Elisha Cuthbert, Eoin Macken and Brendan Muldowney on the Horrors of ‘THE CELLAR’ [SXSW 2022]
The new Irish horror film, The Cellar, just enjoyed its world premiere here at SXSW for the first in-person film festival since 2019. The same night, the supernatural mystery was the closing night film at FrightFest Glasgow in Ireland. Festival audiences worldwide are just starting to get a look at the film and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Horror fans everywhere will get a chance to see The Cellar when it premieres on Shudder and in select theaters on April 15!
Here’s the synopsis:
Keira Woods’ (Elisha Cuthbert) daughter mysteriously vanishes in the cellar of their new house. She soon discovers there is an ancient and powerful entity controlling their home that she will have to face or risk losing her family’s souls forever.
At our roundtable interview at SXSW, we talked about director Brendan Muldowney’s short film “The Ten Steps” which inspired The Cellar, Elisha Cuthbert’s motivations for taking on the role, and why families keep moving into cursed houses in horror movies.
Dread Central: I’m excited about the premiere, it’s going to be great. Have you guys been to SXSW before?
Brendan Muldowney: No. They’re good are they, the midnight shows?
DC: It’s nice that they’re actually not Midnighters this time. They’re a little earlier.
Elisha Cuthbert: I know! When I saw that I was like, oh, I don’t know. This is gonna be tough for me. I think it’s like three hundred people or something like that and it’s sold out. I’m really excited.
DC: I love movies like The Cellar because they show a housing market that only exists in the horror genre. There’s always a really creepy old house that has a history.
EC: That they got a deal on because it’s obviously haunted!
Eoin Macken: I’ll take that deal!
EC: What’s wrong with these people? We talked about that actually. Like, why would they do this? There’s no way they’d be able to afford such a beautiful, big home.
EM: But you would still move into it because you think maybe it won’t happen to me and maybe it’s not real.
EC: Maybe it’s fine! They’re so busy with work, they weren’t paying attention.
DC: Where was the actual house?
BM: It was the Clonalis House in Roscommon [Ireland]. It’s a guest house. It’s far bigger, we tried to make it look smaller on camera.
EC: It’s a huge place.
DC: I always love the real estate in horror and movies shot in famous locations.
BM: You’ll love the Clonalis House, check it out.
DC: How much did you guys actually film in the house? Was The Cellar a set?
EC: We filmed a lot in the house.
BM: Everything was in the house apart from the cellar. And the sort of door into the cellar.
EC: That hallway was a house but then when you go down the stairs, that was a set.
DC: I love the idea of the number of the steps continuing down passed the actual staircase. Was that the impetus for the idea?
BM: Well, that was the short film. There were two things that inspired the short. One was The Haunting, the Robert Wise film. I just wanted to make something that was atmosphere rather than gore. The other was a comic that I used to read years ago. It’s a comic strip, it was written by two writers who wrote Judge Dread for 2000 AD. It was called The Thirteenth Floor about this elevator in a tower block. It was sort of like HAL, you know, the computer in 2001. So when the lift would not like someone in the neighborhood, like a drug dealer or something, the tower block had been built without a thirteenth floor because of superstition. The lift used to take these characters to the thirteenth floor…
EC: Which didn’t exist but it did.
BM: Exactly. I haven’t said this before, but one of my favorite parts of that story was a policeman was investigating the missing people and suspected the lift. So the lift captured the policeman and brought him to the thirteenth floor, and for many weeks I would go back and get this comic strip, and the policeman was trying to escape. He was climbing cliffs and finally beat the computer and smashed his way out and was free. Then suddenly the lift says no, I’m just playing with your mind and you’re still trapped here. Which is used a little bit in the film. It was inspirational, that comic strip to me, and I read it when I was young.
DC: Elisha, when did you come on board exactly?
EC: I had gotten the script and Brendan and I had had a conversation over the phone because it was at the height of Covid. We couldn’t really meet in person but we had great conversations about character and story. It went well. Next thing you know, I was over in Ireland at the hight of Covid which was insane.
DC: Did you have to be there longer than you expected?
EC: Well we had to quarantine for the two weeks prior. But it was nice, it gave me a chance to really work on the script right before, uninterrupted. It was just me in a cottage in the middle of Ireland, it was amazing.
Look for The Cellar and more from this interview closer to the film’s official release in mid-April.
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