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| The Geechee Witch: A Boo Hag Story |
When Hollywood tells stories about witches, they’re generally set in fantasy worlds or in the past, but for many people, witches are a part of the modern world and belief in them is very real. That’s the case for the Geechee people in the southern US, and it’s a belief system explored in the latest film from Jeremiah Kipp, director of festival hit Slapface. In The Geechee Witch: A Boo Hag Story, a woman follows her husband back to the place where he was born and encounters a network of beliefs that are entirely new to her. She gradually comes to realise that she may be in very real danger. I met up with Jeremiah and with lead actress Tryphena Wade to learn more about this unusual film.
“J Craig Gordon was the real originator of this idea because he grew up as part of the Geechee community,” he says. “He's a pretty interesting guy in his own right. He was a child actor in a Clint Eastwood movie called Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil. He went on to be in the House of Representatives during Barack Obama's administration, and he's circled back into filmmaking. In much the same way that Slapface was a movie about where I grew up, J Craig Gordon was writing about where he grew up. This is very much the community he was born into.
“The Geechee are descendants of Africans who were brought to parts of Georgia and North Carolina as slaves. They worked on cotton and indigo plantations, and eventually settled into communities, often on islands. J Craig grew up in that world, and he would tell you that the boo hag is not just a fictional construct for him, it was quite literal. He would tell you that the boo hag indeed rode him. On the island that were filming on, there were blue doors up that we filmed. And the community, it wasn't just a superstition for them. It was a part of the fabric of their world.
“J Craig worked with the other two writer producers, Phoenix Higgins and Jason W Short. Together they basically drew his real story, and then gradually it evolved into the screenplay, where a lot of J Craig's personality infused into the two main characters: Leah, who Tryphena plays, and Asa, played by Stephen Cofield Jr. They're both aspects of J Craig's personality, his artistic spirit, and his push pull with where he came from.
“There are people who come from the Geechee community that don't talk about it. Like Judge Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court came from this community, but very rarely will speak of it. Sometimes it's that kind of community that people leave and don't want to come back. There's a great film, independent of ours, that I highly recommend called Daughters Of The Dust, directed by the brilliant Julie Dash. It's an extraordinary film, and it takes place within this community, and it's about the desire to stay on the island versus to leave. I think it really informed the character of Asa.
“Of course, the character I identified with more when I read the script was Leah, because she's not from there, and neither am I. I'm a middle aged white guy.” He laughs. “But the thing that really helped me as an inroad into the story is that Leah is from New York. When Asa's mother dies, they go back to the estate, and it's a return to the homeland, but it's a world that Leah has not been to. Much like Clarence Thomas, Asa hasn't really talked a lot about where he's from.
“I remember reading the script the first time – I read it all in one sitting. It came to the scene where they're riding in the back of Asa's father's truck, driving through the winding roads of the island, heading to the house. And when they arrive, they're passing by the people who live on the island, the people who work on the estate, which is a proper estate. And when they pull up to the house and the dad says ‘This is home,’ it's a really chilling moment for me, and I think for Leah as well. You're looking at a plantation house.
“It’s something that is a sign of generational wealth, but also a sign of great complexity. It's a disturbing moment for me in the read, and it was an important moment for me in the movie, because inasmuch as it's a horror movie about creatures and monsters, I also thought that it's about a community that is not incorporated into our popular culture enough. And the layers of complexity in the story I found very rich before we even got to the boo hag, which is a creature of their folklore.”
I tell him that I noticed they passed a blue door on the way to that house – a shade of blue traditionally used to ward off the boo hag.
“Yes, that's right. That was there on the island. When they hired me to direct this movie, I was just determined to be a person who would be a listener. I wanted to feel more like a journalist. I wanted to absorb the world of the story. And it was very helpful because J Craig was always there with me. When interviewed, I was like, ‘Yeah, why do you want me to direct this movie?’ They were big fans of Slapface and they were like, ‘We want somebody who loves actors. We want somebody who can create the sense of slow burning dread that builds up to the peak moments in the story.’
“I was like, ‘Well, what about the cultural nuances that I'm not going to be familiar with? I'm not going to remotely understand them. I don't want to mess things up.’ And they were like, ‘Oh, don't worry, we won't let you. We'll be there.’ And indeed, J Craig was with me every step of the way. I loved having the writer with me and having it be his story and him entrusting me to tell his story. He was always there to say ‘It's not this, it's that.’ And there were people of the community that were there with us as dialect coaches, essentially. They were pointing stuff out to us, saying ‘Here are the graveyards that you need to film. Here are the touchstones of our heritage that you need to hit.’”
Leah is our route into the story, but at the same time as she’s adjusting to this unfamiliar place, she’s suffering from increasing sleep deprivation due to strange nightmares. I ask Tryphena if she felt that Leah was mentally changing because of the pressure of sleeplessness during this time, and she nods.
“There was less and less sleep due to the nightmares, but also due to the way that the boo hag operates. She will literally take your breath, which is why every time Leah is waking up out of this sleep, she's breathless, and she's more and more breathless every time. So she's getting sleep, but she's having nightmares or visions, and then she's not actually being able to access her full breath. So that's just all of that together coupled with being in a new place. She's a fish out of water. And then also the challenges of encountering these new people and dealing with her husband, who is also kind of on shaky ground as well. Like, her marriage is on shaky ground.
“All of those things coupled together make for a cocktail of restlessness. You know what I mean? Because of that it's almost like, ‘Am I actually seeing what I'm seeing? Or is it because I can't feel settled here?’ What exactly is the reason?”
It’s her first leading role in a feature film, and I suggest that that might have made it easier to relate, because it’s quite an adjustment to take on such a demanding job.
“Yeah, well, it was definitely an adjustment,” she agrees. “I mean, I've done other films, but my background as an actor is in theatre, so there's also that adjustment of just the differences between being on stage and being on a film set, and still figuring out what those differences are and being able to tell the story. In the film world, everything is filmed out of sequence, so you have to be able to locate yourself in the story. Day one, you're filming the last scene. Day three, you're filming something at the beginning. Day five, you're filming something in the middle. So it's definitely a test in concentration and focus of being able to locate. Okay, where are we in the story, and how is she feeling at this point?”
There are obviously lots of films out there which revolve around the idea of a woman who discovers something and isn't believed by other people. How did she approach putting her own spin on that?
“I think the thing that stood out the most to me about Leah was her vulnerability in this situation, but just also as a person. She's not necessarily a hard woman, you know what I mean? That's what drew me in the most, I think.”
There’s a lot of different mythology out there pertaining to the boo hag. I ask Jeremiah how he chose what to include and what to leave out.
“It was a subject of much discussion. I just remember pouring over endless images of what the boo hag looked like, and there were so many different incarnations of this creature. But I prefer to think from the inside out. I like to think of the monsters not as props or as special effects, but as characters in their own right. And the boo hag wants home. The boo hag wants security. The first layer of security is skin. If you have no protective skin, then you have nowhere to feel safe. You're constantly exposed. You're constantly vulnerable. You're a constant walking nerve end. And so we started from that, from character, from the idea of she doesn't have even her own skin, so she will seek to inhabit yours.
“By focusing on Leah, it's like, ‘I'm going to take her skin. I'm going to take her home. I'm going to take her family, I'm going to take her child. I'm going to take this entire place, because otherwise I will die. I will be destroyed.’ The actor is Nikelola Balogun. We needed a tremendously physical actor to inhabit the boo hag, and Nikelola is a contortionist, so she has this tremendous flexibility and movement in her body that goes beyond working with a dancer or a stunt person. Nikelola's limbs are an extension of her personality. And once we're past that, now we're into the special effects department.
“There was the idea of casting a very small performer, but then also creating the sense that this person is always steeped in blood. It's like the blood is almost like seeping out of this character. It's an interesting thing when you're directing the boo hag, because it's a creature that considers herself to be so vulnerable. And when someone is frightened, they become frightening. She's constantly on the prowl and on the attack, and her target is Leah, and she'll do anything to survive. I think she looks at it as ‘Me or them, and I'll do what I have to do,’ which is terrifying. It's the creature that gets you when you sleep, which is when you are at your most vulnerable. How can you fight back against someone when you're in the twilight of your daily life?”
Obviously, in theatre, everything is much more present around an actor. There's usually something physical to interact with. To what extent did Tryphena have to conjure up the boo hag in her own mind to give her something to be afraid of?
“All of the physical contact that Leah had with the boo hag was actual physical contact,” she says. “There were really only a few moments in the film where I had to imagine that I was seeing something. And in that moment in the film, anyway, Leah is already unsure of what she's seeing. Where the boo hag and I are face to face and hand to hand, all of that was actually happening, so it made it easier to not have to imagine.
“The special effects make-up and wardrobe and everything was done so well that the terror of it also was not imagined. There was effort made to kind of keep us apart while they were working out what her make-up and her body and everything was going to look like. There was effort made for me to not see that until it was time for me to actually see it, which was also very helpful, because the first time I saw the boo hag out of the corner of my eye, I was actually terrified because she looked terrifying. But, yeah, it was really great to be able to work with her and just be face to face and feel the terror of this creature on top of me, this creature taking my breath. This creature dragging me through the hall or up the stairs or whatever it was. That felt really amazing just to be able to do that with the actual person.”
The other thing that struck me about Leah is that a lot of people seem to be trying to take things away from her, or take her away from the stable places in her life. Was the boo hag an extension of that in some ways rather than a new phenomenon for her to deal with?
“Absolutely. I mean, she's trying to take everything. She's taking my breath. At that point, Leah doesn't know that, and she learns that later on about what the boo hag actually does. And also, essentially, there's this issue of pregnancy and not being able to get pregnant and wanting to have a baby. And so I don't think the awareness is there that this being is trying to take my child or my future child, but there is certainly this feeling that something is being taken away from me. I can't breathe when I sleep. I can't sleep and actually get rest. So my rest is being taken. My breath is being taken. And then later, when I learn about what and who the boo hag is, I realise ‘Oh, she's trying to take my skin.’
“This is horrifying. So I definitely see that. The film begins with her on unfamiliar territory. Everything around her is unfamiliar. So there's also that sense of ‘I can't get my feet under me before these crazy things start to happen to me.’”
The atmosphere in the film also owes a lot to its score.
“The composer, Arindam Jurakhan, I’m so happy that we hired him,” says Jeremiah. “He's really intuitive, and he thought very deeply about how the score is not just a reflection of the culture, but a reflection of Leah's mindscape. The way that the boo hag is, like, warping her sense of identity was something that he cared about very deeply. So in addition to the instrumentation, like bringing in an African drummer who brought in an array of drums, including conga drums, all the different ways that those create sound, taking those and mixing them with the equivalent of a bad trip, the way that the ancient and the twisted modern would fuse together was Jurakhan's entire strategy behind making the film.
“I appreciated his weirdness very much. I loved his open mindedness, his deep understanding of the culture. But then also knowing that weren't creating something that belongs in a museum, we were creating something that was a nightmare fusion of the ancient and the twisted modern. I felt so glad to have him. We both made a promise to each other that if it scared him and it scared me – and it definitely scared the producers – then we were probably on the right track.”
I tell him that I was pleased to see that since the success of Slapface, he hasn't stopped making short films.
“There was a time in literary history when you could make a living writing short stories,” he says. “HP Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe were not known for their novels, but were known for their short stories. And the short form, I think, is so impactful. If you're doing something in ten minutes that builds to a peak moment, there's something really powerful about that in its own right, like independent of feature length filmmaking. So I don't just use it as a way to stay sharp and stay working while I'm not doing a feature, I also care considerably about each individual piece.
“You learn something from every project. Slapface, and then some short films, and then The Geechee Witch, and then some more short films, and we'll see what the new year brings. I love to be continually working and making things and discovering. It's always been a great source of joy in my life, making films. It’s scary, weird stuff, but it brings me great joy.”
Tryphena has made quite a few shorts herself, but didn’t know that Jeremiah worked in that form.
“I've done seven features but many shorts, and I try to keep making them,” he tells her. “I've talked to agents and managers who are like, ‘Maybe stop.’ But I really do love the form and I just want to be constantly making things. It’s really the thing that drives me. Tryphena, you've done shorts and features. I know for me, when I direct a short film, it's like three days, it's like a sprint, and a feature is like four weeks. Is the process very different for you too?”
“I do appreciate being able to get in and tell an intense story, and then get out,” she responds. “But I think I really prefer a feature just because I like to be able to sit with the character for a nice length of time and really take time to unfold the story. Sometimes with short film, you feel like you're constantly in a rush because you've only got three days to get this thing done. Sometimes it feels like that with features too, even if you have four weeks, but with a feature, you do have more time to sit with the character. You have more time with your other actors who you are playing with. So you have more time to actually get to know these people and build out a relationship that will hopefully help what you're doing on screen.”
“One thing I appreciated on The Geechee Witch was that these producers understood the value of rehearsal,” says Jeremiah. “So Tryphena and Stephen and a few of the other actors and I had the chance to actually properly rehearse, like sit in a room and go through the characters and go through the relationships. I find there's nothing worse than when day one says ‘You guys been married for ten years.’ It's ridiculous. I try to get rehearsal whenever I do a project but in this one, the producers staunchly stood behind me on that, and they made sure that Stephen and Tryphena and I had the chance to build their relationship because it's foundational to the film.”
“I think this is my first horror film,” says Tryphena. “I never considered that I would ever do a horror film, but now that I've done one, I think I'd like to do more. But what I did appreciate was that time was taken to really build the relationship and not just get to the scary, fun stuff. I appreciate that about how the film unfolds, but I also appreciated that about the process of filming, that it wasn't just ‘Let's get to the blood already,’ but ‘Let's actually tell the story of these people who are in this point in their marriage, and then this thing is also coming in and disrupting their lives.’”
