Interview: Pulling Back THE DARK
Boy meets ghoul in The Dark, the debut feature from writer/director Justin P. Lange that world premiered at last spring’s Tribeca Film Festival https://www.tribecafilm.com and has been garnering accolades ever since. This is no teen rom-com, however. The story follows an undead girl named Mina (Boarding School’s Nadia Alexander) who grows a heart for a horribly abused boy (Iron Fist’s Toby Nichols) after he escapes into her bloody forest hideaway. Despite its, yes, dark subject matter, The Dark is also a haunting story of love and redemption.
Dread sat down with Lange and Alexander, whose film debuts on DVD from Dark Sky January 15.
Tony Timpone: Your movie was one of three zombie films that premiered at 2018’s Tribeca Film Festival. What’s responsible for the enduring appeal of this subgenre?
Justin P. Lange: I don’t really know. Everybody’s trying to push the envelope and do different things. I never really categorized The Dark as a zombie movie even though I get why people do.
Nadia Alexander: There is a zombie in it! [laughs]
JL: I wasn’t referencing a lot of the rules of the zombie trope. Mina was driven by rage and the monster starts even before her infection, even before she dies.
NA: If I had to guess, it would be that, as human beings, we’re fascinated by humanity gone wrong. [Zombies] are still sort of alive, but they’re running on these base instincts for the most part. Mina is a little different because she’s more alive up here [points to head] and fully cognizant of what she’s doing. But there’s something that’s interesting about having a human form that isn’t capable of the same level of emotions and rational thought and decision making that we live people have. People are just really interested in that. It’s this idea of, if you stripped away all the humanity from somebody but you kept the vessel, what would you get?
TT: What did you want to bring differently to this subgenre?
JL: What Nadia just said is actually very interesting. That was something we talked about, and it was something that I really wanted in the script. With classic zombies or vampires, the actions, the violence that they do, they don’t have an agency over it. It’s always defined by a need. It’s scary and terrible, but they do it because they need to do it and they don’t have control over it. And I really wanted Mina to be like this. She has control over these things she’s doing to some extent because they’re instincts.
She’s not devoid of responsibility for the choices she’s making. It’s a human side of the zombie. What I was trying to do was just make my type of horror film. I didn’t know what that meant. I just went with my instincts the whole way. I definitely drew off different parts of the genre. The opening is an homage to Psycho, with the changing of the subjectivity. The playfulness of starting with one character and then, suddenly, you realize that’s not the main character, and what that does to the viewing experience. In talking about developing Mina, I was thinking about how do you do a film where the killer/slasher/whatever monster character is our protagonist?
That was something I was really interested in. I looked at some of the mythology behind Jason Voorhees and Candyman. They have very sympathetic backstories. It doesn’t really come through in the movies that much, but there is a righteousness in a way to what the monster becomes. I was drawing on that, and Let the Right One In was a huge influence. Then Pan’s Labyrinth, Devil’s Backbone, as far as the juxtaposition of extreme violence and innocence. It ran the gamut of different influences. I don’t want to say that I was trying to do those. I was mostly trying to just tell an emotional story within the context of a violent, dark world.
TT: Nadia, what was the key to bringing Mina to life, so to speak?
NA: It was her rage and anger, and for some reason, anger has always been a very easy emotion for me to tap into as an actor. It was really key to the monster part, that [the monster] was driven by anger and rage and fury. It was just understanding the pain of what she’d experienced while she was still alive. And then overcame that rage by becoming a monster and angry and bloodthirsty. And tapping into that made Mina pretty much everything that she is. And then we undo that as the story goes on. But I needed to have that coming out of the gate, so we started there.
TT: The real horror of the story is the child abuse that both young characters have endured. Why was this an important subject for you to broach with The Dark?
JL: It comes up in a lot of my films; I feel very strongly about it for a variety of different reasons, personal and otherwise. When I was writing Mina, I needed to be in that space with her. I couldn’t write that kind of violence and this character from a distance. If I can’t sympathize with her, then the audience can’t sympathize with her. Her being an abuse victim, I was there and I was able to attack the script from a real righteous angry place and feel like I understood why she was doing what she was doing. The Dark is not autobiographical by any means, but it’s something I feel really, really strongly about.
TT: Anything that you could add to that, Nadia?
NA: The whole film is really a metaphor for abuse in the monsters that it creates out of children. That’s an extremely important thing to talk about. Before it was stigmatized and taboo just to talk about. And obviously, abuse itself is terrible. But talking about it is key and paramount to understanding because a lot of people have suffered abuse in some way or another. And talking about that kind of stuff and seeing films like this and others told from the perspective of the abuse survivors is really powerful and really important. I’m happy that films are being made about this. Obviously, I hate the topic itself, but the fact that it’s been brought into the light is really important to the discourse.
TT: Both Mina and Alex do morally questionable things in the movie. Was there any trepidation on shooting those scenes that the audience might lose sympathy for the characters?
JL: Well, that was always the tightrope we were walking. When I made the decision to have Alex go to that dark side, there were definitely times when people would read the script early on, and they would say, “Well, now he has to die at the end because he’s done this.” And I said, “No, I don’t think you’re right.” During preparation and even when I went into shooting, it was knowing that I was walking that tightrope. Even down to the way I shot it and the shots I chose, we’re always trying to manipulate the audience and to put them in a place where they could be with these characters even as they’re doing these things that are very questionable. But you feel with them in a weird way. It’s almost tragic when they’re doing these questionable things.
TT: How did the film grow out of your short film?
JL: The short film was my thesis film at Columbia. I arrived a little late into the horror genre. It was my last directing class at Columbia with Eric Mendelsohn, and he said, “Try something different,” and “different” for me was horror. And a light bulb went off, and I just fell in love with it. So, we made the short as more of a bit of a sketch to say I knew I wanted to do something different. I wanted to take the opportunity with a thesis film to just try some stuff, a testing ground in a way. I just didn’t have the resources, but you can definitely see some seeds that carried over [to the feature]. But for the most part, the short was a trial run for some of the ideas I had for the feature. And luckily, the short actually ended up having a bit of life of its own and gave me and others the confidence to jump into the feature.
TT: Nadia, how did the makeup help you bring your character to life?
NA: That was definitely paramount. If they just slapped any makeup on me, it wouldn’t quite work. It was a grueling process. I would get up at 4 or 5 a.m. so that they could do two hours of makeup and shoot when the sun came up. And just that process of getting into the monster kind of helped that monster part come out in me. Once I was all bloodied up, I was ready to go do this thing. There were so many aspects to the makeup: the prosthetic, which was painted and covered in blood and dirt. And then there were the teeth, which were like a retainer and made my [own] teeth all nasty. I had contacts which blinded me, but didn’t fully blind me. That was my original concern, that it would be the blind leading the blind. The nails I couldn’t stand! The nails were the worst because we couldn’t fully glue them on because I had to take them off at night. So, they’d just pop off any time I did any kind of physical stuff. They were just gone. They fell off in every scene.
TT: Why do you think more filmmakers haven’t been able to humanize zombies?
JL: It actually wasn’t even something that I did intentionally. I was just going off instinct. I wasn’t even really thinking about zombies when I wrote Mina. What reanimates her is irrepressible rage, that was growing inside her, that she couldn’t control and it was going to take over her. This rage would take her over and drive her forward whether she was buried in the ground or not.
TT: What’s next for you both?
JL: I’m working with Dor Film again on a film I wrote called Theresa, which also deals with abuse. It’s about two sisters who come from a rough home, their mother passes away and it’s kind of how they reconnect. The biggest inspiration, at least stylistically, is Carrie. The structure will be like Carrie, a slow burn that just explodes into an all-out slasher.
NA: I always like to do anything that’s interesting. Anything that’s challenging, anything that has unique characters. And I’m writing a sci-fi miniseries right now that’s from a feminist angle, with all female protagonists. I like delving into things that are different, things that are new. Anything that’s new, hit me up!
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