INTERVIEW

Ernest R. Dickerson

The DP and director on the fantastic potential in image-making/-seeing, learning to photograph the world, and the possibility of a Demon Knight sequel.

BY FRANK FALISI | January 13, 2025
SHARE:

“This phrase ‘point of view’ has to be taken seriously,” said Serge Daney, referencing Fritz Lang’s great and Gothic Moonfleet (1955). “The point of view is a concrete situation in a cluttered landscape. It is subjective and, at the same time, it creates the objective.” I am thinking about Daney and Ernest R. Dickerson together in part because Dickerson—cinematographer, director, and cinephile—speaks about loving and living film in ways that evoke Daney’s proposed and unfinished “cinema-autobiography,” a kind-of life-telling that would situate personal cinephilia with the motion of modern history and so, cinema.

Dickerson photographed the first six features directed by his NYU classmate Spike Lee. It is his camera that locates the objective amid the spectacle, locates the how of the political inside the four sides of the cinematic frame: how Mookie surveys the crowd in motion (Do the Right Thing), how a chorus of meatheads breathe in a Bensonhurst cloister (Jungle Fever), how Malcolm X’s face is a map. As with Lee himself, to think of Dickerson solely in terms of polemics is a disservice to filmmaker and film watcher. In both his and Lee’s work, there is the heat of uncovering human joy and connection in these stories. Dickerson has shot some of the most alive frames in contemporary American film: Def by Temptation (1990), The Brother from Another Planet (1984), Cousin Bobby (1992), Krush Groove (1985). With his own feature debut as director, Juice (1992), he fused pulp sensibilities with a dynamism of blocking, a honed instinct for moving the story through time. Dickerson’s directed features hum, his typically thoughtful and speculative use of color merging with—in his own words—“dealing with things here in the United States” in tactics alternatively sly and operatic. He’s been a prolific television director since he worked on six episodes of The Wire, but to this writer, it’s Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995) that sees Dickerson in full command of his monster memories and movie love, a neon dime-store dream that cries bullshit on America as often as it finds, through acts of special effect, blocking, and camera movement, a kind of holy lowness that charts a better way to be. Did you know cinema vibrates? It echoes how we see the world.

Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight
Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight

How are you today?
It’s a good day. Just dealing with things here in the United States. Where are you?

I’m in Jersey, in Lawrence Township, right near Trenton. But I was born in Freehold. You’re a Newark man originally, right?
Yeah, born and raised.

You’re out on the West Coast now?
Yeah, I’m in Studio City.

Do you think growing up in Newark impacted how you see the world?
I mean, I grew up in a housing project. I lived in projects until I was 18. It’s interesting but I never have dreams that take place in the country. They all take place in distressed urban environments because those used to be my playgrounds. We used to play in abandoned buildings, on the rooftops, in the basements.

I was a latchkey kid. My mom worked at the library, and on my days off from school, I was left to my own devices. I went to Catholic school, and all my friends went to public school, so on holidays, I was by myself. On the weekends, I had my friends. We started seeing movies at an early age. If there was a good Saturday matinee, we would go, usually a horror film or a science-fiction film. One of the best double bills I saw was This Island Earth and The Pit and the Pendulum. Horror films were big events, growing up. I remember when The Blob [1958] came out, when House on Haunted Hill [1959] came out. Those movies really hit us as kids.

What was art like in your house, growing up?
Well, there was art and music in the house. My dad died when I was 8 years old. But my uncle was a jazz musician, and my mother had me reading from an early age. I used to read adventure and science-fiction stories. I started getting into horror in high school. But even as a young teenager, my favorite author was Ray Bradbury. A book that really impacted me quite heavily was The Martian Chronicles. That and Something Wicked This Way Comes.

My uncle lived in New York. I used to love to just go over and stay with him. Some days when he would go to work, I was left on my own. So I would go to the movies, go to museums, and just travel around by myself. I think my uncle probably had more to do with the directions I took in my life than anybody else. He was the first man to put a camera in my hands. He was an artist-in-residence at Wesleyan University, and while he was there, he started taking classes in black-and-white photography, doing his own prints, and they were amazing. He turned me on to a lot of movies. We’d sit up late at night and just look at old movies.

Because of a conversation I had with him, I discovered cinematography. I always wondered why certain movies looked the way they did. One of those movies was David Lean’s 1948 version of Oliver Twist. This was after I’d seen [my uncle’s] photographs, and was really starting to get an idea of what photography was all about. And we’re watching the opening scenes of Oliver Twist—when his mother is in labor, going across the moors, with the storm clouds, and the skeletal trees, and the wind blowing, and really high contrast black and white—and my uncle just happened to say, “Damn, this photography is beautiful.” And that’s when it hit me: movies are photographed. Okay, so that’s what this person is in the credits, the director of photography. Not long after, I went to the movies and saw In Cold Blood [1967], which was also black and white, photographed by the great Conrad Hall. The look of that really affected me, too.

That started my whole love affair with visual storytelling. I started really realizing why Hitchcock movies looked the way they did. You know, we didn’t have a color TV for years. So I first saw Vertigo [1958], at around 14 or 15 years old, in black and white, but there was still something about the composition of the visuals that really struck me. And it started me on a lot of other horror films that were coming on TV around that time, like Robert Wise’s The Haunting [1963], which is still one of the most gorgeously photographed films.

Movies That Stimulated and Inspired Dickerson

I’m curious about this twofold dawning consciousness: that movies are something made, something photographed, and something in turn that you could make.
I was reading magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland. And I remember they would talk about Ray Harryhausen’s films, because Jason and the Argonauts [1963] and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad [1958] were huge movies when I was a kid. And Famous Monsters was the first publication that really covered how those movies were made, you know, the secrets of stop-motion animation.

And around this time, you were finding your way to architecture as well, at Howard?
I always drew pictures—I used to do my own comic strips, actually, some in 3-D. Architecture seemed to be the coolest thing, something I could really glom on to, to use my love of drawing and creating. As a kid, I built models. I even made a puppet theater, with the marionettes made out of household materials. But there wasn’t anybody who really pushed me into the whole theatrical thing. Amiri Baraka, back when he was LeRoi Jones, was a good friend of my family’s. And I remember him coming by my house one time. They had just made a movie of his play Dutchman. I was fascinated to find out how that movie was made. But then, it was like, “Oh, it’s a movie.” I could never get involved in making a movie. And so architecture was what I went after. It really taught me how to pre-visualize a problem and solve it.

Before Howard, I did a couple of years at Rutgers University, because I hadn’t declared a major. So I was working part-time, going to college part-time. For the electives, I took classes in film. I wound up working in photography. At Howard, I would try to get jobs in architect’s offices, you know, as a draftsperson. And they’d say, “We can hire you, but we can’t pay you anything.” That didn’t make any sense, so I decided to see if I could get a job on the school newspaper, in the photography section.

The day I showed up—I had the camera that my uncle helped me buy—nobody was in the office. So I decided to sit around and wait to see if someone would interview me for the job. And this report came through that there was a Senate hearing involving these two young African American girls, the Relf sisters, from Alabama. They had gone for a routine checkup, and while they were there, the doctor sterilized them. When their parents found out about it, they were horrified. Come to find out that he had been doing this to a lot of other young African American girls without even telling them. And this case wound up going before Senator Ted Kennedy. So the call came through about this hearing, and they needed somebody to go down and photograph it, so I ran down to the Senate hearing room that was jostling with other news photographers, and I wound up getting some great photographs. So for my first trial job at The Hilltop school newspaper, I had two front-page photographs.

I took a minor in color photography, and all the work I got after that was photographic. Even though I stayed in architecture, I ended up at Howard University Medical School, doing medical photography. But we had a studio, so we were developing film every day. That’s when I decided I had to get out of there, that I couldn’t stay in DC for the rest of my life. I began to realize that my true love was film. So I applied to NYU.

Those seem so impactful as early photographic experiences. On the one hand, you have this intensely horrific behavior on display in that trial, and, on the other, medical photography’s intense relation to the human body. How were those images interacting with your interest in cinema during those years?
What was great was that two of the guys in the [medical] department with me were movie fanatics. And the AFI had some amazing retrospectives, and there was the Circle Theater that would do great double bills, like of Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout [1971] and Don’t Look Now [1973]. They showed Lawrence of Arabia [1962]. I remember going to see Robert Aldrich show his personal print of Kiss Me Deadly [1955], which wound up becoming one of my favorite films. Every week, we’d go to three or four movies. We read magazines like Cinefantastique, so we were always up on fantastic films that were coming out.

Then we heard about this thing called Star Wars. I mean, we were reading about it for months. So we plotted it out: on the day it came out, we got all our assignments done, shut down the lab early, and went to see the first screening at the Uptown Theater in DC. It blew us away so much that we stayed to watch it a second time—just walked right back in. This was before the line started. After that second show, the line was around the block. Oh god, we were really movie fanatics. We would go see midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, we’d smoke some weed, go see Rocky Horror, Eraserhead, Phantom of the Paradise. We were getting hip to a lot of young filmmakers coming up.

Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight
Billy Zane in Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight

That’s a well-balanced diet of genres. Kiss Me Deadly is basically perfect, I think.
I mean, I always gravitated toward not just horror and sci-fi but thrillers. I loved film noir. And, actually, a lot of the student projects I did in film school were noirish. I met Spike on the first day at NYU, and we’d always go see a lot of movies together.

I loved Japanese horror. At AFI, they showed Kwaidan, which became one of my favorites. I also saw Onibaba and Kuroneko. I loved The Man Who Fell to Earth when it first came out. Anything that was trying to do cinematically what science-fiction literature was doing, I loved. Even if critics weren’t too crazy about it, I thought Lucas’s first feature, THX 1138, was brilliant. And my favorite film of all time is still 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was attracted to cinema that really pushed: seeing Apocalypse Now for the first time at the Ziegfeld in Manhattan just blew me away. Spike and I would go to these movies together, we loved a lot of the same films and had a lot of the same dreams. And one of them was to eventually do The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Malcolm X [1992] is epic in ways a few of the films you cite are—Star Wars, Apocalypse Now, 2001. Were you and Spike dreaming in those monolithic, expansive terms?
To me, it’s what the story required. I love big films. Lawrence of Arabia is one of my favorites. And actually, when Spike and I were planning out Malcolm X, we originally wanted to shoot in 65mm for a 70mm presentation. And when we were in the early planning stages, the restored version of Lawrence of Arabia came out. We went to see it in the theater in its 70mm glory and were blown away. The landscapes, yeah, that was part of it. But what got us was the close-ups, because they were so sharp. And our purpose in doing Malcolm X was to show the world who he was. Because there had been so much disinformation about him. We wanted to put Malcolm right in front of everybody. And we felt that if we could do it in 65mm, that would be the best way to get that kind of sharpness that Lawrence had.

We always loved the experiential part of film. We always designed our coverage to put the audience in the shoes of the main character. That’s something I’ve always tried to do. I mean, working in television, I still try to do the same thing. I try not to shoot like television because I don’t really know how to do television.

That’s interesting to think about, how distinct these mediums are, even though they’re full of moving images. How does, or did,  TV look differently to you?
It used to be a really separate medium, but now everybody has a big-screen television in their living room. And so over the past several years, you’ve seen TV shows trying to become much more cinematic. Cable started it, streaming helped. I’ve been lucky in that I’ve only done a couple of shows that really wanted TV-style photography, network shows that kind of conform to what Gordon Willis once called the “dump truck” school of directing, where the director shoots everything they can think of and lets the editor put it together. That kind of goes counter to everything I’ve ever learned about how to make a movie. In a movie, each scene is determined by whose point of view it is. And it’s what I did on all the TV shows I worked on. The Wire, The Walking Dead, Dexter… they all allowed me to shoot and cut them like films. That’s been one of the saving graces for me, being in television nowadays: I’ve been able to treat each episode like a mini-movie.

Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight
Jada Pinkett in Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight

Speaking of movies that come from television, I wonder if we could talk some about Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight. It reminds me of what you said, about the experiential act of filmmaking and watching. Like, that movie is squarely Jada Pinkett’s story, but it sort of takes a little while to settle on her, to assert that perspective.
That was my intention. I figure, if I’m going to put a young, African American girl in there, people think 10 minutes into the movie, she’s going to die. Most movies in those days, if you had Black characters, they were the first to go. And I deliberately wanted an African American woman for that role. I wasn’t sure who, but I wanted her to be small in stature, tough. And then when I saw Jada in Menace II Society [1993], I said, “Yeah, that’s her.” [Executive producer] Joel Silver had somebody else entirely in mind for the role, not an African American. So we set up a meeting, and I told her to go in and convince him, and she charmed him.

The cast is like the ’96 Bulls.
It was such a fun cast. I had Jada, I had Billy Zane. I had seen Billy in Dead Calm [1989]. It was a brilliant film. And I said, “Yeah, he could do it.” But when he showed up, he didn’t have any hair, and he came with a suitcase of wigs. And he was like, “What wig do you want?” I kind of liked the bald head, I told him to just be him. Dick Miller was somebody I grew up watching, because I grew up with those Corman films, and when I found out he was available, and he wanted to do it, it was great. He was amazing to work with. And CCH Pounder and Bill Sadler. Bill brought such gravitas to the role of Brayker. Gary Farmer, he was a great guy, he was so fun to work with. Thomas Haden Church was so cool, I was so glad to see where his career went after that.

We had a very comfortable situation. The film takes place in one night, but I didn’t want to shoot 30 nights out in the desert. That would have just been diminishing returns—the crew would have been miserable. So I asked if there was a way to shoot indoors someplace, and we were actually able to find a decommissioned airplane hangar at Van Nuys Airport. And that’s where we built the whole set. It gave us maximum control, which gave us regular working hours. We could go in, start shooting at 8 a.m., and go until 7 or 8 p.m. The crew on the film was a lot of the series’ crew. Rick Bota, he was the DP on the show. Stephen Lovejoy, the editor, wound up becoming my editor for several years after that. And I brought on Christiaan Wagener, the production designer, who had worked on Surviving the Game [1994], my second film [as a director]. He designed the whole church set. We came up with the idea of making it like an old mission church that had been reconverted into this flophouse hotel.

It’s got such a specific look, this kind of soundstaged neon nightmare. Both in-universe with Tales from the Crypt’s aesthetic but also somehow distinct, if that makes sense.
The thing is, it wasn’t like a typical Tales from the Crypt story. Most of those are comeuppance tales, karma stories. And this was about the eternal. I’ve always loved The Outer Limits episode “The Demon with the Glass Hand.” The eternal hero who’s fighting evil. And it was creating that mythology, and showing how that legacy gets passed onto the next person. That’s what we find out in the film. That’s why the star has to come all the way into alignment, because it’s leading Brayker to find the next person, the next Demon Knight, who winds up being Jada’s character, Jeryline. I love that she played it as feistily as she did. I love stories about ordinary folks who, confronted with extraordinary situations, rise to the top. They’ve got to overcome their fears, overcome what they consider their foibles and failures in the face of overwhelming odds. This girl starts the day cleaning out the stove, and the next morning she’s dealing with a cosmic horror, and will be for the rest of her life. It’s almost like Gilgamesh, you know?

There’s also this subtle point that the cosmic horror manifests as a white almost yuppie-like manager figure.
Yeah, what’s really cool was, after he’s gone, you see who takes his place: a Black demon. Actually, Mark Kennerly, who plays that new Collector, was my next-door neighbor in Brooklyn. That was amazing: he just happened to be in L.A., and I got him the role. But it was like, “Okay, he’s going after Jada, so the demon is going to be Black this time. Take on a Black persona.” I don’t know. I love the subversiveness, but not many folks noticed it. This was the first movie where an African American woman saves the world.

Billy always wanted to do a sequel to Demon Knight. And I’m still in contact with Gil Adler and Alan Kratz, the producers on the show. But the rights are so screwed up, just all over the place. So if we did, we wouldn’t be able to call it “Demon Knight,” and we definitely couldn’t use “Tales from the Crypt.” But I would love to shoot a sequel in Paris. That’s where Jeryline wanted to go, you know.

That’d be amazing, obviously. What other projects are keeping you busy right now?
I’m between jobs, just finishing a show. My wife and I are rewriting, looking for new stuff.

Rewriting?
My wife found a novel that was recommended by [actor] Scott Wilson, who became a great friend while we were doing The Walking Dead. He passed away. And so my wife was able to negotiate and get the rights to the novel, and she vowed she would try to get it made. So we have a script, and I just finished a rewrite. It’s a great tale of survival about this 9-year-old kid who loses everything during Katrina. It’s a bit of an epic tale. We’ve spent some time in New Orleans, a city we love. So we’re working on that, and we’re working on a horror film that we wrote together.

You brought up Dick Miller, you’ve worked with John Sayles and Jonathan Demme. I wonder if you could talk a little about Roger Corman, what he and his kind of filmmaking means to you?
I just think Corman was a really great director. He got more publicity as a producer, but I’ve always been inspired by filmmakers who were able to achieve impressive results with hardly any resources. Even a little movie like Attack of the Crab Monsters, you know, terrible special effects but a very spooky story, and I think one of the first films to really deal with telepathy. Not of This Earth is brilliant, minimalist science fiction. I would love to remake The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. The effects weren’t there at the time, for Roger. And I know what that’s like: what we wanted to do for the incarnation of the fire demon at the end of Demon Knight, that was pre-CGI. We tried to do it optically, and it just didn’t work. But I can imagine what Roger wanted to do. His Poe films were really quite brilliant. I had dinner at his house one time. Roger made a great martini. And he was a really, really, really lovely guy. I miss him. 🩸

Dick Miller in Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight
FRANK FALISI

is a New Jersey–based writer. He’s an Associate Editor at Bright Wall/Dark Room, and his writing has appeared in Reverse Shot, MUBI Notebook, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

X: @frank_falisi

The film is also available on DVD and Blu-ray.
RELATED CONTENT
    FRESH BLOOD
(James Bond III, USA, 1990)

Every so often, an actual reputable film materializes from Troma’s output of zero-budget shlock. Despite its nonsensical title, 1990’s Def by Temptation is one such example.

BY LAURA KERN  |  June 19, 2024

The intricate black magic of practical effects, horror and comedy fusion, and subversive satire, according to the trailblazing writer-director of Tales from the Hood.

I’ve reached a place of acceptance where I can admit without shame that I watch scary movies...

BY MELISSA LYDE  |  January 31, 2023

(Kaneto Shindo, Japan, 1964)

The opening images of Kaneto Shindo’s exquisite, dread-drenched, medieval Japan–set Onibaba (1964) are overlaid with telegraphic fragments of text: “THE HOLE. DEEP AND DARK…”

BY JOSÉ TEODORO  | November 15, 2024

RECOMMENDED
    RAVENOUS
GUIDE | ORIGINS

Supernatural

(Victor Halperin, USA, 1933)

This pre-Code offering packs a lot of story into its typically brisk running time, with several plot threads weaving together a (not always successful) tapestry of spooky and criminal doings.

READ MORE >

BY  ANN OLSSON  |  Month 00, 2021

REVIEW

The Keep

(Michael Mann, USA, 1983)

In what could be the fastest-resulting rape revenge movie, a drunken lout brutally forces himself on Ida, the young woman who doesn't return his affections, during a party over Labor Day.

READ MORE >

BY  LAURA KERN  |  Month 00, 2021

REVIEW

We Need To Do Something

(Sean King O'Grady, USA, 2021)

Beast is a lot of movies in one package - fractured fairy tale, belated-coming-of-age story, psychological drama, regional horror film - but above all it's a calling card for its leading lady, Jessie Buckley.

READ MORE >

BY  LAURA KERN  |  Month 00, 2021

🖨 📄