Playing as part of the Incredibly Strange section of the NZ International Film Festival, Nicholas McCarthy’s horror Home weaves three stories around one particular haunted house. We asked McCarthy what makes real estate good fodder for a horror film and other tough questions about Home. The answers may or may not involve pyjamas.
Hello from Flicks. What have you been up to today?
Actually I was in my pyjamas until four o’clock. Then I picked my daughter up from preschool and ate French fries with her. This is probably the life of a lot of indie horror directors.
The property market causes enough anxiety for people already. Did you really have to introduce a horror element to it?
Ha. Yeah it’s obviously an exploitable theme. When you look for homes to buy or rent, you see the inside of a lot of places and you try to imagine yourself living there. That’s sort of what the devil is doing in this movie. He’s like a picky shopper.
Without giving too much away, ‘Home’ seems to feature a twisting narrative. Was this how you originally envisioned it, or did the film evolve that way?
It started with me thinking about a story told in two distinct halves. But then when I started to write it, this whole other part invaded it, a third section. When I’m writing, I want to be able to surprise myself. So the more chances I took, the fresher it felt to me. And the scarier.
What are the challenges – and advantages – of weaving a story like this?
The advantage of the offbeat structure is to keep the audience on their toes. I wanted in a way to lull them into thinking they are headed in one direction and then suddenly they get moved in another.
It also works thematically. There’s this confusion of time and place in the story. And the movie, in a general way, is about families. I had been thinking about how we all have that experience when we go back home and we may feel like we’re going back in time. Into our childhood. The disturbing part of this comes from feeling like you have no place in that world anymore. One secret of the movie is the only person who has a place in everything we see is the devil. He’s the real main character.
What do you think the key elements are that contemporary horror films need in order to surprise a jaded “seen it all” audience?
I’m not sure there’s a formula, which is good. When I think of the movies that most influenced contemporary horror, I go back to 1999, when The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project came out. These two still seem like the most influential in the genre. Horror is now either expected to be carefully mounted, like the Shyamalan movie, or raw and immediate, like Blair Witch. Both those movies couldn’t be more different. One has A-list actors and an airtight script. The other is shot on low rent video and performed improv by amateurs. But I guess what they both had is they tell their stories passionately. And, each builds on something we are familiar with, from other genre films, as well as ghost stories we tell each other. People connect with that.
The title of your film is so simple that it’s almost unsettling. Are you proud of the lack of hyperbole?
It’s funny, here in North America we retitled it At the Devil’s Door because there’s a huge Dreamworks kids movie called Home coming out. So I like to think in the future, some family is going to rent or stream my horror movie by accident for their children, who will be traumatized.
What was the most memorable moment of the shoot?
There’s a scene we were shooting where a stunt woman gets pulled across a floor with a cable. The idea is the cable gets removed later. It was about 3 o clock in the morning. I describe what I want to the stunt team, they do a few gentle run throughs and give the thumbs up to go ahead. We roll camera and I say “action.” And the stunt woman is violently pulled straight through the air at top speed and SMACK lands head first on to the cement floor. You could hear the sound louder than anything. I call cut and ran over to her. She just gets up with a smile and asks “You want to do it again?” She loved her job! Stunt people are the most amazing people in the world.
Who would be the best, and worst, people to bring along to your film?
You know those signs outside rollercoasters that warn small children, pregnant women, and people with heart conditions not to ride? All of them probably shouldn’t come. Everyone else is welcome.
What was the last great film you saw?
The last great film I saw. I watched the Blu-ray of Antonioni’s L’eclisse again a couple of nights ago, one of my all time favorites. As far as new movies, I was blown away by a documentary called Giuseppe Makes a Movie that I caught at the LA Film Festival. Truly one of the funniest and most insane films about making movies I’ve ever seen. It was directed by Adam Rifkin.
What are you thinking about doing next?
I’m going to get out of my pyjamas by 3 tomorrow, I SWEAR.
