Exclusive: Cody Calahan Talks Black Fawn Films’ Let Her Out
Snapping at the heels of recent festival fave Bite (review), comes Let Her Out, the latest venture from those unstoppable beasts over at Black Fawn Films. Dubbed “The Secret Project” until just a couple of weeks ago, Let Her Out marks director Cody Calahan’s bid farewell to his trusty Antisocial franchise, and whilst this latest project is said to serve up just as many WTF moments as his previous offerings, this time round everything has been firmly grounded in an urban environment in the hopes of invoking “a slow-building anxiety attack” in audiences.
Penned by Adam Seybold and starring Alanna LeVierge, Nina Kiri, and Adam Christie, Let Her Out tells the tormented tale of young bike courier Helen (LeVierge), who finds herself suffering sudden inexplicable blackouts and hallucinations. It’s not long before she discovers the horrific truth that it’s actually a benign tumor causing her symptoms, but that’s the least of her worries: The sarcoma is actually the remains of her “vanishing twin sister” that was absorbed in utero. Her evil twin has been cooped up way too long and wants out of her cage and starts urging Helen to act out her psychotic plan, putting everyone in Helen’s midst in danger.
With the first trailer and news of festival screenings expected to roll out any time soon, Dread caught up with Calahan for exclusive details on what audiences can expect…
DC: The Black Fawn Films team never lets up. You’ve got so much on the go so it must be difficult to even remember now, but how did the shoot go?
Calahan: [laughs] Yeah. We finished it right before we started shooting the new movie (The Heretics), but this one’s been our tiny little secret.
DC: That’s something I wanted to ask you about. Both Bed of the Dead and The Heretics were never kept a secret so why was Let Her Out dubbed the Black Fawn Films’ “secret project”?
Calahan: At first we approached it differently than any other movie because it’s unlike anything that we’d ever done. It’s set in Toronto and we also had these new ideas of how to approach the filming of it. I don’t think it was really our initial intention to have it be this secret project but we went into filming and I never really came up with a title for it so it just became like untitled film number 7 or whatever. I wasn’t quite sure what the film was going to be so the title seemed unimportant as we went into it. That’s basically how it ended up becoming this project that we couldn’t talk about and we just joked around and said, “Let’s just call it the secret project,” and months went by, and because we didn’t release anything about the actual filming of it, we just decided to keep it under wraps until now.
DC: It’s also a project that’s been a long time coming, right? Something you’ve had on the back burner since you shot the first Antisocial movie.
Calahan: Well, it’s interesting because I couldn’t quite figure out the story I wanted to tell. It was more about the shooting style and the approach that I’d figured out and played around with myself. After that, Adam Seybold, who’s a good friend of mine and who had written a few treatments and a script with me before, brought up this vanishing twin thing that he had just read about. What I had wanted to do and this movie that he had in his head just sort of clicked, and we wrote a treatment in a weekend.
The vanishing twin story the film is inspired by is a real thing and actually a lot more common than people think. It’s a crazy high percentage of people who actually lose one of their twins in the first stage of pregnancy, and it’s usually absorbed into the mother but it can be absorbed into the other child. It’s pretty intense stuff to begin with so at first we didn’t really know how to approach it because we started doing research and it was like, “Oh my God! I don’t even know how to step into this.” But I think we found a different way to look at it rather than taking the super medical approach in the end.
DC: The synopsis had me thinking The Hand meets Dead Ringers and other films along those lines.
Calahan: It’s definitely got remnants of those. I don’t want to call it a straight up body horror. I mean, it has elements of that, but it’s got elements of possession and psychosis because you don’t really know if she’s losing her mind or if this is actually happening.
DC: So when it came to prompting Alanna in terms of where you wanted her to take this evil twin version of her character, did you give her any specific points of reference?
Calahan: I drew up a list of films that I had her watch, which were just horror movies with ladies in leading roles. But, rather than have her stuck in an apartment going crazy or whatever, I wanted her to be actually physically running from this thing in her head so I also had her watch a bunch of action movies just to get her prepared for what we were going to put her through. I think it’s the most physical role I’ve put an actor through before.
Not to compare, but there were moments where Antisocial 2 could breathe because we cut away. Here we don’t ever cut away from Alanna. It’s from her point of view all the time, and once this thing gets set off in the movie, it’s kind of like a freight train after that. She’s running; she’s driving; she’s battling herself. It was really, really physical. There were definitely some days when we were done shooting and she would just pass out.
DC: In the press release it says that the film opened Alanna’s eyes to a darker side of herself that she didn’t realize she had. Did she let on to you what it was that she discovered?
Calahan: What was interesting was that I think a lot of the time I would give her hints. I didn’t want to scare anyone as to how intense it would be so I warned her that we needed to push. I think I kept pushing harder and she let me push harder and there were some moments where you could see her break, but in a really good way. She would just go to places and then we’d cut and she come out of it and she’d be like, “Whoa! Okay! Did that work?” Sometimes we’d have to work on it, but most times it was her alone just finding those dark places. She did open up a bit about where she would go, but sometimes I think it was better for her to just have those secrets that she could keep using. It was a super organic process and we sort of built the character of Helen together. I had an idea of who this character was, but then I let Alanna create her as well so that she could connect more.
DC: You’ve also said that you wanted to keep the film gritty and realistic despite plenty of WTF moments. Was it hard to find a perfect balance? I ask this because I’m guessing there are probably some trippy and more ethereal moments when Helen has these hallucinations and when the evil twin rears her head.
Calahan: Before we started filming I got this idea of if there was a possession or if there was someone going crazy, it could be in the apartment below you or just across the street. Usually in possession movies all that is happening takes place in a room where the priest or whoever comes in and it’s all sort of contained in its own little world. I kept wanting to remind the audience that this is actually happening and it’s happening right now and there are street cars passing by while she’s freaking out on the side of the street. And she’s running around through these alleys and there are people around and we get that ignoring that people do like when we cross the street when we see somebody yelling to try and avoid them. I just really liked the idea of this woman in peril who’s looking for somebody to help her and she’s in a city of thousands and thousands and nobody’s around.
DC: So when will people be able to finally see the movie?
Calahan: Well, we’ve got a little bit of buzz going right now about where it’s going to end up and where the premiere is going to be. Right now we have one festival confirmation that we definitely want to do because we’ve always got such a great response from those guys. They reached out straight after seeing it. One of the guys there even responded the next morning just saying that he’d been thinking about the movie again and he just wanted to say how intense it was and how it was one of the best possession films he’s seen.
I’m just excited for people to see it now because I really don’t think it looks like a typical possession film although it does end up taking you down that road.
You can keep up with all things Let Her Out related over on the film’s official Facebook page.
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