Writer and director BrendanMuldowney spoke with Digital Trends about his new horror film TheCellar.
Brendan Muldowney set out to create a horror film based on atmosphere instead of gore with his award-winning short film, 2004’s The Ten Steps — the template for a creepy story about a cursed house with a mythological basement was put into place. After 18 years, the wait for a feature-length film to expand upon the short is over, as The Cellar arrives in theaters and streams on Shudder on April 15.
What was an important influence was Robert Wise’s The Haunting. I had always wanted to make a horror film that was all about atmosphere with no gore. So that was really the inspiration. And then, of course, the film, you know, took off. It was the most successful short we ever did. It won best short at the Sitges Fantastic Film Festival, which is a hardcore horror audience, and it won best short at the New York International Children’s Film Festival, which was running at the time.
Anyway, long story short, I have always been interested in quantum physics, but I really don’t understand it. I just like reading it. Even the small bits that open my mind are so profound. It nearly replaces religion for me because it is something we don’t know the answer to. I feel small. It’s very interesting you pick up on that because I tried many different versions [of the film]. This one was an extension of the short. The other was a prologue of the short, and a new family moved in. With that new family, the protagonist would have been another young daughter, and I found it very hard to send an innocent young woman to hell. It finally hit that it’s better if it’s a mother looking for her daughter. I went, “OK, but I need something else.
Well, it’s very hard to say that, because horror is such a broad spectrum. I love both ends of the spectrum. I love the most transgressive dark films like Martyrs. I really like hardcore horror. But equally, I remember, when there were video or DVD shops, I could easily go in and pick something not even mind-numbing but just as fun like Cherry Falls, for example. With this mad concept, it’s sort of based around the Scream idea that, if you’re a virgin, you’ll be killed.
One of the financing bodies is called The WRAP Fund. You can access financing from it if you shoot in the west of Ireland in certain areas, about six counties. Not only do they have six counties, but they’ve been using a lot of their other counties, and they pointed us towards Roscommon. So, you know, we had to look in Roscommon, and we were lucky that was such a brilliant house there.Well, there was some building and, obviously, the cellar itself is built.
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