Koontz Exorcises the 'Phantoms' Within

Interviewed by Nina Davidson.
Hollywood.com, January 22 1998.


BEVERLY HILLS - Author Dean Koontz turned to writing to exorcise his personal demons, creating a long list of best-sellers about supernatural and unnatural thrills. Escaping from a difficult childhood led him into the realms of terror as a cathartic release. "As a kid, I escaped into all kinds of fiction because we were very poor," he said. "My father had 44 jobs in 34 years, and a lot of the time he didn't work. And the reason he had so many jobs is that he frequently punched out his boss, which is not a wise career move. He was very violent, very alcoholic, we never knew whether we had a roof over our head the next day, or food on the table. Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid."

Koontz, deeply tanned and dressed in a black blazer over a black silk shirt, displays a gregarious charm while promoting his latest film "Phantoms." No subject, from his father's mental illness to his new hair implants, is off-limits for Koontz.

After all, his fiction has no conventional limits either. "Intensity," set in a 24-hour time period, follows a woman frantically escaping a serial killer. In "Phantoms," the film immediately jumps into action as well when sisters Joanna Going and Rose McGowan return to Snowfield, Colorado to find the entire population murdered. The sisters discover the menacing subterranean Ancient Enemy, a massive creature with a God complex and an appetite to match its ambitions.

Koontz, whose previous novels "Intensity," "The Servants of Twilight," and "The Face of Fear" were turned into television movies, insisted on complete control over the shooting script of "Phantoms." In 1995, he fought a legal battle to remove his name from the film "Hideaway" after he viewed the final product.

"I don't want to get into the usual Hollywood thing where you write the script and they love it for a week and a half, and then they bring in seventeen other writers," he said. "I said the only way I'll do this if I have control of the shooting script, no one can write behind me unless I approve it, and if they do, I can throw out what they did. Give me a choice of director, and approval of all the creative elements in it, and I'll do it. And I was astonished that they said yes. Nobody but Miramax would have done that for somebody like me."

Koontz selected director Joe Chappelle, who directed the film-noir "Thieves Quartet" in 1994. Veteran actor Peter O'Toole signed on for the role of Timothy Flyte, a tabloid journalist who studied the Ancient Enemy at Oxford University but was expelled for his eccentric views. Koontz said he thinks people enjoy being scared by his works, both cinematic and literary, to lessen the uncertainty of their daily struggles.

"Because they live in a world that's pretty scary and life is very uncertain. None of us know whether we're going to be here tomorrow," he said. "Seeing a movie that's very scary with a lot of thrills in it makes you confront mortality in a way, but be over and done with it in ninety some minutes. They walk out feeling that they've survived. I think it relates deeply on a subconscious level that way, otherwise I don't know. But thank God they do, or I'm out of work. I'd have to do something honest for a living."

After performing the honest living as a teacher for the Appalachian Poverty Program upon his graduation from Shippensburg State College in Pennsylvania, Koontz cut a deal with his wife Gerda. She said she would support him for five years as he tried to succeed as a writer. By the end of those five years, Gerda quit her job to run the business side of her husband's profitable career. The couple just celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary in 1996.

Koontz, who writes six days a week from 7:30 a.m. to dinnertime, said he relies on discipline to keep churning out his novels. He dismisses the dilemma of writer's block as the hobgoblin of little minds.

"I never get writer's block. I've never had it. Writer's block comes from one thing, and one thing only, for every writer, and that is self-doubt. That makes me sound like an egomaniac, 'I have no self-doubt.' In fact, I probably have more self-doubt than any writer I know. But you confront the self-doubt. You just say 'It's going to be here and I can't do anything about it,'" he said.

"I see my self-doubt as actually this little imp with sneakered feet that sits on my shoulder and chatters in my ear that I ought to actually be on an Alaskan fishing boat or gutting halibut because that's all my talent allows. I'm so self-critical, and I actually say to other writers, if you just embrace that, this is the way it is, self-doubt is actually a very healthy thing. I think it's the people who have no doubt that every word they put down is gold that probably don't write very well."