 |
| Insectasy Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival |
Meeting Angus Silver, the modest-looking man behind the extraordinary and delightfully perverse Insectasy, I feel obligated to begin with a confession. Whilst I’m not sure if it’s the best, it is, I tell him, my personal favourite of all the films I’ve seen at Fantasia 2026. Its central idea – focused as it is on a woman who is sexually excited by insects – will shock many people, but I love the way that it uses that together with the classic structure of a porn film to interrogate the normative expectations that we have about sexuality in film, and about a lot of the ways that people interact socially. How did he bring all those elements together?
“It's tricky to say where it comes from,” he says. “The premise was something I wanted to do for a bit and we found the right collaborator in Tirion [Healy]. She’s totally fearless and was super interested in it. And then beyond that, I guess it was just sort of like you were saying. There is sort of interrogative quality to it where we have all these characters who have, some way or another – it's a sort of compulsive behaviour. They don't really know why they're doing it. Especially Sadie.
“We’ve got her thing with insects, the specific paraphilia, but what's at the root of it is just that she's doing things and she doesn't exactly know why, and she doesn't totally feel like she's got both hands on the wheel, so she's at war with herself. That's something that I feel qualified to write about. And then from there, I was also interested in asking why bugs do what they do. So I could find a little thread there.”
There's a wonderful scene with Sadie’s friend Genevieve in which she’s pouring out her troubles and Sadie just stops her and asks her why she's doing what she's doing. Those behaviours are mysterious in terms of desire and intent, but we generally don't talk about how mysterious they are.
“Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of scenes where it's just someone being asked point blank ‘What do you want from this? Like, what do you want right now?’ Nobody has an answer. I don't think I would have an answer if somebody asked me that in a lot of different settings. And I guess that the question that brings up is then, ‘Well, why am I doing this?’ And then we have the scene with Julius looking at ants and she asks if they do what they do because they want to or because it feels bad not to do it. That was it for me that once I figured that out. I thought ‘Okay, I understand this character and I understand the bug thing too, a little bit.’ It's just fun.”
Going back to Tirion’s fearlessness, there’s a kind of fearlessness in being willing to explore that kind of paraphilia on film to begin with, but also her directness is something that we rarely see, certainly from any female character, in cinema. Being willing to interrogate social situations in that way is something that's quite fearless in itself.
“We got, again, a great collaborator in Tirion. If something didn't feel right about it, I can lean on Tirion to say ‘Is this Sadie? Is this who she is? Is this what she's going through?’ There was an interest that we all had in this being a frank movie. We didn't really want to dance around the topic too much because that wouldn't be interesting. Obviously the first scene has some shock elements to it, but it mostly just comes from a place of wanting to have a frank conversation about a topic that I guess a lot of people would find kind of bizarre, at least at first glance.”
There's some clever visual language in there as well. I tell him that I love the way that Eighties erotic thriller language comes through in it, with the sheet-clutching and everything, and the whiteness of Sadie’s room.
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm totally pulling from some De Palma influences in there. There are these classic things, like the sheet clutching. Anything I could draw in that made this feel classic, I was having fun a lot with. It's a bit larger than life in places. Sadie is funny, right? The bug thing aside, she dresses kind of funny and she does funny things.”
I note that I also like the way that the film seems to have the same kind of logic that one finds in porn films, whereby whenever it slows down, some new opportunity will come along that she'll just stumble into. And we accept that because of the nature of the film. It doesn't have to be logical.
“I don't even think I made that connection exactly, but I see it,” he says. “I liked her just stumbling into the same characters over and over again. Something feels a bit magic about it, at least this way. Especially when she runs into Theo at a party and she runs into the character Honey later on, just outside her place. I wanted that to feel a little bit like magic, a little bit like a dream. But you're also right, that does, I guess, sort of feel like a porno to me.”
There’s some really exceptional montage work in the film.
“Montage was my way into filmmaking as a kid,” he says. “I didn't really know how to write sequences or film a scene in sequence, but I could understand the idea of putting together a bunch of shots in a way that was interesting to me. And then you steal someone else's music and make it flow a little better and yeah. So, I mean, montage is super important to me. And then we have this sort of big hallucination scene at the end of the movie, not giving too much away, and that was interesting to me, to just sort of take the concept and stop making sense for a little while. You know, just take the barest elements and use some imagery that's strange and makes you uncomfortable or makes you think it's a little beautiful too.
“We also have this cool montage in the middle of the movie where she's at a restaurant booth and she's up to no good and she's got all her friends around her, and we're cross cutting with Tirion with her hand in a jar full of crickets, which I think that cuts together well. Incidentally, every time I see it, that's the one thing I go ‘Wow, I can't believe she was totally cool with doing that.’ At that moment I didn't think that was too crazy, but every time I see it I’m like, I wouldn't want to put my hands in a jar full of crickets. That's gross. That's a tough one to do. She's like I said, fearless.”
There are pieces of surrealist imagery in there as well, such as the woman with candles in her hair. Did he have any particular influences where that was concerned?
“Tons and tons of influences. A lot of those are me doing the old look through books of old paintings and dog ear pages that I like and just rip them off entirely. Like the candle image is just a rip off of a John Bauer painting from the 1910s era, a fairy tale illustration. With these things, you always miss the mark a little bit. The thing about trying to rip off paintings is they're usually better as paintings, but it's really cool to serve as creative inspiration or something on set. So Neve [Klassen], our production designer, and I had a lot of fun just with those little images. It takes some time away from the actual shoot and you try to make something that looks unique and looks singular and looks, I guess, intentional.”
He calls it ripping off but, I suggest, it seems like something that someone might have seen once in their life and then flash back to in that ecstatic state, not getting it quite right.
“Yeah, that's totally what we're going for. She's just pulling from everything that she has in her head, and she's got all these conflicting ideas and she finds something beautiful about the bugs, even though she's also a little disgusted by them. It's that ecstatic state that she's in.”
It also works really well with the music. The score for the film is fantastic.
“Thank you,” he says. “The score is of course one of the most important elements and it's something that I have a lot of fun collaborating with people on. It was three of us that worked on the score. We had Tom Cepeda who did most of the compositions. He scored the opening scene, where we have this sort of driving, pulsing sound that's very cool. He's a wonderful musician. And my girlfriend, Solange Nelles, who is also a wonderful musician, came in late in the process and made these amazing compositions. My favourite one she did was the scene with Julius where we have a variation on the main theme of the movie, and it sort of sounds like a carnival. She made that incredible.
“The rest of the compositions are by The Rats That Drink Blood, who are a secret band who only works for me. I was showing everybody way too many influences there again, just confusing people with way too many songs. I'm like, ‘We could try something like this, or this.’ But the big influence for me, and what I really like, is Goblin. I really like Claudio Simonetti and other composers from that area, like Fabio Frizzi. I like these sort of funky sounds in movies that otherwise you wouldn't expect that sound coming through, and yeah, some strings in there. I didn't want to have the score be too synthy. There's space for that, but I like these heightened moments where you have strings coming in, something feels a little over the top.”
It's a little bit De Palma, too, I observe.
“Absolutely. I love Pino Donaggio, who did a bunch of the De Palma movies. Yeah, that's totally what I'm going for. Again, a little bit over the top. Heightened. But I think that's fun. I think people have a taste for that, especially at this festival.”
Yeah. I mean, that seems to be very much in tune with the approach of the film in general, doesn't it? And you have to balance that as well with. And there's quite a lot of humour in the film, so that you could just keep people watching, I suppose, and keep them not too scared to carry on with it.
“Well, it's funny to me, the whole premise and this predicament that she's in where she has something that she needs to keep secret. There's a lot of opportunities for comedy there. The one person I'll mention who is getting by far the most laughs out of the whole movie is Emmett Roiko, playing Theo. He gets some big laughs. He was completely crushing it at our first screening. It was amazing.”
His character seems more out of his depth than anyone.
“I know. I love the way Emmett played that character. We had some really talented people trying out for that, but there's a temptation to make Theo either sort of dorky or totally stupid. But Emmett totally got it: he's just some guy. He's a pretty regular guy who is meeting someone who is not very regular. She's a bit out there and he has no idea how to communicate with her. She has no idea how to communicate with him either. Once again, she doesn't really know what she wants from him.”
I saw that you had. Yeah, I mean, I saw that you had an intimacy coordinator for this as well. And I know that they do a whole lot of other things besides what people assume. And some of that is getting people to feel comfortable with each other to make that kind of thing work. But I mean, there must have been some very odd jobs for them to do on this film as well.
“That's absolutely right.” He laughs. “Our intimacy coordinator was Megan Wong. She's awesome. It wouldn't really have been a good idea to do this one without an intimacy coordinator. There's sex scenes that are pretty standard, obviously, and she knows how to make sure everyone's comfortable and stage those in a way that looks like the real thing but isn't. But you're absolutely right: we did throw a bit of a curveball. There's some cockroach stuff going on. And that's where she was, again, just totally cool. Totally level headed.
“I don't know how she did it, but she's working with Tirion to make sure that everyone's comfortable, everyone's having a good time. Caitlin McClure, our costume designer, also served as a bug wrangler on set that day because she had worked at a bug zoo – a zoo where they show bugs to kids, so she knows how to keep the bugs calm and keep people calm around the bugs. And so between Tirion and Megan and Caitlin, I didn't have to worry about it too much.
“Everybody was handling a really odd situation shooting-wise. They were handling it very gracefully, and everyone was comfortable, and the cockroaches seemed to be doing all right, too. They can't really speak out for themselves, but they were pretty chill, because I was having nightmares beforehand. Cockroaches running everywhere and everyone screaming. It didn't turn out that way.”
He’s thrilled to have had Fantasia as a launchpad for the film.
“Fantasia was the entire plan for us doing this,” he says. “I wanted to get this into Fantasia. I have no idea if we would. And having Justine Smith, who programmes the Underground section, go to bat for us and be such a supporter of this film was absolutely amazing. But now, you know, I'd love to have someone take this movie and show it to the world. Obviously, that's the dream, but my real dream is that in 10 or 15 years, college students show each other this and say ‘Oh, this is crazy. Check this out.’”
