Interview with Brendan Muldowney, Director of Shudder’s The Cellar

Cat: Congratulations for the 15th, the film is launching! The film originated from a short that you originally created, and a few years back now. What was the process of developing in into a feature, and how does it feel to now have it as a feature?

Brendan: Well, you know the process was a long process, I mean that we made that short in 2004. It won a lot of awards for us. It won. I I tell everyone this won best short of the shorts at Fantastic Film Festival which is a hardcore horror festival and it won best short at the New York International Children's Film Festival. So we realized it was special at the time that it was had a very broad appeal basically and also over the years I had noticed people wondering about what happened after the short so, I did try and write a version in 2007. It wasn’t great, it was just an extension of the short film itself. Then what we let it drop. There was a bit of interest from the states at the time, and you know? There was in every so often I would drop in. We had a writer working on a treatment for a while and and it wasn't really going anywhere.

So we went on and made other things so it was only then I'd say I went back to it maybe once during that time and tried something else. I can't remember when, but then I went back taking it seriously, I think around 2016 I think. Just after I'd finished Pilgrimage and we were waiting for Pilgrimage to come out and I was wondering what what was next and. I just thought it might be the time to do it.

I thought it was time to maybe do something commercial or try to do something commercial. Obviously you can never tell if something is going to be commercial and and also you know I I had spent a long time making quite demented films. You know, very adult films very either violent or really dark themes. And my daughter's 10 now and she was always asking me what my my films are!

Cat: What do you think sets The Cellar apart from other haunted house horror movies in the genre?

Brendan: Hopefully not too much because I was trying to literally trying to fit in amongst them, you know, and like it was inspired by Robert Wise's The Hunt so well. The short film was but not directly inspired like the story. It's more the atmosphere. I just wanted to recreate an atmosphere where there was no gore, no violence, no you know. Now, in fairness, the feature has moved on a hell of a lot, you see more than the short was all about what you don't see. It wasn't about jump scares, there was one jump scare and that was in a deliberately to set up the the idea so that the audience are the expectations of the audience that they are in a standard horror film. And then the twist at the end was nothing to do with jump scares.

So in a way the short was was very engineered, whereas with this one I had to, you know to to develop it and expand it. I had to go places where the short wasn't. But you know what? Would set it apart I would say is the twist maybe and that's in the short film and then you know the hokum. I always call it hokum, but this sort of mythology I've built around it, which is sort of inspired by not not directly inspired by HP Lovecraft's cosmic horror, so taking this sort of science fiction slant on on the standard, Judeo-Christian mythology of Hell, and the devil, and then, instead of that, having a void instead of hell, which is maybe somewhere in the universe.

Cat: I found really fascinating is that there are some like folklore elements that are throughout. Steve is telling Ellie that you know the house was owned by a witch, and that's what the skeletons are, and that all this occult stuff happened in the house. Do you find that you drew on any Irish mythology to bring that into your film?

Brendan: Well, there's a couple of things about that. At one stage, the mythology was all going to be the balloon or the one eyed king of The Formorian was in there. The Druids house was built on a druid sacrificial site, and what I'm working on next is is all to do with Druids and stuff, but you know it's not directly. You know the the the mythology. Basically I have in my head, I've got a whole world there that there was that John Fetherston, the owner of the house, was involved in this cult and there is 7 more houses around Europe and each one has different symbols for a different sigil, all leading to 7 different Princes of the Void. We all know that's hell, but so several different demons you know and like I have so many more things that that that the the world in my head is richer.

And if you know if I had ever had the chance to do a sequel, I would have and I had to leave stuff out of this film. So much stuff like a cool scene where the professor. I had a scene that was too expensive to shoot, but he actually worked out well. We see him working out visualizing something and he realizes something and he quickly leaves his office and he's trying to call Keira and he gets into a lift. And as the iPhone answers, it's counting and the lift starts going down through the floors and just keeps going through the ground floor. So I mean and there was a whole then as the lift banging around and crashing to the bottom and the doors open. And what does he see outside? We don't know, but it was a whole big sequence shot in one of those old fashioned lifts that you'd see in Angel Heart. I had all this stuff but it was going to. It was too expensive. I couldn't find the location so we would have had to build a stash and we were on a very low budget and then the final straw was one of the finances of the funders said. The house is where it happens. It can't happen elsewhere, and that's not true in my mind. The the mythology is wider, but I wasn't going to argue, you know, I just knew like I just knew I couldn't afford to pull it off so I just didn't bother. It's not directly based by by any Irish mythology, but then again I find this with all my films like I made a film Love Eternal which was based on a Japanese novel. Now I put a lot into that myself and I had a scene where. The lead character has a flashback to his father's funeral, where him and his father used to play with walkie talkies and at the father's funeral he puts a walkie talkie into the coffin without anyone seeing and then used to spend night listening to the walkie talkie just hoping to hear something. But all you could hear was that the creaking of the wood.

Now, I have never read James Joyce. I think it's Dubliners, not our Ulysses. I'm not sure, but my girlfriend's brother when I was over in Salona one Christmas said to me, “there's a scene, I think it might be Ulysses where someone puts a telephone into a coffin” and I said no, I didn't know that, and I've done. I said I honestly didn't know that, maybe I heard, but I said I didn't know it.

A long winded way of saying to you that I'm the sum of my parts. I'm Irish, so maybe there is some.

Cat: You worked with Alicia Cuthbert, who is absolutely fantastic as Keira Woods. She just radiates this maternal instinct that I found incredibly impressive. What was it like working with her on set?

Brendan: She was great, like you know, and I'm not just saying that I'm not saying she was great, she really was great.

She was funny. She was light-hearted. Lighten the mood. She would nail her takes. She cared about the character so she would be well prepared for everything.

I'll tell you about the set which really you know gives you a good example of how supportive the cast, where to me, the last night's shooting. In the house was and we knew we had to get out that night. We were never coming back because they were striking the set, putting the house back to the way it was before. We went in and I was. It was late at night and I had. I was already half an hour overtime and I think they were saying you can't go anymore because. Without boring you, there's a thing called turn around so that certain amount of time before the makeup and everyone has to get a certain amount of sleep basically, or else we can't get the next.

We can't get the next day's shots, it was the end scenes of the film and I still had a lot of shots to do and they weren't luxury shots. They were shots to make it nicer. They were what I needed to tell the story and I was said to remember saying to the cast we're going to have to actually start doing just, you know, once we get it in one take, we're going to have to just move on. And I mean that's unheard of, you know? The safety you always do too, because something could go wrong in the frame that you're not spotting. Or anyway when I told him this like I just like, it's only in hindsight I think about it that other actors could freak out and they could freak out in many ways. They could freak out at you for putting them under this pressure and get angry. Or they could freak out themselves internally and start fluffing their lines and they would have to do more than one take so they were so calm all of them they were saying don't worry Brendan, we've got your back and then went up. Did their takes; one take only and they were get nailing their takes. So I had like that for me was when I just knew there were. They were supporting me. They were behind me.

Cat: I have one final question for you and it's the seller uses a lot of mathematics and physics to explore supernatural forces and life after death. What inspired you to incorporate those types of sciences into the film?

Brendan: You know, it's probably not the first time you'll see me are the the last time. I mean you'll see me do that because I in love eternal I I basically when I'm thinking about life after death and what replaces it for me. What replaces religion for me is thinking about the universe and our place in it. Because it's an unknown to anybody. Even the brightest scientists can’t. Physicists can't tell us so to me that's humbling in itself. So I always resort to it in love. It was more of a philosophical approach, but I was trying to come up with somebody who was coming to terms with their existence and and I was using fractals as a real sort of metaphor of how everything seems to be bigger and smaller, and and yet profoundly connected. And in this again I just resort like when I had. I knew Matt mathematics from the short films based around counting, so I did want to base it around maths, but I quite quickly, I'm dealing with sort of the void, I was thinking of other dimensions and I I regularly do look up this, string theory and these things and I don't understand it. Half the time, but it gives me a peaceful feeling just even trying to understand it.

Sometimes I get a little insight. Tt won't probably won't be the last time I'll resort to it, because if I'm stuck I always go back to that. Having some kind of like scientific basis for why we're here. I think there's a lot of profundity in it. I'm terrible at math, but I do think that math is more than just numbers and I think it's a language that can actually describe certain realities in our world.

Cat: thank you so much for your time and good luck this week.