Five FrightFest Facts with Nick Lyon, from ‘Do You Want to Play?’

Lyon is no stranger to horror fans. Across a career spanning everything from Species: The Awakening and Zombie Apocalypse to disaster movies, thrillers and creature features, he has built a reputation for delivering ambitious genre entertainment while working across an impressive variety of styles and scales. Most recently, he wrote, directed and produced On Fire, a thriller inspired by the growing threat of wildfires, demonstrating his ability to balance spectacle with real-world anxieties.

Now, with Do You Want to Play? making its World Premiere at Tubi FrightFest, Lyon returns to supernatural horror with a tale of possession, friendship and demonic infection. Featuring an Ouija app, a possessed teenager, and an occult expert known as Scary Gary, the film promises a contemporary spin on a classic horror premise. Ahead of the premiere, we caught up with Lyon for our latest Five FrightFest Facts.

Nick Lyon, writer-director of Do You Want to Play?

Tell us about your film

Do You Want to Play? is actually a film I first wrote back in 2011. About ten or twelve years later, I came back to it when Glenn from Scary Content asked if I had any Ouija scripts, and I still really wanted to make this. But by then there had been so many Ouija board movies that I had to ask myself, What can I do differently?

The answer was to bring the idea into the present day by combining an old-fashioned spirit board with technology and an app, while really exploring the idea of possession.

The film follows Emily, a young woman who inadvertently opens a door to something very dark while playing with a spirit board at an app launch party. A demon begins trying to possess her, and it falls to her boyfriend Tommy and Owen, Tommy’s estranged former best friend and the creator of the digital D3M0N board, to figure out how to save her.

Eventually they enlist the help of Scary Gary, a former priest turned occult specialist, podcaster and YouTuber, played by Ricco Ross, who audiences might know from Aliens and Beauty in Black.

At its heart, it’s an old-school possession movie colliding with the way we live with technology now. That’s what finally made the idea feel fresh enough for me to come back to it and make it.

How did you get into making movies?

Oh man, it feels like eons ago (of course I am still 25 at heart).

I was an art student in Portland, Oregon, but at the same time I was also restoring mannequins for about two and a half years, doing performance art, photography and all sorts of other strange creative things.

Then I went to Germany to learn German and make my art, and somewhere during that time I realized filmmaking was probably the one thing that could combine all of my interests, writing, photography, performance and making art. I suppose the mannequin restoration probably played into it as well. That was a pretty interesting job and definitely gave me a slightly unusual visual education.

In Germany, at Werner Herzog’s command, I started working as a doorman at a big club while going to film school. I was also working as a projectionist and began directing music videos.

That’s basically how I fell into movies. One thing led to another, it somehow became a career, and I’m still doing it.

What films would you love to see screened at FrightFest and why?

I definitely want to see Lesions. A friend of mine is an executive producer on it, and I’ve been hearing about the film, so I’m really curious to finally see what they made.

And that’s one of the great things about a festival like FrightFest. You get to discover films you might otherwise never see, and you get to experience them for the first time with a real horror audience.

If you could create your own award to give at FrightFest, what would it be and why?

I would create “The Troll Award”, and it would be given to every filmmaker who actually managed to finish their movie.

Making a film is hard. It’s also incredibly fun, but it’s hard, and whether somebody loves your movie or absolutely hates it, completing one is an accomplishment.

Every filmmaker eventually gets trolled. Somebody somewhere is going to tell you that your movie is terrible, that you shouldn’t be allowed near a camera, or that you’ve somehow personally destroyed cinema, or in my case I should apparently be beheaded with a spoon for making Grendel.

So I think being trolled is almost a badge of honor. It means you actually made something, finished it and put it out into the world for strangers to complain about (and I think it’s sort of a sport for some trolls and anger management for others).

It’s probably not particularly useful for publicity, but congratulations, you win “The Troll Award”.

Everybody who finished a feature film gets one.

If your life was made into a horror film, what would it be called and who would play the starring role?

The Filmmaker: It’s a Wonderful Death.

They say insanity is making the same mistake over and over again while expecting a different result. So my horror film would be about a filmmaker who has been sentenced to a life in film purgatory and has to keep making one genre movie after another for eternity.

Every movie has to be low budget, almost no time, and several huge elements that are nearly impossible to accomplish. And you have to have at least one actor who leaves his mic pack on and talks shit about you not knowing you can hear them, or they just go to the bathroom and their irritable bowel syndrome becomes next-level entertainment.

One film is action. The next is horror. Then zombies. Then a disaster movie. Maybe even a Christmas movie or a drama.

And every single time, the director convinces himself: “This is the one. This might be the best thing I’ve ever done. It’s genius. It’s a new path! It’s going to be a hit!”

Or he just needs the job because he has a family to feed.

Either way, at some point during every movie, he dies a spectacular death appropriate to whatever genre he’s making. My favorite was mid-shoot on a shark movie, falling through the broken deck of a boat in Puerto Rico, getting a staph infection and ending up in hospital for ten days. I still have the scar to prove it. I tell people it’s a shark bite.

Then, after several weeks of sleep, The Filmmaker wakes up, has another idea for a movie, or gets another call offering him a directing job, and immediately thinks, “this time it’s going to be different.”

And the whole film begins again.

If I really wanted to add another twist, I’d have every movie take place in the same town as It’s a Wonderful Life.

I actually think it could be a pretty fun film. I’d want someone like Owen Wilson to play the filmmaker, someone who can be funny without looking like he’s trying to be funny.

And if anybody reading this wants to finance it, I’ll definitely write it.

They say write what you know.