movie is that I wanted the audience to keep thinking, "This isn't real—he's crazy," or "Maybe this is real; maybe this guy is seeing these things that are real, but no one else can see them but him." But I wanted to make sure that whatever the audience is thinking is the same thing that Tim is going through, and so hopefully Tim and the audience are all in the same boat when they are involved with this film. People walk out with ideas if it's real or if it's not. It's interesting; most women think, from what I've heard, it's all in his head, and then you have men [saying,] "No, it's real."There was an indication that Asian horror influenced the film's overall construction. Did it impact your performance?

Watson: Well, it was something that we all talked about, and obviously Sam and Rob are big fans, so there was always that element of what the Japanese horror [movies] are doing right now. I think it's so effective, just using simple little camera tricks and visual things in ways that I think are so effective, and obviously it says something, because every company is going and remaking every Japanese horror film right now. Whether they're doing it the right way or not is a different story, but that's something we all talked about, and wanted to try to, as much as we could, put into the film. We could have gone in there, and I could have been in every scene just bug-eyed like you see every actor that has poor direction, but we wanted to try to make sure that you cared to follow this guy through his journey, which I think we did. When I first read the script, I thought, "I don't care to follow this guy through this journey at all. Why should I care about him?" That was something I talked about early on, that right off the bat we have to make sure that this guy is likable enough so the audience really cares to follow him through this journey of going back home for the first time and facing his fears. Stephen Kay, how did the influence of Asian horror change your directing style?

Kay: I don't know that it changed the style so much. What it does, and I don't even know how much in the end we were allowed to do this, but the goal was to slow it down. Because you realize in those movies it's the breathing that makes those movies creepy. They don't throw shit at you for 95 minutes. They do sort of let it breathe, let it sit, and then let you manufacture your own adrenaline and go, "Oh, I'm really uncomfortable," and then they throw something at you, and then they let you breathe for another chunk of time. I think, pacing-wise, when the editor called after the first week of shooting, he said, "You know, this is going slowly, and Barry's taking his time," and we were letting him take his time. It's much less sort of bumper-cars, which is what we sort of do here in the States in terms of horror movies especially, where the goal is to throw as much freaky stuff at the screen as you physically can.The film's climactic chase races through multiple realities. How did you design that sequence?

Kay: When I came on to the movie, there was always this sort of [feeling] that when we get to "this" point, we didn't know what happened at the end. So that was the constant discussion, and for me what was interesting is if it's a movie about a guy who was sort of paralyzed by fear. There was an argument at one point to put those abductions throughout the movie, to put them in real time, and to me the fun of making the movie was that you should be looking going, "This dude might be crazy." So you had to hold back on that and hold back on that, and for me it became the boogeyman basically taking him through his "greatest hits," going, "Are you scared yet? Because you're next." That was the cool thing for me, and I just went and said, "Let's go in order of disappearance leading up the showdown."How did you decide what to show and what not to show as far as the monster itself was concerned?

Kay: My feeling has always been that the less you see of the boogeyman, the scarier the boogeyman is, and that's the sort of cross that you bear when you make this kind of movie. You're kind of going, it's called Boogeyman, so you're pretty much straight-up making a monster movie, but my taste is not that as a rule, so I was going, "Let's put it in his head; let's make it in the shadows and make it sort of as non-literal as possible," and so the actual boogeyman became progressively more literal, which for me I would have honestly preferred a more obscured creature. But it's fine.Rob Tapert, how do you approach moviemaking like this from a producer's standpoint?

Tapert: One thing in the horror genre that is appealing to people that work in it is that it is very much a director-driven business. Even if you have a script that's written by somebody else, it's eventually the director, because it's their vision, and it really has to have the script express what they think it should be. But there's no way to send a horror director out to shoot something that he doesn't understand or love, because it just won't work, so you really can't just go out and get a great horror script, give it to a director, and say, "OK, go make this." They have to find a way to take every aspect of it aboard and make it theirs. I think it's like that for anything, but in a drama, where it's pretty straightforward—"OK, we want to make them cry here, laugh here"—horror is a little different, because it's all the placement of the camera, and how the camera moves is so integral to telling the story and advancing the horror, or can be, that really everything about it has to be the director's vision as to what's scary.Was the origin of this film Eric Kripke's screenplay, or were you first approached by director Stephen Kay?

Tapert: Eric Kripke had a script. It was more of a traditional '80s horror film, very much, and then we brought some other writers aboard and kind of found some weird middle ground. When Stephen came aboard, he said, "I really want to scare the audience," "I think I can scare the audience," and he went out and boned up and did his homework and watched all kinds of horror from around the world. But far and away the most interesting stuff that's happening right now is kind of the Asian horror, which is different than a traditional '80s monster movie. So he really moved the script from more of a monster movie into more of a psychological movie, and finally when we kind of sprang the boogeyman towards the end of the movie and it loses some of the psychological [element], "Is he crazy?" or whatever, so Stephen kind of guided the last set of writers and did some writing himself, as all directors do.How much freedom did you give Stephen Kay to move the film in that direction? How closely did you work with him?

Tapert: Word by word, but eventually you've got to let the director do what they want—not do what they want, you've got to let the director try to create their vision. You can have all of the discussions about the script, but as soon as it starts to go off and shoot, then you really have to say either "I'm with you" or "I'm against you." But you'd better be with them, because everybody's got to be pulling in the same direction to make something work.Is there a guiding principle for the kind of projects you accept for production at Ghost House?

Tapert: First and foremost, Ghost House is a horror company. We're interested only in making horror movies, and ideally ones that satisfy, at least at this juncture, a wide audience, so kind of our mandate is to make movies that are entertaining, that provide 10 to 15 jump-out-of-your-seat scares, that work within a certain financial range, and things that aren't repulsive, for lack of a better word. I know that's very subjective, but there's just some areas that we say we don't want to do that. We don't find it entertaining.How tough was it to strike a balance between the visceral and psychological elements of the story?

Tapert: What if told you test audiences decided it? Yeah, sad as that is, because I think, in the director's mind, he would have loved to have kept this all to the very end of the movie, even after we show the boogeyman, he would have liked to put it back into a psychological realm, but the horror audience just couldn't go there with him. So when you tried to tell them something different at the end of the movie, then what they had witnessed in the last 10 minutes just wasn't working.What other specific challenges did you have bringing this project to completion?

Tapert: Each movie and each project has its own challenges that are unique unto it. In this particular case, the boogeyman, how much do we show, when do we show him, all of those questions needed to be answered, and ideally we've answered them in what is hopefully the most satisfying fashion. But nothing is a breeze.