DieDie Books

Independent horror publishing is an essential part of the horror community. Writing about horror promotes the genre and the films that often get overlooked. I’m so excited to announce that I am writing a book! I’ve joined the DieDie Books team to write about the 2009 classic Jennifer’s Body. DieDie Books is an independent series of research-based horror books. Created by filmmakers Rachel Kempf and Nick Toti, DieDie Books has announced its first five books. They are currently fundraising on Kickstarter. I can’t express enough how amazing this experience has been, and how supportive the DieDie team is. I had the pleasure of interviewing Rachel and Nick about the series. 

So first, if you could just give a little overview of the project, what are your goals? What inspired DieDie? 

Rachel: I mean, we definitely love the idea of having a book series that kind of melds academic criticism, like film criticism, with popular writing about it. There are so many people just writing about films that they love on the internet. That's got a kind of energy that's a fun thing to lay on top of well-researched and thought-through film criticism lenses. So that was definitely a goal, we haven't found many books that do that. And, yeah, I think we also wanted to create a series of books that looks super sexy. Cool, awesome-looking collectible books with like, super sick cover art that'll be just like really fun to read and really fun to collect. 

Nick: Yeah! One of my things was that I obviously want the books to be good. That's why we're trying to recruit really good writers for them, like people who we actually enjoy reading their writing. But I also wanted the artwork for the books to be so good that people would buy them regardless. So then if they buy it as a fashion accessory, because they're a fan of the movie, then they actually read the book and think, “oh, this book is also really good!” Then, hopefully, they'll buy more books. So we're trying this classic exploitation film strategy. That's the way that they would make movies in the 70s. As long as it has a lurid title and a really graphic poster, then we don't really care what the movie is, because we're just trying to get people into theaters. And some of those movies ended up being really amazing. And it gave them more freedom to do whatever the heck they wanted, which is sort of our vibe. We give the authors a very long leash to kind of bring whatever they want to it. 

What was your selection process with authors? And what was it like reaching out to people?

Nick: Well, we'll limit it to the first five, since that's what we've announced so far. But, we just started reaching out to people whose writing we liked. Some of them were people that we knew beforehand. Some of them were people we didn't. But like, for instance, we contracted a guy I used to know when we lived in Austin. He had started writing a lot of horror film criticism online, and I liked his writing. And that's Jacob Trussell, who's writing our book Poltergeist. So he was one of the first people I reached out to about doing a book and now his book is going to be one of our first five. Some of the others are people like Bob Mielke, he’s writing about Threads. He was actually our thesis advisor when we were in grad school. And with the Colangelos, I just happened to read one of their articles on Sleepaway Camp. I thought it was a really good article. So I just reached out to both of them and was like, “Hey, we would love to do a book with the two of you co-authoring about Sleepaway Camp,” and they both loved the idea. And yeah, just jumped into it. 

What was your selection process for the movies? Did you have a specific set of films that you wanted to do?

Rachel: No, a lot of times we'll go by authors. Like with Threads, it was literally just that I wanted the book and I knew the perfect person. Sometimes we'll see a person like with you, we were just like, “Oh, man, we love this girl's, articles I want whatever this girl wants to write about, like, go nuts.” Sometimes we'll approach an author that way. Like, tell us what you want. Sometimes someone will write on a specific text, and we'll be like, “I want you writing about this.”

Nick: I would say we always foreground, at least thus far, we've always foregrounded the author. Like, for instance, if Bob had said, “Oh, I'd love to write a book, but I have no interest in writing about Threads,” we still would have had that conversation to be like, “Okay, what movie would you want to write a book about?” And the same for the Colangelos. 

Rachel: Sometimes someone will pitch us a movie that is not our favorite, but we ask the author to get us excited about it. Like, “What's your pitch for it?” And you know, it's like, “I'm excited by your excitement and the things that you want to bring to this.” So, I still think that'll be an interesting book. We have been a little like strategic in terms of the books that are pretty far along in the drafting process. Selecting kind of how we want the first series to go. We thought it was nice to have a slasher, and a paranormal film, and a pretty popular canonical movie. And then to also have some outliers like Threads. So it ended up being a good mix to start with. We definitely want to cover a really broad spectrum of different types of horror, and get into the idea of you know, what is horror?  

What are your goals for the first set of five books? And what are your goals for the future of DieDie? Where do you see the company going? 

Rachel. We still make movies, so I would love if, on a large scale, this became the thing instead of our day jobs that was funding our movie-making. I don't ever expect to make money from making movies and I kind of don't want to, because that comes with stress. But, this is something where we have a nice product and people can buy it. If this became a thing that made us enough money that not only we could live on, but we could also film fund our films with them that would be ideal. 

Is there anything else that you hope people know about DieDie Books?

Nick: I think that it's really important. What I love about the horror genre is that it's something that is fed from the bottom up, it’s a grassroots thing. It's something where the fans are the ones who determine where the culture goes. And I think that that's always true of culture as much as there are, you know, rich assholes at the top of society trying to convince us that it's not that way that we should be only caring about the stuff that they're making money off of. Horror is a different thing. You know, horror fans can like whatever we like. And that's for us. We get to like the things that are low class and disreputable. And no one can take that away from us. And so that's that's the spirit I want to bring to DieDie. 

If you’d like to know more about DieDie Books you can check out the Kickstarter page here!