Elisha Cuthbert on Why ‘The Cellar’ Pulled Her Back Into the World of Horror
From Dread and Shudder comes The Cellar, which arrives in theaters and to the streamer this weekend. This is the latest housebound thriller from Irish filmmaker Brendan Muldowney. The 2004 short film “The Ten Steps” served as the spark for Muldowney to expand a compact possession story into a more complex feature about family, numerology, and the Devil himself.
In the film, Elisha Cuthbert stars as a working mom who discovers that her daughter has disappeared in the cellar of their new, incredibly haunted home. As her husband Brian (Eoin Macken) starts to unravel, she is forced to confront the sinister forces controlling their lives in order to save her daughter’s soul.
We sat down with Elisha Cuthbert recently to discuss her return to horror after House of Wax and Captivity, why having kids attracted her to the role, and why we should all be afraid of math. Actor Eoin Macken and director Brendan Muldowney were also kind enough to offer more insight into the mysteries of The Cellar. For more of this conversation, feel free to read our earlier interview out of SXSW.
Dread Central: You haven’t really done too many genre pieces and horror films before. Did you think it was a little more challenging than you thought and a little more emotional?
Elisha Cuthbert: I thought is was age-appropriate, too. At the time, I thought, oh great! I’m reading about a character that I felt like I was… at the time my daughter was three. To play a mother who was sort of invested in making sure she found her daughter, I understood that I could draw on the fears of losing a child. I don’t know if I could have tapped into that prior to having children like I did having my daughter. So that really appealed to me a lot. And I thought the movie was really well-written and sophisticated for the genre. And interesting how it played with numbers.
DC: There’s a little subtext in the movie about you being a careerist and this idea that maybe if you were there, your daughter wouldn’t have gotten lost. There’s some guilt, there.
EC: I think I drew on that, too. There’s that tug-of-war between your family life, your career and especially as a woman, too. Balancing all of that. And then realizing that, gosh, if I would have been paying attention more, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. I could understand the voice of that.
DC: And then Eoin, you start to get a little possessed, too. You almost get to play two roles. You get to be the Dad and you get to be this zombified character. Was that fun to play and to just stare off into space every once in a while?
Eoin Macken: (laughs) I do that anyway. So, I thought this is great. I thought it was really interesting playing that character. It’s a nice dynamic that Brendan [Muldowney] created because a lot of the times, you have the male character who actually isn’t able to do anything. And I think that’s an interesting element for it to play on. He doesn’t necessarily believe what Keira’s (Cuthbert) going through. But, also, he’s kind of powerless to it. I thought that was an interesting element to play, as a man, where you’re trying to protect your family but you can’t really do anything because you don’t understand what’s happening.
DC: Did you guys want to have more of a monster at the beginning? Was it hard to pull back for a little bit? You start with this interesting idea of the Leviathan and these Princes of Darkness. Did you ever want to play with a different kind of creature?
Brendan Muldowney: No, I was always stuck on the one we used. I just think it’s sort of cool looking. To be honest with you, it was based around what you’d call a folk tale. Where I grew up, there’s a place called the Hellfire Club. It was a gambling den and there was a story about a stormy night, a knock on the door, and a hooded figure came in and joined the poker game and dropped the ace of spades on the ground. When they looked underneath they saw that the figure had hooves. So, it was the devil. In terms of the creature, no, I always wanted to use that. In fairness, I have been talking to the two producers…about the seven princes of hell which are fascinating demons all in their own right.
DC: The whole idea of math and horror isn’t used too often. There’s Pi, there’s the Number 23, and a few others. Suddenly mathematics is…
EC: Evil, right! Math is the devil’s arithmetic.
DC: We have to be afraid of math now.
BM: Are you not, already?
EC: I am, for sure.
The Cellar is in theaters now and also available on Shudder.
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