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| The Dead Thing |
There are love stories and then there are stories about love, and the two do not always overlap. Elric Kane’s The Dead Thing is one of the latter – which isn’t to say that it’s mot beautiful or that there are not times when, watching it, you will be desperately hoping that it’s troubled central characters can make their relationship work. That’s Alex (Blu Hunt) and Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen). Their connection is intense, but she’s been struggling in many areas of her life and he has a secret so dark that it threatens to overwhelm them both. It all begins with a date arranged over a phone app. When I meet Elric at the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, where it’s screening, I note that I’ve recently been discussing phone dating with Miguel Llansó, and that we were reflecting on how drastically it has reshaped people’s lives. Was that where the development of this story began?
“Yeah. I'm pretty observational person, and I had a note on my phone for years that said ‘dating app horror.’ And I don't even know why that was, you know, in my head. But then I was teaching film, and I was working with a secretary who every day, she would come in and recount these wild stories of – not so much the sexual side. It was much more just the different kind of apps and the different people she'd meet and the awkward conversations. And it felt to me like she was a little bit lost because of how much time it consumed in her life without finding anything real through it, for the most part. And that definitely was a part of the kernel for me, versus my own experience with dating.”
He was already in a relationship when it became popular, he explains, so he wasn’t in a position to base the film on personal experience.
“I was thinking of the darker side of what that could lead to. And also it did feel like if you got to the end of the story, you could imagine someone recounting the events of the story and saying, ‘It's sounding like a modern urban legend.’ We don't have a lot of modern urban legends – maybe on Reddit. But I was like, ‘Oh, how do urban legends start?’ And then I could imagine this being, ‘Oh, did you hear about the girl who met this guy on a dating app?’ And then ‘...and what happened to her?’ and ‘I hear she's still out there.’
“You can see how something like that could germinate. And so having certain ideas like that and then also thinking to myself, ‘How do I do that in a way that feels real?’ Maybe at the risk of making a less scary film, but it's more important that I make this not feel silly, because if it feels silly the concept would just fall apart. And so that became the focus. I wanted this to feel very real and very focused on this person and her emotions in her world that she allows us into in some ways.”
Alex’s flatmate is going through difficulties in her relationship at the same time. Was that about creating a parallel, or showing that it’s not the use of apps themselves that is the problem?
“A little bit,” he says, “and grounding her. She has this fantasy world that she's in with her dating. And then there's a reality, and she doesn't seem very good at reality. You know, she doesn't seem very good at keeping up with her friend, and she's probably done things in the background of the story that maybe have led to fissures and division there. It's just adding layers of drama and to kind of parallel her, to contrast her with somebody who is only living in reality at times. And I think that can work pretty well. And sadly, I think, because at the end of this, if there's a sadness arc to The Dead Thing, it’s also the loss of friendship.
“People always talk about romantic love, and often only focus on the loss of that. But friendship involves love, and a lot of friendships break all the time for very strange reasons, or sometimes people don't even realise what happened, and they never get those back. I think that can be an equally heartbreaking topic, and I think that's something that's also at the core of what she's going through.”
I note that she has kind of troubled relationships at work as well, particularly with the one guy she works with who has a crush on her and doesn't really understand why she wants to keep her work life and her dating life separate.
“Yeah, there's definitely some different forms of maybe toxic...” He hesitates. “Not just masculinity. Toxic relationships are sometimes a two way street, but there certainly is a form of toxic masculinity at the core of different characters and at different levels. So you have one character who's kind of likable, but then his behaviour is so stupid and gross that you want to kind of slap him and say ‘What are you doing?’ Then you have another character who is just funny and lets his mouth kind of run off. And then you have a core male character who's becoming all consuming and going truly to the dark side of these relationships.
“I do think it's important to study this stuff now, because of how the view of these traditional roles has been changing. And if you can do it in a film and still try to entertain and even move a story forward, it's a good way to do it. I think a lot of stuff happens in workplaces where it's not even intentional between people, but it's just a weird tension. And they have a particularly strange workplace. It's like an after hours place where you're doing things to probably prep for the people who work the day shift. So it's very graveyardy, and part of my general feel of trying to create a movie that's like a ghostly version of night in LA working, which is truly how I view LA. L A is very alienated and dark and much more broody at night than what we see on TV of the daytime.”
I mention the little bit of daylight that we see early on when Alex and Kyle have been together for the first time, and suggest that it might represent more of a real world that she loses touch with as she's more and more focused on the night.
“Absolutely,” he says. “I mean, you nail it. It's that little bit of hope, because it’s the one time we see daylight in the film – with him – and because maybe it's just going to be a nice possible new connection. But really, even from the start, as important as the two leads were for me, it was vital to make it in Los Angeles set at night, because that was a character to me. You know, Collateral is an example of a movie that uses that like a character. But I've never seen, really, a horror film capture the way I feel about Los Angeles, which is – I don't want to say it's bleak – maybe the film is – but it's different. It's different and it's very quiet at night and not a lot of people in the streets. It's that feeling. And I think it could get lost pretty easily.”
It seems important that there is, from the start, more than just sex between the two of them, but how did he work on building up that sense of a deeper chemistry between them?
“I think they obviously just connect,” he says. “There's something between them. Maybe there's a darkness to why they're connecting, maybe there's not. So it's a little open. But I think she's obviously seeing something in him that she needs and maybe some of that is being consumed by somebody, being all in, to forget certain things, to forget yourself. I think there's something they see reflected with each other.
“There's another character at work later who maybe doesn't have the heat that she's feeling with this, but does offer a lifeline to a more innocent, realistic type of relationship. And seeing somebody, how they're going to make that choice at a certain point, is always interesting to me. You know, we all have friends who we often see pick the wrong person. ‘Oh, my God, they're picking the bad guy over the’ – you know. But our lead in this is obviously very charismatic too, and in some ways vulnerable in his own way at the start. That makes him appealing. There's something in her that needs this and needs him. We try to ground something that could be very fantastical to feel almost – not banal, but just real. That was my goal, at least.”
In this kind of horror, there's often a focus of relationships that become obsessive and maybe self destructive, but here there's also a suggestion, with a guy whom Alex meets later, that what she really needs to find is balance.
“Yeah. I mean, I think this generation is absolutely born into devices in your hand. The way to connect being online versus nature and trying to just put that stuff aside for a while. I'm not saying that there's any right way. It's not that I'm trying to be preachy about it, but, you know, there are ways to reboot ourselves, and maybe we sometimes actually will require that. And sometimes some people – it's too late, you know? But I think that contrast is absolutely something we hope people take away.”
We talk about the actors, as I tell him that I think it’s the performances that really make the film.
“I appreciate that,” he says. “You know, when you make something, people always think you want to just be the director. But honestly, a lot of how you feel about what you've made is how people view the people in it, because those are the relationships, and that's the emotion. Blu was the first person I wanted to cast, weirdly, because I knew I wanted someone who didn't look like the typical woman I see in every other movie: blond hair, blue eyes, like a cheerleader or whatever. This is not that movie. I wanted someone who looks a little different.
“I had seen The New Mutants and couldn't really tell from that because it was a big movie that had a lot of issues, and she wasn't sure if she was going to make more movies after that experience she had. She was doing TV and things. I had seen a lot of other actors presented to me for it, but I kept thinking about her, and weirdly enough, I'd seen her Instagram. Obviously, this is about modern phones, and she had a lot of really interesting images of herself in the way she would stare off at things and gaze. It sounds like a weird thing to say that I cast her because of her gaze, but it was a big driving force because I knew we'd be looking at her looking at things for the whole movie.
“She was also talking about Robert Altman in posts, and filmmakers that I liked. I was like, ‘Oh, interesting. She has really good taste in movies.’ So eventually – it was our last swing before we cast the lead – I said ‘Could you just find a way to get the script to her manager?’ And she read it that day. We got on a Zoom. She told me she listens to a podcast that I am the host of, and I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ She was like, ‘I’m in.’
“In terms of directing her, I didn't, for the most part. We talked about the story, we talked about the character. I made sure that I didn’t get in her way because she was already beyond committed. You can kind of tell when you watch the movie: this is not somebody who was ever holding back or ever told me ‘I can't do that.’ She was always willing to go further than we were asking because she just understood Alex.
“Ben, on the other hand, was the opposite. I hadn't looked at any guys yet, and the casting director, David Guglielmo, just sent me one tape and said ‘Just so you know, this is a stuntman who has been doing it for a long time. He's in Mad Max: Fury Road. He's in Furiosa. He's one of the war boys. He just sent this tape in and it's really sensitive.’ He just read the monologue from the main stretch of the film that he has, and it was very intuitive and sensitive, but he had long hair and looked like this really cool dude. And so, of course, I cast him. And then he's like, ‘So George Miller needs me to go back for a few weeks and I have to shave my head.’
“He did give me the option of not letting him go do the George Miller film, which I was not going to do. He said, ‘I'll just do your movie if you want.’ I said ‘You go to George Miller and we'll make it work.’ And we did. But it was different. He had a lot to prove to himself, probably because he hadn't done something like that. I think he's still natural in the film, but coming from naturally being an actor meant he got this other quality that's not as fluid as some people, and it's suddenly different. He's obviously a very beautiful looking person, and just physically, and I think it added something. And he's really tall and she's really short, so it was interesting.
“I never got to read them together, and so it was a risk. With some independent films, because of the way contracts work, you don't get to introduce the people. So It was a little worried. And then the first day on set, that outside scene was one of the first things we did. The way he leaned into her was so sweet, and the way she kind of reached up – we were like, ‘Oh, this is going to work!’ You just knew it.
“The guy who comes in later in the story to her workplace, John Karna, he had been on a TV show called Scream, which was two seasons of this show that was based on the Scream movies. He was the cool podcast nerd. We had met. He had to actually research the podcast I hosted to play the role. He was like, ‘I don't know anything about Horror podcasts.’ So he started listening to it. Then he reached out and told us. This was years ago. And so we watched a couple movies together at one point, so he was actually in my lookbook. And for people who don't understand, like, when you do a lookbook, it's just for you to have ideas of who you might cast. He's the only one who was the lookbook character who ended up playing that character. So he actually was cast from what was written with a voice like his in mind.
“For me, at the point he enters the story, it's like a breath of fresh air, because it’s become kind of oppressive. When he comes in, I breathe a sigh of relief. He's just a very natural performer in that way. The other guy who worked at the office, I'd seen him in a super independent film that Arrow had released called Threshold. He was the lead, and I thought he was really good. And I was like, ‘Well, I'm sure you could do this role.’ And so that's how you flesh out the rest of the roles. Thankfully, I think they all took it really seriously. They all responded to the script and they were all, they all knew it wasn't going to be exactly the same as other things they've done. I think they could sense that we're trying to make something a bit more super focused and maybe more emotional.”
Presenting the film at Fantasia is super exciting, he says.
“When you make something, you're really focused, and then as soon as you finish it and send it out, there are reviews. I know I'm going to make something very specific. I'm hoping it will really talk to somebody. And I know somebody else will be like, ‘Oh, but there's no head explosion.’ You know, when I go to Amazon these days and there's a horror film, it usually has to have something crazy in the first scene. So you have no idea. And the thing that’s special about Fantasia, which was the first that we heard back from, was that they write a response that’s very detailed about what they responded to and why they were so excited, why they wanted it.
“Just like anything, you know, our worth as artists or whatever, it's suddenly like somebody going ‘Oh, you matter.’ And you feel really incredible and you're very excited about the film. And it was a festival I'd never been to but had always wanted to, so that was terrific. And we've heard from a couple programmers here how they felt. And so that gets you excited because if they do, somebody else will, and suddenly you're like, ‘We have a movie.’
“I don't know if somebody talked to Frightfest from here, but we heard pretty quickly from somebody at Frightfest – I believe it was Alan Jones – who had watched and seemed to have a similar reaction to it, it just feeling different to them. And very now. I think most of the ideas I have for stories are, like, Seventies or Eighties throwbacks. And so I was like, ‘How do you make a movie that's a modern horror film that's about right now, but it isn't a teenage phone film?’ So that was part of the challenge.
“I think Frightfest is going to be exciting. I've heard that it's an 800 seat theatre in Leicester Square, and it's already almost sold out. So my brain is like, ‘That's going to be interesting.’ I'm kind of excited to see it with a very different crowd. It'll be interesting to see where it ends up.”
