The ‘V/H/S/Beyond’ Directors On Crafting Their Own Versions of Sci-Fi Hell
After seven films and 12 years, the V/H/S/ franchise shows no sign of slowing down, especially with the recent release of V/H/S/Beyond. The latest installment marks a new chapter for the series, moving on from year-specific entries to broader thematic connections between segments. In V/H/S/Beyond, all six directors—Jay Cheel (How To Build A Time Machine), Jordan Downey (The Head Hunter), Virat Pal (Recapture), Justin Martinez (Southbound), Christian Long & Justin Long (Barbarian), and Kate Siegel (The Haunting Of Hill House)—take the idea of science fiction to new heights. Quite literally.
We sat down with all of the V/H/S/Beyond directors to talk about their love of science fiction, the loneliness of space, and our favorite Terminator movies.
Dread Central: Congratulations. I screamed and laughed my way through V/H/S/Beyond the other night. So thank you so much for delivering an incredible V/H/S/ film again. But I want to start with what’s everyone’s relationship with science fiction.
Jordan Downey: My relationship to science fiction is my relationship to movies because Critters is my favorite movie.
DC: Are you serious?
Jordan Downey: I’m dead, dead serious. I own it. In film school, everyone’s like Fight Club and Pulp Fiction. I’m like, critters. But it’s not because it’s the best movie, it’s because it’s the movie that just grabbed me as a kid. Whether it was the cover, whether it was just watching it repeatedly on TV, there was just something about it. And that is obviously science fiction. You have aliens and bounty hunters coming from outer space. The Fly is an all-time favorite of mine. Terminator, Robocop, anything. I’ve always loved sci-fi action horror especially. So it’s in me as much as any genre.
Justin Martinez: Tremors for me, it’s in my top five movies all the time. And I’m always trying to think in terms of what they did as far as putting monsters on the ground and playing with the unseen so that you don’t have these things consistently in your face. I’m always trying to do that.
Kate Siegel: Oh, I’m obsessed with science fiction. I started reading Ray Bradbury at a very young age, and I go back to The Martian Chronicles all the time, constant inspiration. Contact is in my top five. It’s such a fertile ground for horror and for plot, you get freed literally from gravity. I think that’s great.
Virat Pal: Yeah, I mean, I’ve grown up on a diet of just sci-fi movies. I saw Back to the Future on cable when I was a kid in sixth grade. With commercial breaks. But it was the best movie I’d ever seen. Since then, obviously all the great titles they’ve already mentioned. The Terminator, obviously Terminator 2.
DC: Which one’s your favorite though? One or two?
VP: I would say two definitely. But that’s the one I also saw before the first one.
DC: Yes, me, too.
VP: And The Thing, I think it’s the greatest movie I ever made. Also, it’s very different from the others, but Gravity.
KS: Absolutely.
VP: Gravity, I saw it in the theater four times, one of the best movies ever made.
KS: I think loneliness is inherent in sci-fi because you can be so entirely alone in space. And that makes me more scared than anything.
Christian Long: So I guess I might like science fiction more than I thought I did. I think I have a bit more of a casual relationship, more of a friend with benefits. I like science fiction. I love The Thing, I love Terminator 2, I love those movies. But I wasn’t as immersed, it sounds like, as the rest of my film directors here. But yeah, I would love recommendations to watch more. I’m sure there are a million great science-fiction movies that I need to see.
Jay Cheel: The Thing is a big one. I’m going to give you a recommendation for a weird science fiction movie. It’s called Hard to Be A God, it’s about a planet far away that’s in the process of societal growth. They’re in medieval times and people from Earth travel to the planet and as observers, have to embed themselves into a medieval world. But it’s science fiction. And for me, working in documentaries, I have always tried to pull genre into docs. And I’m actually working on my second documentary on time travel. So I am a science fiction nerd.
DC: Jay, how did you approach the V/H/S/Beyond wraparound? It makes sense that you’re a documentary filmmaker. So I wanted to hear about tackling your wraparound and whether you were ever scared to have the wraparound.
JC: I wasn’t scared. Nothing scares me except the films that were in this. [Laughs] No, I’ve done similar things before, and I like the idea of creating a story and pulling in real people to comment on things that don’t exist. So I always feel like the fake documentary thing, at least in the way that I was doing with interviews, actors will kind of give it away. So you bring in people who are experts in a particular subject, give them a research package about what they’re supposed to talk about, what the history is, and then you just have a conversation for an hour.
Eventually, you forget that you’re talking about something that isn’t real and it’s just speculating. You pull out all the things that give away that they’re talking about something that isn’t real. So it is kind of like a catharsis because in documentary, you have to put in everything that represents truth and this is the inverse. So it’s fun.
DC: Virat, I actually compared your segment to The Terminator in my review. I wanted to hear about working with Evan who wrote this script with you and developing this Terminator Bollywood story that I’m obsessed with.
VP: Collaborating with Evan and Josh and everybody was amazing, just spitballing ideas, brainstorming what would be the best way to mash up all these things together so that feels like a cohesive story, but also feels like the fun parts work. The song part works, but also the horror part works. Evan, he had this amazing idea of the face being ripped off in the end. Oh my God, some of the deaths. We would just go back and forth on what would be the most craziest things she could do, but also giving her motivation, the people she kills, and the subtler ways they had wronged her. So it was very important for us to structure it in that way. V/H/S/Beyond was such an amazing collaborative process and with total creative freedom. So it was a real joy.
DC: And I love how you play with narrative versus handheld.
VP: I guess that was also because we were on a film set, it gave us a little bit of creativity to use this studio camera. I thought, “Oh, I don’t know if I’ve seen that before. That would be cool to mix this kind of high-quality footage with all these other different cameras.”
DC: Jordan, were there any video games that shaped your approach?
JD: Absolutely. I mean, video games absolutely influenced it as much as Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson and George Miller. I mean, watching Fury Road in theaters, that was the most recent movie that just completely floored me. The energy and the chaos and the madness of something like that combined with sort of the flow of a video game, how you’re kind of tugged through a narrative. And then with video games, you always have to backtrack, right? You come to some blockade and now we got to go back to get that item. We didn’t go as far as levitating props and glowing them on the ground with health meters and all that. I thought about that, but that’s where you go a little too far.
Resident Evil, of course, is a huge influence just because of the monster elements. It began as zombies, but then as it got to parts 4, 5, 6, 7, you’re like, “OK, they’re doing some crazier stuff.” That’s kind of what we were doing. And naturally the leveling up to a boss from mini boss to mini boss.
DC: Do you have beef with birds though? [Laughs]
JD: No beef with birds. It didn’t even cross my mind. The first movie I made is this low-budget movie called ThanksKilling about a killer turkey.
DC: We watched it every year in college. We made a drinking game and watched your movie every year around Thanksgiving.
JD: But no beef with birds, but if things happen in threes, I guess I got to pick the next fowl.
DC: Justin. My question is just how??
JM: That’s a great question. I mean, yeah, honestly, I have to thank the V/H/S/Beyond producers, Josh Goldbloom and Brad Miska. I leaned on them so heavily in the creation of this that I can’t thank them enough from Brad Miska helping me design the alien to Josh getting this airplane and getting it on a stage so that I could have something to shoot in pretty much the week before I was going to shoot. It came down to the wire. So I mean, how is a big question because it’s such a complicated piece that almost every section of my movie is “How did I manage to do this?” And I don’t know if I can give you an actual answer.
DC: Christian, Becky is an icon. Tell me more about writing her.
CL: I’ve been saying that there’s a prototype. There is that woman that I feel like everyone knows to some degree. I love her. I love Becky. She was greatly inspired by Kathy Bates in Misery. My ex-girlfriend, who I’m still friends with, has a dog and her mom refers to the dog as her grand puppy and Grand Doggy. She treats it like a human.
DC: My in-laws do that with my brother-in-law’s dog.
CL: Oh, really? You see, people do that. It is crazy, as far as I’m concerned. I love dogs and birds, but it’s crazy. But I just thought, “What if that just got twisted a little, or a lot more?”
DC: And then Kate, I love how your segment at first isn’t as chaotic or gnarly as the other ones, but then it goes to a whole other existential level. I wanted to hear about how you crafted the pacing of this one.
KS: For me, the heart of “Stowaway” is what happens when everyone tries to do everything. And that’s the horrible thing that happens. So I knew I had to take as much time showing everybody doing their best. The aliens are doing their best, and the nanobots are doing their best, and everyone’s just trying, and it all leads to this horrible monster. There was such joy in that for me.
DC: Yeah, I agree. I love that. And how did you design your creature?
KS: I worked closely with Patrick McGee, the creature creator. What I talked about was that the nanobots had never encountered human flesh before, but what they had at their disposal was an octopus and a spider. Also because the nanobots are future technology, they would think things like, “OK, so one eye good, 10 eyes better, one tooth good, hundreds of teeth better!” They’re just not quite figuring it out. They’re doing their best. They’re like, “Oh, she seems to be banging around. Let’s stick her to the wall and then maybe she’ll be safe!” They’re really trying and they’re like, “Oh no, her throat has been ripped open by her claws. Let’s fix that. It’ll be fine.” So it was a lot of that kind of design.
V/H/S/Beyond is out now on Shudder.
Categorized:Interviews
