Podcast: C. Robert Cargill on ‘The Final Terror’

As a successful novelist and screenwriter, C. Robert Cargill knows a thing or two about the horror genre. But perhaps just as important: with films like Sinister and The Black Phone under his belt, Cargill knows what it takes to make horror movies that still appeal to multiplex audiences. So it's only appropriate that Cargill would join the Certified Forgotten podcast to talk about The Final Terror, the debut slasher from soon-to-be blockbuster filmmaker Andrew Davis.

After sitting on the shelf for two years — during which time star Daryl Hannah became a sensation in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner —The Final Terror finally hit theaters in 1983. The film follows a group of Forest Service employees who head into the woods for a weekend of camping, rafting, and marijuana. But when the campers find themselves stalked through the forest by an unknown killer, the group must brush up on their survival skills or die underneath the open sky.

In this short excerpt from the podcast, Cargill explains how The Final Terror breaks from convention with the slasher genre, and why that hurt the film's chances at distribution:

This is structurally not a slasher film. It has all the hallmarks of a slasher film, but the minute the characters realize what danger they're in, they make all the decisions that the audience would be yelling at the screen for you to do. [...] They keep making all these choices that are the smartest thing to do, and then being foiled along the way by the person stalking them. And I'm so fascinated by the structure of this movie and how smart it is. How in 1981, people looked at it and [went], 'This isn't a Friday the 13th movie. I don't know what the fuck this.'

The Final Terror episode of the Certified Forgotten podcast is now available to stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, or the podcast platform of your choice.