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| The Undertone Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival |
A comfortable family home becomes a site of terror when a podcast co-host listens to what might be demonically attenuated audio files in Ian Tuason’s The Undertone. The film, which makes highly effective use of old horror tricks, premièred at Fantasia on Monday 28 July, and the following day I discussed it with Ian and his star Nina Kiri.
“It started when I was writing a scripted narrative podcast,” Ian says, “so that's what The Undertone was initially. It was two podcasters doing their regular weekly podcast episodes, talking about creepypastas. And then my parents got sick, and I was a caregiver to both of them.
“You know, all my life, I've been wondering why The Exorcist was so scary. That's the scariest movie that I've ever seen, and it traumatised me as a kid. I'm Catholic, so it really messed me up. I knew that one factor was the Catholic guilt and the fear of going to hell, but then another factor was that it was a movie where it took a child that's supposed to be something safe and make that the danger.
“For a long time, I've been trying to think about what. What could I possess? Because I wanted to possess something. And then when I was caregiving my parents, they were like children. Children, and I came up with this idea. I wrote scenes in between the podcast recordings. That's how the movie came to be. And then we met Nina. We met looking for someone that could carry the entire film while being the only person on screen. And then we talked a lot about the character, and we made it work.
“I watched a bunch of horror films like The Babadook. I watched a lot of one location films that weren't horror, to see how they did it. Like the Babadook was shot wide a lot, so that the background is ominous and the space itself is threatening. I also like to add a lot of negative space behind the character. And so I thought a lot about each shot and how this space could be threatening.”
Nina was just coming off a lengthy series of appearances in The Handmaid’s Tale, and looking for projects that would let her do something different.
“I read the script and I thought it was so intelligent and so personal, so vulnerable. And then I met Dan [Slater, producer,] and Ian on a zoom. As soon as I saw them and we’d talked for two minutes, I was like ‘I know this is going to be really good.’ It was very organic in terms of chemistry, and I felt like – I don't know – with horror, it's already so dark, so if I don't feel like I can be safe, I don't really want to be involved in it. I mean, because already it's a really vulnerable movie. With horror, you just go places and you have to be brave to go there, but I can't feel brave to go somewhere if I don't feel like I'm doing it with people that make me feel safe.” She turns to Ian. “But you already made me feel safe...For me, it's like, can I exist in the space and be able to go? To become vulnerable?”
In this case, that’s psychological as well as physical vulnerability, I suggest.
“Correct,” she says. “That's another reason why it's so important that the people involved are people that I can just connect with.
“There’s something that I've done in the past with roles that feel very demanding. I kind of just have my own boundaries where I'm like, ‘I'm just going to stay here until the shot is done, and that's it’. And then I can really be there for that. Then I go back into my own world and put on my headphones and read my book or something. But then as soon as I got to the house and we started shooting it was a really relaxed atmosphere. I honestly think this is why the movie is so good, because the energy was very relaxed and very collaborative.
“Ian is very giving. He's not latching on to exactly what his idea was. He’s very open to interpretation and people saying, like, ‘Oh, what if we did this?’ Or if I said ‘Can I change this line to this?’ He had no ego in terms of being like, ‘No, actually, it has to be this way. This is exactly how I saw it.’ And yet he still had boundaries for what he really wanted to fight for. So as soon as I got there and started meeting everybody, I felt like, ‘Oh, this is a really easy atmosphere to be in.’
“I honestly didn't think that that would be the case because of, again, horror, and one house with 15 people all around each other. So it was a combination of luck that everybody was someone who I felt very easy and natural around, and then also being like, ‘Okay, I'm staying in the room where I hang out in between scenes, and then I come out for the scenes, and I can go back to a place where I can replenish.’”
“That was my childhood room,” says Ian, smiling.
We talk about the development of the podcast scenes, and Nina reveals that she used to do radio when she was at university.
“I did the news, and then I started my own show where I would get writers from the creative writing program to come in and read their work, and then sometimes get actors to read out their work. We did a couple radio plays because I was like, ‘They should have the experience of reading their work. And also I think people want to hear it.’ So I already had a lot of experience just listening to radio, and podcasts like Serial changed my life. Obviously.” She laughs.
“In 2014, when it came out, it was like the best thing I. And then before we started shooting, I was listening to a lot of podcasts that had two people, and I noticed a lot of them do what obviously we wrote, which is that one person has one point of view and the other person and their conflicting points of view create banter while they're talking about the subject. So that was less hard for me because it felt like a persona which is more fun and not dark, you know?”
“So you have good karma in the radio play community,” observes Ian, explaining that his first version of The Undertone was a radio play.
“We all have a personal connection based on our past,” he says. Like Michèle [Duquet, who plays the heroine’s bedbound mother] – she was a caregiver to her mom. It really helped with her performance. She knew how to make the sound of her shallow breathing.”
He’s done work with similar themes in shorts in the past, and he explains that this helped when it came to creating the right atmosphere.
“I did VR shows, so I played with creating a spatial experience. The same with the surround sound – it was a 3D soundscape.”
The atmosphere also owes a lot to the work of production designer Mercedes Coyle, he says.
“She convinced everyone that it was going to be a good movie when they saw the set. My house didn't look anything like that. The wallpaper, all those trinkets. It was all her.”
So how much did the eventual film resemble what he thought he was going to get when he started writing it?
“It's a miracle. It was everything I imagined. Everything appeared on screen.”
“Watching it for the first time, I was so focused on all the things that changed from what I shot, and so impressed by the changes that were made that I was just kind of taking it all in,” says Nina, who hadn’t had the chance to watch it before Fantasia. “As I left and as we were going to the after party, it felt like it really hit me. The heaviness of the movie, I think, hits you sometimes after you see them. And I think that's a testament to how good it is.”
“Yeah. The stuff that was added was all team effort,” says Ian. “We did a test screening and we got notes. One of the notes I kept on repeating was that they wish they knew more of the background of the relationship with her mom. And we didn't want to reshoot anything, so we thought about recording a voice message that Evy listens to over and over.
“When Sonny [Atkins], our editor had that idea, I opened my laptop, and I pulled up a voice message that my mom left – her last one – and I clicked on it to listen to it. And then we recorded Michelle when she came in for ADR to do it, but she didn't know that we were going to do it. We got it and put in the movie and it probably made the movie twice as special.”
“Yeah, it did,” says Nina. “Because it really made you care more about them.”
