Walking out of a screening of Detention I heard others trying to pigeon hole the film by comparing it to films like Scott Pilgrim. “Both films use texting,” writer/director Joseph Kahn tells Free Press Houston in an interview. Kahn is no stranger to filmmaking having paved a career with music videos. A glance at the tip of the iceberg of artists Kahn’s worked with is impressive enough to warrant more than curiosity. (U2, The Chemical Brothers, Gwen Stefani, Blink 182, Eminem, DMX, Wu-Tang Clan, the list goes on.)

Genre similarities aside, Detention is like a ray of shining starlight over the pitch-dark night of teen movies. Detention involves body switching, time travel, high school rivalries about prom night, slasher freak outs and a few other bits of the kitchen sink thrown in for good measure. Detention is a masterpiece of surrealism, and though set amongst high school students it functions more as humorous commentary on modern pop culture as filtered through the revised sensibility of John Hughes teenagers.

Kahn: You just made my day. This is my version of John Hughes filtered through the way I process media. If you look at Scott Pilgrim they use texting for comic book emulation. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re using motion graphics. Frankly this script was written before Scott Pilgrim came out. My agenda was based on my experience after 20 years of music videos and filmmaking. Teen films have stagnated for almost 30 years. John Hughes almost perfected the form but nobody has gone beyond that. All they’ve done is add more snark. I’ve updated the scene and by that I mean I’ve re-interpreted it and reinvented it. I’m trying to do something that feels now rather than a studio film that’s just filling out templates. When you say you’re going to make a high school film; high school isn’t a genre, high school is a location. It’s the stories within the high school that fall into genres. In high school each one of the jocks, nerds, or whomever – each one of those people are living different genres. My co-writer Mark Palermo is a film critic in Halifax, and we had a lot of discussion