‘Red Rooms’ Director Pascal Plante On His Haunting Digital Thriller
It’s so easy to find disturbing images and videos online. That sounds like an obvious statement, but it’s one worth making in an era when a slip of the thumb can send you down a depraved rabbit hole on YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, or even 4chan. Writer and director Pascal Plante taps into this new reality in his terrifying new digital thriller Red Rooms, where a woman’s obsession with a serial killer takes her to some strange and disturbing places. It’s a harrowing and pulse-pounding character study of people who take their love of true crime to another level, while never veering into exploitation. Its two main performances by Juliette Gariepy as Kelly-Anne and Laurie Babin as Clementine ground the film while letting Plante delve deep into the complex psychology of people with such obsessions.
In Red Rooms,
Kelly-Anne wakes up every morning to wait outside the courtroom to secure a seat at the high-profile trial of Ludovic Chevalier, a man charged with the murder of three teenage girls, with the gruesome videos of two of the crimes surfacing for sale online on the dark web. She finds herself bonding with a fellow voyeur, momentarily breaking her out of her loneliness, while also witnessing the emotional decline of the victims’ families. As the proceedings continue, it becomes increasingly difficult for Kelly-Anne to maintain the psychological and physical balance between her normal life and her morbid fixation with the accused killer, with her obsession reaching new lengths when the final piece of evidence reveals itself within reach.
We spoke with Plante, Babin, and Gariepy about deep dives on the Dark Web, leaving some horrors to the imagination, and Lingua Ignota.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Dread Central: Hello. I watched Red Rooms. I loved it, and now I never want to go on the internet again. Thank you so much for that experience. But Pascal, I wanted to hear from you first. Where did you get inspiration to make a movie about the dark web?
Pascal Plante: Yeah. Well, the dark web came later, to be honest. The first vantage point for Red Rooms was the people who are obsessed with killers themselves. So the “groupies”. This is not my favorite word, but for lack of a better word, I’ll keep saying it. So just the people who gravitate towards them.
I know in Montreal there was a notorious killer who has been tried, and someone we know was part of the jury. And she mentioned actually that there were people roaming the courthouse and they were basically his fans. This was the first time that I heard about this phenomenon. But then it only takes a quick look online to see that every killer has their fan pages. It’s not even hidden. You go on Facebook, you can access any community. Since there is such a strong sense of community, of people loving whatever they love, it doesn’t seem as weird anymore because you feel validated by the fact that you can totally have a crush on someone who killed 30 women.
So the first rabbit hole of research came from the groupies, so Kelly-Anne and Clementine. They are kind of at opposite ends of this spectrum, but there’s a wide variety of people that exist in between. Since there aren’t that many examples of narrative films and fiction films that have these kinds of characters, I needed at least two to show that it’s not just one profile. Because a film with only the Kellyann character, the conclusion would be almost like [all people who love serial killers] are sociopaths, whereas I don’t think it’s just that for many reasons.
I also didn’t want the killer to be tailored to a real killer that existed because I didn’t want to give any promotion to any true, real person. And so the fictional element came into play, but I also thought a lot about what would be the killer of our time. So it got me thinking about the tools we use. I wrote Red Rooms during the pandemic, and researched it during the pandemic, so [I was inspired by the] oversaturation of screens and just being overly online to the point of being a bit desensitized by some of the content you can watch.
One thing led to another, it led me to the folklore of the red rooms and the dark web and all that jazz. I’m very geeky myself, but I’m not necessarily on the Tor network on a regular basis. This is very much why I researched it for the film to come up with an original killer.
Dread Central: Juliette and Laurie, what was your research like? Did you guys do a lot of research? You represent two very different kinds of characters. So I was curious for both of you, and starting with Laurie, what was your experience like getting into the head of this character?
Laurie Babin: Yeah. So for me, my research was really just groupies way more than actual killers or true crime. It was most important for me to not judge my character and just understand how someone can really fall in love with a killer. So that was really my focus. So I read some Reddits, I read a book in French about the phenomenon of groupies. And all through filming Red Rooms, I was really trying to convince myself that I was in love with the killer.
DC: Yeah, that got to be so weird. It’s such an interesting headspace to be in. Juliette, I’m assuming you probably had a similar experience with Kelly-Ann.
Juliette Gariépy: It’s funny, she seems very different from us. But to a certain extent, when you see one scary movie, then you’re able to see one that’s scarier maybe, and your tolerance to violence keeps going up. So we always need more. That I could understand, to me, it’s like, oh, Kelly-Anne just saw too much, so she needs more to get “high”. That I get, of course.
But it was hard for me to comprehend how someone could be okay with getting so close to a dangerous situation like buying access to witness a murder on the dark web. That’s when I went to research that phenomenon. I learned about women mostly, or people who’ve been traumatized, who’ve learned to cope within a traumatizing lifestyle or household or whatever that you’re stuck in. You build coping mechanisms that make you comfortable around violence.
When you’re seeking violence but don’t want to get killed, I learned that being in contact with someone who’s behind bars allows you to express that love for danger. You’re close to the danger, but you won’t actually get burned because he’s behind bars or he’s behind the screen. He’s not there, which leads to tension and anxiety. So this really made sense to me and helped me understand how when all is violence, then you’re going to find a way to go close to it. Apparently, there are a lot of women who write letters and have real relationships with men behind bars because they feel comfortable in it.
But just generally it makes sense for women whose anger is never put on a pedestal. So when we see powerful men who are dangerous put on a pedestal by the media and by Netflix, because all we see is murder shows, then it’s normal for us to want to get close to it. Even though it’s actually crazy.
DC: Well, and something I really love about Red Rooms is how you play with expectations, Pascal, about seeing violence. You never show us the torture. You show us little clips of it and hear the sounds, which is worse than seeing it in my opinion. So I wanted to hear from you about your choice to not sensationalize and show the violence and rather have it exist within the viewer’s imagination.
PP: Yeah. Well, not showing it doesn’t mean I’m going easy on the audience actually, as you mentioned. But the point was not to shy away from it or to be prudish about it. Especially with a film that is labeled as a thriller or even dabbles with horror, you have a blood thirst that develops within you even if you don’t know it. You expect shit to hit the fan, you expect to see some action. And in this kind of film, well, the kind of action you see is usually murders and a lot of times murder of women. So in a weird way, the film also takes its time to set up the pieces slowly but surely. You want to be rewarded as an audience. So you expect it, you want it.
And when Clementine says, I want to see the video, I think it doubles as the mindset of a majority of the audience members. But then not only am I not showing it, I’m reminding you that this is fucking horrible. So in a meta way, this is the comment of the film, “Why do we even crave that?”
Even towards the end, we are rooting for Kelly-Anne. She’s our lead, but we’re rooting for what? For her to try and acquire and see and watch the snuff film of a 13-year-old? This is completely nuts. But we are used to this kind of narrative to give us that kind of reward. We crave for it, and we expect it in such a film. But my play is to remind the audience that this is kind of sick. If you boil it down, if you think of it, that’s on the one end.
But the other end is also to just make a film that has a different vantage point that feels fresh, hopefully, and toys with you a little bit. That’s fun for a filmmaker to do and express within the film.
DC: I think so often with courtroom dramas, we expect a very particular kind of film. But I love the way the beginning, especially, you’re panning very slowly and we were getting every ounce of testimony from the defense attorneys. I love the way you set this up by having a courtroom scene in a very stark white place, and you use those colors throughout. So I wanted to hear more about that opening scene.
PP: Yeah, they’re slow. We’ve had discussions about them in the editing process. Is it too much? Is it too long? And we decided to keep them as is. But yeah, it was a battle.
Just going back to a detail you’ve mentioned, you say the room is really white. First, it’s a set, so we built the room this way. But it’s also in tune with the DNA of the real Montreal Courthouse, which is a brutalist building. And it’s very far from the warmth of what we’re used to seeing in most courtroom dramas. Usually, you have high ceilings, wooden carvings, etcetera, but in Montreal, it’s stark. So we enhanced that feeling of this bright white sterile cube. And also we made the cube of the glass cage even more angular than what it is for real. There’s this whole play about cages and reflections and glass, and there’s this visual motive throughout Red Rooms.
But so long story short is we built the set according to our needs, and we ended up just filming an overly lit bright whiteish wall. And my challenge was to make it interesting for something like 40 minutes of screen time throughout the film. It comes back often, but every time we come back to that courtroom I tried to make it visually and aesthetically a bit different in the way we would film it, and frame it. I don’t know if that answers your question.
DC: It does! I actually want to go back to Laurie and Juliette. Your characters are so different, but your personalities here are so different also from your characters. So I was curious what it was like for the two of you to work together to create this really weird kind of friendship dynamic between the two of them.
JP: It’s so funny. I think we’re living proof that this relationship works. We can be very different and yet connect and be able to work together. And it’s funny because yeah, I feel very far from Kelly-Anne. But Clementine is even further, I think, from both of us in a way. But I think Kelly-Anne sees herself maybe in her. Maybe Clementine is a younger Kelly-Anne, mentally, or she went through the same process. I dunno. I think they are versions of each other, even though they’re so different.
And I think it was very hard for both of us to even comprehend Red Rooms. And we would talk and we would be like, that’s crazy. But it was very good to have each other because we’re both at the same age, we come from the same neighborhood. It felt very good to have each other.
LB: Yeah, all what Juliette said. But also, I think that we really helped balance each other out. And I think that it was really important for Pascal when doing the casting. He was really looking for people who both got along but also were extremely contrasted.
And just to go back to Clementine and how hard it was to become this character who’s very far from me, I still think that there’s a bit of Kell-Anne in Juliette even if she’s not saying it. And there’s a bit of Clementine in me. I’m not saying the naive part [laughs]. I think I have it in the kind of loving personality and a bit maybe fragile, not intimidating, just wanting to be friends with someone who you think is cool. I think I can find myself in that. And I think that Juliette can have the confidence, and I don’t know how you, Juliette, relate to Kelly-Anne, but I feel like there’s a bit of Kelly-Anne in you.
JP: Yes, absolutely. There’s a part of Kelly-Anne that wants to connect and it’s hard. That moment where they break up, it’s the only moment I feel like—well, there are other moments, but besides buying the video and having that high intensity—where she feels something. Friendship breakups are the worst in the world. And maybe that’s why Kelly-Anne doesn’t want any friends. She doesn’t want to get hurt in that way.
PP: If I can add one super quick thing about both of them and the casting process. I do not do casting expecting to see the characters in the audition room. It did happen with my earlier film, let’s say. And I was like, “Oh, that person is very close to the character.” But for some strange reason, I never ended up casting these people. I always ended up casting people who get the essence of everything on paper, but who also add something that I did not expect. That little 10% of magic is better than what I’ve written.
And in both Laurie and Juliette, I think this is what they did. They preserved, I guess, the idea of the characters, but also let a little bit of themselves permeate the character. This is what makes them work. For me, it wouldn’t have worked if I worked with a Kelly-Anne doing Kelly-Anne or with a Clementine doing Clementine. For many reasons, even behind the camera, it would’ve been hell. You know what I mean? I trust actors, I love actors, and actors are good, and actors can act. And that’s a testimony that they’re good actresses.
DC: Hell yeah. And then my last question for you, Pascal, is the music is absolutely incredible here. It’s got this weird kind of industrial vibe to it. So I wanted to hear more about the collaboration with your composer, Dominique Plante, who’s also your brother!
PP: This is his first score! He produces music and he plays music, but he does it more for artists. But he knows my taste. We get along super well. He’s helped me out here and there in other of my films at a lower capacity and every time I was very pleased with his work. Like I said, he knows me so well. He will never send me something that is completely off. And so it made it very easy.
But Red Rooms was quite a challenge. It’s almost 30 minutes of original music, especially since when I write, I put in my ears a curated audio mood board. So I have songs that I get attached to and that I listen to over and over and over again when I’m writing. They were very all over the place.
I was telling my brother, “There are funeral marches in there, Baroque music, but also noise music, harsh electronic music, and black metal, and somehow you have to make it fit. And also I want a melody that a five-year-old can hum.” This is pretty much what I said to him.
But also I did all the spot-checking since we sliced in a lot of music with temp tracks, with other kinds of music. We knew which music to remove and change by a score. And there were a few songs we decided to keep in the finished film. So my brother got a sense very quickly of the essence of the sound I’m looking for and the emotion it tries to convey.
DC: Have you all ever heard of Lingua Ignota?
PP: It’s so funny. This is completely your bullseye. You’re completely dead on. Not only are you dead on, if you play the film, there’s a moment when he looks at the camera…
DC: Exactly why I asked! It literally sounds like a song I listen to all the time.
PP: If you put on “Butcher of the World”, a song from her second album, it actually syncs with the first impact of the gaze, and the whole sequence works. We edited the sequence off this track and we couldn’t license the actual song. It’s a weird experiment you could do, but it fits for three whole minutes.
Red Rooms comes to digital on October 4, 2024.
Categorized:Interviews
