What Apollo 18's Director Wishes He Could Go Back And Change About The Film
Found footage horror movies are a dime a dozen, but they can still produce some of the scariest moments in horror. Whether set in a single bedroom or the vastness of the Maryland woods, plenty of the best horror movies can be found in the found footage genre.
One underrated found footage movie is the sci-fi horror film "Apollo 18." Released in 2011 and directed by Gonzalo López-Gallego from a script by Brian Miller, the film asks one question — why did we stop going to the moon? Rather than budget cuts and a lack of public interest in the space program, "Apollo 18" imagines a fictionalized version of the canceled Apollo 18 mission that quickly descends into terror and death. In the film, a trio of astronauts heading to the moon in 1974 learn their mission is not to study moon rocks or even Soviet missiles, but a recently-discovered alien species living on the moon.
Though the film was a moderate box office hit, it got a mostly negative critical reception. In a recent interview with Syfy Wire, director López-Gallego addressed the regrets he has with "Apollo 18" and said he would have "gotten out onto the surface a little bit more" if he could do the movie all over again. "I would have let the audience breathe a little bit more. Maybe cut back to something on Earth. I'm not sure. It was obviously supposed to be contained and give that sense of paranoia between these two guys."
Why there was no Apollo 19
According to López-Gallego, the lackluster commercial performance of "Apollo 18" comes in part due to the distributor — Dimension Films — selling the wrong movie to audiences. Specifically, Dimension Films tried to market the film as "the next 'Paranormal Activity.'" It's hard to remember what a phenomenon the first "Paranormal Activity" was at the time, but this comparison set an unrealistically high bar for "Apollo 18" to pass. As the director said:
"I was always saying, 'Come on, this can't be "Paranormal Activity,"' 'Paranormal Activity' is a great movie, but it's about a couple in their bed. This is about two guys back in the '70s in a lunar module. There's no way we can pretend this is the same thing. It's a completely different thing. So I think part of the hate was probably related with that — that we were trying to somehow cheat the audience or something like that."
This is a shame, because the plan for next film sounds kind of cool. Screenwriter Brian Miller told Syfy Wire that he wanted to break from the found footage genre with "Apollo 19" to tell a more traditional narrative focusing on a second crew sent to investigate the Apollo 18 astronauts. He said the film would be broader in scope and looked toward "Alien" and "Aliens" to explain his approach. "James Cameron came in and obviously knocked it out the park with the big action version once Ridley had done the small, contained version. That's what I thought would be great: a big action movie on the Moon. Nobody's really done that yet," he said.