ComingSoon Senior Editor Spencer Legacy spoke with director Kevin Lewis about directing The Accursed and combining horror with comedy. The Accursed is out today through video-on-demand and on digital storefronts.
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“Elly (Sarah Grey) is asked by a family friend (Mena Suvari) to spend a few days looking after an elderly woman (Meg Foster) living in a remote cabin,” reads the film’s synopsis. “She readily agrees, thinking a short trip to the woods will be a nice escape. The cabin turns out to be anything but relaxing as Elly begins hallucinating in ways that blur reality with her dreams. As the visions take over, Elly realizes that she was lured there by a demonic presence hiding inside of the woman just waiting to break free.”
Spencer Legacy: Willy’s Wonderland to The Accursed is a bit of a tonal shift. What made you want to tell this story next?
Kevin Lewis: I read Rob Kennedy’s script and I just loved it. I thought that the first seven pages was its own movie in itself, you know? I just [thought], “Man, it’d be cool to do something different. A little darker and more sinister and a little more grounded.” Working with all these great actors on these characters and making a compelling story about guilt and grief … The idea of the sins of the mothers visiting on their daughters just really spoke to me, all of it. So I was like, “I’ve got to do this.”
Building on that, the themes of grief and guilt are very prevalent in the film. What made you want to really dive into those ideas?
It’s interesting because I’m taking care of my mom, who’s 91, and a lot of thoughts of that just kind of creep in. You know, like, “could I spend more time with her,” and things like that. When I read the script about Ambrose, and my wife’s a nurse, and Elly’s a nurse, and some of these themes hit home to me. I just love the idea of making a 70s vintage horror movie. Willy’s was a love letter to the 80s and movies like Evil Dead that I loved. The idea of making more of a grounded kind of [film], dealing with the mind, psychological horror film was very compelling.
There’s some really great and unsettling imagery all throughout the film, especially the hand in the mouth. What was the process behind deciding what sort of visuals to create?
I love the idea of the hand in the mouth. That was really exciting to me. We did a prosthetic hand, but we also mapped it for the VFX. A great company, Ntropic, did all the VFX for us. It was just really cool. I wanted to make it as organic as possible. I used a lot of practical effects on this movie as well. [I wanted to] blend the things and try to make it as real as possible because I think a lot of movies get bogged down on the VFX and it’s like a CGI fest. It looks more like a cutscenes from video games. I didn’t want that in this movie and I knew we were making a serious film about serious subject matter. So the VFX needed to be serious and feel real.
I think the practical effects worked really well. All the goo and slime really makes it feel more gross than digital blood and that sort of thing.
We had a demon, we built — that was Troy James. We built the suit, Cinema Makeup School built the suit for us. Did a great job. Then we added the goo and stuff. Then the VFX were the flies and things like that, so we augmented it with VFX.
There are so many designs throughout mythology and pop culture for demons. How did you land on what you wanted the demon to look like?
You know what’s really interesting about that? The demon … they’re dealing with demons, right? In the movie. So the idea of now we have manifested it into a physical form … how do you do that? Dave McAdoo was the artist. He did a lot of concept drawings with this [and] just did a fantastic job. We went through it and said, “I like this part. I don’t like this,” and everything. But at the end of the day, it was really about what the demon does to the world it affects, right? When he comes from his world into, let’s say the real world or the cabin world in our movie, it’s “what does he do to those people around him?”
So that’s why I did that whole — I call it the demon shake — where you do a demon POV. A VFX where the image would do the image shaker as he would come in. It would have that low base rumble. I researched a thing on low frequency. A good friend of mine, Scott Harbert, he’s an executive producer of this movie, was telling me about these low frequencies in horror movies. I started doing research and it’s true. It’s like this low-base hum. It kind of unnerves the spirit a little bit. Sometimes they do it where you can’t even really hear it, and sometimes it’s a little more prevalent. I just thought, “man, that’s the way the demon has his own kind of score,” right? His own vibe to it. The sound is part of that extension of the physical form.
So when we’re shaking that image and then we’re doing that demon hum or the demon base, and just trying to bring his world into the real world and the cabin world, it felt very invasive. And that’s what the scene’s about, right? It’s about these women getting invaded. I think that’s one of the scariest things for women too, is being invaded without their consent. That’s kind of what’s going on. I also wanted to manifest that physically and emotionally and visually, and that’s where we all came together with all those, those things.
You mentioned like the sins of the mother allowing for an almost all-female cast. What did that opportunity and experience mean for you?
Oh, it was great. I was raised by a single mom and I had two sisters I’ve been married for over 20 years. I have a daughter who’s 16. So that wasn’t a … I mean, it was a challenge in a way, but it really wasn’t. I understood the characters. Rob Kennedy wrote a great script, so I understood where he was going with it. What I liked about it too is it’s very organic. It wasn’t a movie where these were guys and they changed it, or this or that they’re talking about their boyfriends. It just felt real and it felt natural, you know? That’s one thing I really liked about the project, so I wanted to keep that organic integrity through shooting the movie and finishing the movie.
There’s a lot of both jump scares and a more slow, crawling sense of dread and horror throughout The Accursed. Is it difficult to balance these different types of scares and figure out when to use what?
Yeah, and the thing is, I’m not a big fan of jump scares. Sometimes I think they’re cheap. They could be really cool, really good. But sometimes I feel like, “Okay, we’ve seen that or done that.” My feeling on The Accursed was I wanted to get an emotional tone. I wanted to get a sense of dread. I wanted to get a sense of unsettlement and just unease as you watch this movie, and mood and atmosphere, thick. I love movies like that. That’s what I really wanted to bring to The Accursed. From frame one to the end, it’s this unsettling, atmospheric, moody piece. The jump scares were interesting, but I was more … the thing is, the emotion of what the characters are going through, that’s also creating the mood, right? That’s creating the atmosphere. So all those had to blend in and go hand-in-hand with each other, you know?
Is there a particular message or feeling that you hope people come away from The Accursed with?
It’s really cool because I love making movies where you have to think about it a little bit. The message, for me, is just that you can’t live with the guilt. You can’t live with the regret. It will eat you alive. That you need to confront your demons. And that’s what we’re talking about in the movie. One of my favorite things a friend of mine said was, “It doesn’t catch up to until it catches up to you.” That’s kind of what’s going on with Elly, right? She cannot confront her demons. She’s mired in this regret and in this deep sorrow about her mother and guilt, and it eats her alive. If she didn’t do that and if she maybe sought help like Beth suggests or worked [it] out in a positive manner, none of this maybe would’ve happened, right?
So I think we all have our own demons that we have to face, and if we don’t face them now, we’re going to face them later. It’s better just rip off the band aid and face them now. And the idea of history, right? The sins of the mothers, like I said. The song, the Sting song “History Will Teach Us Nothing” really was in my mind when I was making this film, because these characters — Sadie and Elly — they’re on the path of becoming their mothers. The generational trauma, if we could stop that and talk about it and move on from that and not keep these things that chain us emotionally, we can evolve and be a better person, right? Then help the next generation not to repeat the same mistakes. I like to tell my kids, “you’re going to make mistakes, but I don’t want you to make mine and here are mine. I want you to learn from them. So then you’re going to make your own, but you just don’t make mine. Don’t repeat what I did.” And that’s the theme of The Accursed, right? They’re repeating what their mothers did and it needs to stop.
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Earlier I mentioned the shift between the two movies, but also, what did you learn from making Willy’s Wonderland that you were able to apply in The Accursed?
Every movie you learn, right? There’s practical things about filmmaking in terms of “get your days” and all that fun stuff, but more emotionally … Spencer, it’s interesting because I came down with Covid and was in the hospital for two weeks. When I came out, Willy’s was just coming out. When you’re facing death like I did, you really change, right? Things just are not the same. I really learned to just take life … carpe diem, you know? Live every day, enjoy every moment, enjoy every breath. I really try to do that and try to be centered. So it’s interesting, because I made Willy’s, but then I went through this horrendous experience and I kind of changed. To say “what did I learn from Willy’s to this,” Willy’s, in a way, feels long ago because of what happened with me. So really, I took what happened to me and what I learned from that and did The Accursed.
In Willy’s you have a silent Nicholas Cage, which is crazy. Was that always the idea that he wouldn’t speak?
Yeah, so I got the script. G.O. Parsons wrote a great script, and I got the script and he didn’t speak until the very end. He had one line, but I always felt like if you do that, that line really needs to be powerful. It needs to be epic. Nick and I talked about it and he felt that the animals, the animatronics, were trash. They were beneath him and he didn’t need to speak. I agreed. So we just cut that and went on to make a movie that he didn’t speak through the whole film.
There’s that scene where he comes out of the kitchen and I do that push-in, and I’m trying to trick the audience, “Okay, here comes the one-liner, here comes the 80s cheese line, the groovy line,” and we push in and then we just hold it and nothing. I kind of like that.
Is it difficult to balance horror with comedy and find the right tone? Because they’re such distinct tones.
You’re right. But you know what’s funny is what happens when some people laugh sometimes is [that] they’re kind of anxious or kind of unsettled, right? So they laugh to let it go. So as much as you think horror and comedy are not in the same universe, they kind of are. It’s an emotional response. So I always feel that you’ve got to get to the truth. You’ve got to get to the truth with the characters. Just like with Nick, when he said, “these animatronics are trash, I’m not talking to them.” That was his truth, right? That’s what he really believed. So when you get to the truth with the actors and Mena [Suvari] and Sarah [Dumont] on The Accursed, and Alexis [Knapp] and Meg [Foster], and it’s like, “okay, this is what Ms. Ambrose is going do and this is what she wouldn’t do.” You really start narrowing down the characters. Then things start to evolve, and then the truth and the reality starts coming into play. Then you can start playing with things. Then you can start finding the humor in things.
It was great because we rehearsed, and it’s like that thing with Mena and Sarah, Beth and Alma, they just never like each other in the movie. You could feel it and they were just riffing off one another, and was just great. “Let’s do it this way, let’s add a little of this.” So it’s all workshopping and trying to get it to where you feel that, “Okay, now we’re telling a complete story, and it’s got hills and valleys.” It’s not this one thing. It has peaks and it goes up and it goes down, and it kind of just feels natural, and that’s where it needs to be.
