Mike P. Nelson did not grow up with unfettered access to horror. His parents had rules. And yet here he is, the writer-director behind a Wrong Turn reboot, two segments in V/H/S 85, and a Silent Night, Deadly Night (2025) reimagining that went viral before it even hit release.
Meaghan and Arthur sat down with him for an interview covering his origin story, the franchises he has taken on, the films that shaped him, and what is coming next.
This is an editorialized summary of that episode. We pulled out the highlights, organized the threads, and wrote it up, but honestly? It does not fully capture how good the conversation actually is. You are going to want to go and listen to the whole thing.
A Monster Kid Who Never Really Stopped
The origin story is genuinely charming. Mike’s earliest horror diet was the Universal Monsters, things his parents considered tame enough to allow. He had a tape (recorded off TV, the way things were done) of James Whale’s Frankenstein that he watched repeatedly as a five-year-old. That tape lived alongside Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Temple of Doom, which his dad was a little less enthusiastic about.
That one has a special place in my heart.
Mike said about Temple of Doom, with the kind of conviction that tells you it still does.
The real turning point was Monster Squad. His godfather, a man who essentially ran a home video store out of his basement (wood paneled walls, a beta deck, a projection screen), had a copy recorded off HBO. Mike’s dad figured if the kid loved Dracula and the Wolfman, he’d love this. He was right.
What Mike got from Monster Squad, though, was something specific: monsters could be mean. There could be blood. Kids could be involved. “Okay, I’m in,” he said. Not long after that, he wrote his first story. It was about the Wolfman eating someone. His teacher was concerned. His dad explained. And that was that.
The filmmaking impulse kicked in early, too, thanks to his dad’s camera rig, a hulking shoulder-mounted setup from the early eighties where the deck was a separate ten-pound thing you lugged around. He and his friends made movies with it, figured out how to dub in punch sound effects by timing the tape’s creep, and basically never stopped. The cameras got smaller. The budgets got bigger. And somehow, a kid who wasn’t supposed to watch horror grew up to make it.
Franchises, Reboots, and What the DNA Actually Means
We asked Mike P. Nelson whether there was something specific that drew him to inherited IP, the kind of work where you step into a franchise with decades of baggage and audience expectations already baked in. His answer was more honest than you might expect.
He did not go looking for it. Wrong Turn came to him after The Domestics, his first Hollywood feature, and his initial reaction was surprise.
Never did I think I was gonna be doing that.
What changed his mind was the script. It felt like its own movie. It had the essential Wrong Turn DNA (kids in the Appalachians, a tribe in the woods, bad things happening), but it was telling something genuinely new with it: a story about liberal city kids colliding with conservative rural people colliding with a commune of violent idealists in the woods.
He called it “this trifecta,” and you can hear in how he describes it that the political texture was exactly what made him lean in. You can do a lot with familiar setups when you actually have something to say inside them.
Silent Night, Deadly Night came through Brad Miska, a producer he’d worked with on V/H/S 85. The key to his pitch, the thing that made him want it, was that he developed a take specific enough that it could have worked as its own original Santa Claus movie if the studio had passed. That’s actually a useful creative bar. If your version of someone else’s franchise is good enough to stand on its own, you’re probably doing it right.
Billy Chapman, Pixar, and a Viral Nazi Scene
The Silent Night reboot gave Billy Chapman, the original film’s traumatized protagonist, something the original never really did: reasoning that goes beyond “this orphanage was terrible to him.” Mike’s take introduces a new layer to why Billy is the way he is, something that unfolds across the first few scenes and completely redirects where you think the movie is going.
Meaghan summed it up well:
As of what a couple scenes in, something completely different happens to Billy’s character that leads him into his entire sort of trajectory for the rest of the movie.
Where did the idea actually come from? Pixar and a Bill Paxton movie. Mike was watching Ratatouille and Frailty back-to-back with his wife and son. Ratatouille gave him the whimsy of a character being guided by something else, literally controlled by a presence they can’t fully explain. Frailty gave him the darkness of someone receiving divine instruction to commit violence and genuinely believing in it. Combine those, add Billy Chapman, and you get a horror film that plays like a dark ride with real teeth.
The casting came together fast once they settled on Winnipeg (the film was originally set up to shoot in Vancouver, then moved). Mark Acheson as Charlie was the only carryover from the original casting call because Mike fought for him specifically. Rohan as Billy and Ruby Modine as Pam came through connections and chemistry; once the budget restrictions lifted, Mike knew who he wanted and moved quickly.
On set, he was personally feeding Rohan his lines as Charlie, working with him off-camera or from beside the monitor about 90% of the time, which is how the conversations between Billy and his internal voice feel so natural. Nothing sounds dubbed in because nothing really was.
The infamous Nazi sequence, the one that went viral before the film was released, came from Mike’s lifelong love of Indiana Jones. He grew up in what he called “the church of Indiana Jones,” and his dad collected World War II memorabilia, so the villains of that era were never abstract to him. The sequence is explicitly modeled on the book-burning scene in The Last Crusade.
He even pulled a line of dialogue directly from it: “We are pilgrims in an unholy land,” which Sean Connery says in the original, and Charlie now says, walking into a room full of Nazis dressed as Santas.
That one is literally just for me
Mike said. Most people caught the “garbage day” reference. Not everyone caught this one.
The sequel talk is real. Mike has pitched an idea to both leads and the producers. Everyone is in. It comes down to whether Cineverse or another entity wants to greenlight it.
The more people that say we want this, the more likely it’ll happen.
So, there you go.
VHS 85 and the Horror We Actually Live With
Mike contributed two segments to V/H/S 85, and they are connected, which is unusual for the franchise. The concept for “No Wake” had been bouncing around since at least 2018. It started as a short story he pitched to managers who called it too dark, too risky, because the central horror is a sniper and an active shooter situation. His manager at the time told him not to give up on it. He didn’t.
When Josh Goldblum reached out for V/H/S 85, Mike P. Nelson sent three ideas. Goldblum liked two of them and told Mike to pick. He picked No Wake. The segment strips back the usual slasher formula and asks a genuinely disturbing question: We spend so much time focusing on who the killer is.
What if we focused on the victims instead? What if they woke up and got to talk about what they experienced? The horror is not the shooter. The horror is that this is just something that happens now.
“It’s not necessarily a knife-wielding maniac,” Mike said.
It’s you go to the grocery store, and you don’t know if you’re gonna come home.
The two segments tie together in a way audiences don’t see coming, using a structure where one segment appears mid-anthology and the other lands near the end, revealing itself as connected only after the fact. David Bruckner, who produces these films, was immediately interested in figuring out where to place them. It worked. And, Mike noted, watching it through a 2025 lens, none of it feels dated even though it’s set decades ago.
The Amazon, Giant Snakes, and Shooting in the Jungle
Mike’s next film is Boiúna: Legend of the Amazon, a creature feature about a giant snake on the Amazon River, produced through Constantine and picked up by Lionsgate domestically. It was shot on location in Colombia, on actual Amazon River water, in the jungle, in 98-degree heat with 100% humidity. He reunited with Alan McElroy, who wrote Wrong Turn, and producer Robert Kaller, who produced it as well.
He kept referencing Sorcerer, the William Friedkin survival film, as a spiritual touchstone for how it felt to be out there.
I mean, I don’t wanna speak out of turn here, but it kinda feels like we’re in it, man.
The producer of the film, Jeremy Bolt, who did the Resident Evil films and Event Horizon, felt it too. Half the film is subtitled. A significant portion of the cast are non-actors from local communities.
It is, by Mike’s description, raw and dirty and heavy, and he contrasted it directly with Anaconda:
Ours is very… a little bit more grim. But in a really great way.
A domestic release from Lionsgate is expected in late Q3 or early Q4 of this year.
Toy Soldiers, Brackets, and the Things That Stuck
Meaghan asked Mike about Childhood Trauma, the segment on the Grave Tone Horror Podcast, where they revisit films watched at an impressionable age. Mike’s answer was Toy Soldiers, the 1991 film about terrorism at a boarding school.
He saw it at a sleepover around age nine, thought it was terrifying, watched it again as an adult, and found it still held that same uncomfortable weight. The violence in it registers differently from horror violence because it is grounded in reality in a way that a slasher never quite is. A kid grabs a gun to shoot a terrorist, and the recoil sends it flying upward.
That is not an action movie beat. That is what actually happens. He pointed out that this kind of childhood exposure probably connects directly to the No Wake segment in V/H/S 85, thematically if not consciously. These things stick.
The episode closed with a quick horror bracket. Mike’s picks moved through Wrong Turn over Hills Have Eyes, Midsommar over The Menu, The Shining over Carrie, and Cabin in the Woods over Shaun of the Dead.
In the final showdown between Midsommar and Cabin in the Woods, he went with Cabin in the Woods. His reason was honest: right now, he is in the mood for feel-good horror. “And that would be Cabin in the Woods.” Meaghan’s response was perfect: “There’s nothing feel good about Midsommar.” She’s not wrong.
If you are looking for a horror movie to watch tonight, make sure to check out all of the movies that Mike P. Nelson worked on!