Welcome to a special horror roundtable podcast, featuring Collider's Perri Nemiroff and Haleigh Foutch along with the filmmakers behind The Endless. The hit indie horror follows two brothers back to the cult they escaped as kids, where they find much more sinister forces than they bargained for.

With The Endless arriving on Blu-ray this week, we recently hosted filmmakers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead -- who shot, wrote, directed, produced, edited and starred in the film -- to chat about a bit about creating The Endless, horror cinema in 2018, discussions surrounding "elevated horror," and how evolving trends in the industry -- from streaming to MoviePass -- are changing the game for indie filmmakers. Listen to the full interview via the embed below and read some of the highlight quotes underneath.

Known for their trio of critically acclaimed indie horrors, Resolution, Spring and The Endless, Benson and Moorhead talked about fielding offers for bigger studio projects and why they haven't regretted any of the ones they passed on.

"We’ve actually been presented with that pretty often and we continue to be," said Moorhead. We don’t think we’re the only stories that ever need to be told, you know? But honestly, the ones that we passed on, when they go and get made and we watch them, there is never any regret. It’s either as bad as we thought it was going to be or it’s way better than we think we made have made it. So we have no sadness about ever saying no to the preexisting projects."

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Image via Well Go USA

What specifically were they glad they passed on? Well, we kept the chat positive, but one movie they singled out was Stephen King's IT, which they praised for turning out better than anything they would have done.

"I don’t know if we ever would have gotten it, but we were sent IT, and it was pretty casual," Benson recalled.

"That doesn’t mean they were offering us the project, but if we made a bid for it, maybe. That kind of thing," said Moorhead.

Benson continued, "We took a look at it and didn’t think it was bad but didn’t think this is the type of thing we do and then you see the finished movie and you see the type of thing the Muschiettis did with it and it’s amazing. We don’t have that sensibility."

"They just did it way better than we would have," Moorhead agreed. "We would have done something else and it’s not something the audience wanted, it’s not something we would have wanted, but we would have tried. It just would have been all wrong."

But that doesn't mean the duo won't make a Stephen King movie at some point. The pair are huge fans of the author, and already have a script for an adaptation inspired by his short story The Death of John Hamilton. "There’s a short story that we’d like to make about the last days of John Dillinger, that a script exists for and all that it’s just one of those things that it requires money, therefor it requires talent, so it’s a long process," Said Moorhead. "We’d love to take our own stab at The Dark Tower series, that would be amazing," he continued.  "And I don’t know if anyone’s working on this, and I haven’t read it in a long time, so I’m not even sure if we’d still want to, but Needful Things would be cool."

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Image via Well Go USA

Benson agreed and added, "We could do a good job with The Tommyknockers," and Moorhead agreed, "Yeah, The Tommyknockers, we’d slay it. And that one has weird political resonance nowadays too." The duo also singled King's Desperation as an inspiration for their approach to evil forces in The Endless.

The duo also had some interesting thoughts on a few trending topics in the entertainment industry at the moment. Speaking about the idea of "elevated horror," Moorhead explained his distaste for the term and why it sticks around.

"As soon as we heard the phrase elevated genre or elevated horror it was like, “Oh man may we never touch that poison.” It’s just the difference between good movies and bad movies. There’s good horror and bad horror. I’d rather watch bad horror than bad drama because at least one tries to be interesting, but you see what I’m saying. I do understand that there’s. Away that we are trying to talk about movies like The Witch that is fundamentally different than the sixth franchise slasher form the 80s that was basically just made for fun and everybody on set was probably on cocaine and having a great time. Those are fundamentally different movies in approach and so that’s what people are trying to talk about, but the problem is we keep on coming up with these stupid terms that put one over the other rather than just trying to differentiate between them, rather than giving them qualitative assessments. I think that’s the problem. I enjoy some silly movies just as much as I enjoy The Witch, and I don’t think one’s better than the other. I’m not a complete relativist, I do believe in bad movies. They totally exist."

Moorhead also spoke about MoviePass, and how it's driving more theatergoers to independent cinema,

"I am seeing so many more movies than I used to, and I think it’s incredible if somehow they find a way to make it financially viable. I know everyone has that question, who cares? If they find it, we all win. You wouldn’t think Netflix, ten dollars a month for a bajillion movies all you want, all the time and original shows, you wouldn’t think that would be financially viable and they’re the richest company in the world right now. If they can figure it out, I’m going to leave that to them because nobody’s getting hurt. Independent films are up mastic percentages, Lady Bird was like 25% MoviePass and that was the beginning of movie pass. Now, people are talking like 50-60% indie films — it’s better for indie films than it is for studio films."

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Benson also addressed the interesting matter of how indie films are scheduled into major theaters and how studio shifts can cause enormous ripple effects for smaller films.

"The supply and demand of Indies vs big studio movies is a sort of fascinating thing; we got a new way of looking at that with the release of The Endless. It wasn’t a matter of whether people would see The Endless vs a Marvel movie, for example, that wasn’t the question…they were not even in competition. And The Endless ultimately did very well theatrically for what it was, for the amount of screens it was on, it did extraordinarily well, but it would have done a whole lot better had Avengers had not bumped back it’s release and also made them bump back Rampage, which means that for us to be in the bigger theaters, we were basically bumped out because they needed it for Rampage. It was last minute, it got bumped from bigger theaters, and so we became a smaller release. It still did extremely well, but it wasn’t a matter of whether the consumer wanted the film or not, it was the fact that there literally wasn’t movie theaters available to put the movie into."

Fortunately, for those who weren't able to catch The Endless in their local theater, the film arrives on Digital, Blu-ray and DVD Tuesday, June 26.

For more podcasts from the Collider Factory be sure to catch up on the latest episodes of the Collider.com Podcast, the Reilly Roundtable, and the Collider Games Podcast over at PodcastOne.

For more about The Endless, check out the links below:

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Image via Well Go USA