However, when they get there not only do they find themselves at the mercy of a family of rogue traders, but that malevolent, murderous goblins (or Redcaps as they’re known locally) are lurking in the gnarled, ancient wood at the foot of their new garden. Perhaps they haven’t escaped their nightmare after all…

Directed by Jon Wright (Grabbers), Unwelcome is based on an original screenplay by Mark Stay and also stars Colm Meaney, Jamie-Lee O’Donnell, Chris Walley and Kristian Nairn.

The film has also reunited the Grabbers creature team; including prosthetics by Shaune Harrison who has worked on the Harry Potter films, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and Avengers: Age of Ultron along with creature designs by Paul Catling (Maleficent, Thor, Fantastic Beasts) and longtime Wright collaborator VFX supervisor Paddy Eason (28 Weeks Later, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Grabbers).

We sat down with director Jon Wright to speak to him about creating the Redcaps and why he wants Unwelcome to be a modern Gremlins…

Unwelcome is a very apt title for the film as there are a lot of unwelcome characters – not just the goblins…

We hoped the assumption would be that the goblins are the problem. And obviously, the goblins are a big problem in this film, but really the bigger problem is the family of Irish builders [the Whelan family] that come and gradually fall out with this young English couple…

Unwelcome is pretty violent, especially at the beginning, was it always your intention to start the movie this way?

I’ve really made this movie for myself, in the best way. All the decisions that I’ve taken all the way along are like: ‘What would I like to see at this particular moment?’ and for me, I wanted the film to set out its stall and say: ‘Look, this is the kind of film that this is. This is the level that we can get to and where we can go to.’

I always liken the movie to a roller coaster ride, where you’re going up that ratchety slope all the way up to the top, and it’s quite a long ride, and there’s lots of nice scenery to look out on the way up but really, the exciting bit of the movie is the drop. That comes in the final third where we try and push the intensity to the maximum level.

So for me, that beginning was a way of saying ‘hang on for the drop’. We’ll just give you a little drop now, and then you can hang on for later, and there’ll be lots of talking and character stuff, which is really important because you’ve got to learn what these people are all about, but there’s going to be lots of fun and excitement at the end and you hopefully leave the cinema or your living room and you’ll feel: ‘Okay I got my money’s worth. I had fun. It was a Friday night movie!’

The violence is even more disarming as the movie looks like it could be a romance or musical. Why did you decide for the movie to look this way?

The director of photography, Hamish Doyne-Ditmas, is a big fan of musicals. We thought of this as a Grimm fairy tale for adults. It’s not something you want your children watching, and I think adults enjoy that type of tale just as much.

There are lots of echoes of things like Hansel and Gretel, and Rumplestiltskin even, so we pushed the look of the film. We wanted it to have that slightly heightened fairytale quality. That Tim Burton feeling where you’re not sure if it’s a set or if you’re outside, to give the audience a feeling that they might be dreaming almost.

How much of the movie was shot on location and how much was a set?

The house itself was a massive set. I mean, one of the biggest sets I’ve ever shot on. One of the positives of coming out of Covid was that they were very keen for us to shoot on a stage. So that’s a set and then the exterior locations are in Ireland. They’re in a lovely part of Ireland, a town called Cong, where they shot The Quiet Man, which is probably one of the most picturesque towns in Ireland I think.

So it’s a hybrid because the interior stage was actually near Watford, in an airfield – not in a particularly glamorous or Irish location at all! But I hope you can’t tell that that’s the case.

Unwelcome has a brilliant array of characters – is there a particular character or characters you’re excited for audiences to meet?

Well, I think audiences are going to love to hate the Whelan family.

We were very lucky with that cast. We got a fabulous cast of really great Irish actors to play that family. We’ve got Colm Meaney playing the dysfunctional father. We’ve got Chris Wally from Young Offenders playing a sort of horrible, young thug type. Jamie-Lee O’Donnell from Derry Girls plays a horrible thug as well. And then Kristian Nairn plays, I think, quite an interesting character. Maybe not what you’d expect. So first you think he’s almost like Jaws from the James Bond films, like a silent giant, but then as the film progresses you realise there’s a lot more going on with him.

The relationship in the family is complicated and I think all those actors just took so much pleasure in playing them. It was great for them because they felt like they were off the hook and could be really horrible and very unlikable and funny as well. So they bring quite a lot of humour and they just took glee in being that unlikable.

We screened the film recently at Sitges and when the Whelans get in trouble, there were huge cheers and applause and clapping. They’re the family you love to hate, so I’m really looking forward to people getting to meet them.

What were your inspirations for the look of the goblins in Unwelcome?

I always felt that if Redcaps were really real, if they were actual living, breathing creatures that lived in a wood, they’d have been discovered in this day and age. They’d be on people’s camera phones and they’d be tracked down by GPS. So it was quite important to me that they’re magical creatures, that if you go into the woods looking for them, but you don’t need the Redcaps, you’ll never find them. So because they’re magical, that gave us quite a lot of creative licence.

They’re not really a family of creatures. They’re very different looking from each other. Some have big hooked noses and some have tiny noses and huge eyes and some have tiny eyes, some have huge teeth… they’re all very varied.

I basically just sat down with a piece of paper and just drew (I’m no great artist by any stretch of the imagination), but I just drew every kind of weird and wonderful goblin that I could on a piece of paper and I didn’t censor my thoughts at all. So it didn’t matter how they came out.

Then I gave that illustration to Paul Catling, who is this fantastic concept artist who’s worked on these huge movies like Harry Potter and Marvel movies and Star Wars and he turned them into these amazing 3D illustrations. He really took those original goofy sketches and ran with it. So we end up with this very colourful, dysfunctional-looking, strange, weird and wonderful group of creatures who couldn’t really genetically be related to each other, but we don’t worry about that because these are magical creatures that have lived for thousands of years.

If you look closely at what they wear, you’ll see modern-day things like bottle tops and beer can ring pulls, and you’ll see things from hundreds and hundreds of years ago, so they’re actually ancient creatures that appear and disappear at will.

We had a lot of fun designing those. And Shaune Harrison, who is a brilliant creature effects guy who worked on Harry Potter for many years, made all the masks of the goblins and did an amazing job.

What was the process of bringing the Redcaps to life?

I was very keen not to have fully CG creatures. I wanted to photograph something. So we went back to a movie that I remember from my childhood called Cat’s Eye, which is a Stephen King adaptation with Drew Barrymore. In that they had a little goblin running around. It was basically a person in a costume running around on an absolutely giant set. That always stayed with me because of how it looked.

So in the end, we built double-height sets. We had full-size actors wearing masks, dressed in those outfits with swords and all the rest of it, running about on double-height sets. So when that first Redcap appears and he opens the French doors, he’s actually opening a 12ft French door!

But the problem with films like Cat’s Eye and Gremlins – which is a big inspiration of mine and a big inspiration for this movie – is when you get a big close-up of the Gremlins, the faces look a bit rubbery and unconvincing. So we used CG for that – we have a physical mask that is very photorealistic, and then we modelled that again in CG and basically animated it in CG.

We motion-captured an actor who is an old friend of mine called Rick Warden, who played all of the goblins. He did all the voices, and he went into ridiculous detail about the differences in their personalities. I don’t know if you’ll get it on the first view. I think you’ll just see a group of malevolent goblins who look a bit different but maybe on a second or third viewing you might pick up that they have very different and distinct personalities. Rick went a long way into that.

Unwelcome mixes comedy with horror. How did you go about nailing the right tone for the movie?

I think tone is really important. I learned this the hard way because I made a film called Tormented where I didn’t have a firm handle on the tone. I think when I made Grabbers, I had a much better idea that if something is funny, that can be very seductive because it makes you laugh, but if it breaks the tone of the movie, you have to let it go.

At the same time, you might have something that’s incredibly dramatic, but if it’s too dark and depressing and morbid, that’s going to equally break the tone in the other direction. So you’ve got to let that go as well. It’s kind of a tightrope walk.

It was important to me that the film was about something and one thing that made me excited to make a horror movie again was watching films like Hereditary and Get Out. They felt like a real departure from the torture porn era, that they were horror films, definitely and they are in the genre. They deliver all the stuff that you expect of the genre, but they have something to say and they have an interesting point of view on modern life and they don’t shy away from sociological issues.

That’s kind of the ambition for the film – to make one of those modern-style horrors that are more thought-provoking and have things to talk about. To take something that’s really fun, like Gremlins and bring it into the modern era.

Unwelcome is released in cinemas on 27 January 2023. Read our review here.

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Check out the brand new trailer here…

Directed by Jon Wright, Unwelcome is based on an original screenplay by Mark Stay and also stars Colm Meaney, Jamie-Lee O’Donnell, Chris Walley and Kristian Nairn.

The film has also reunited the Grabbers creature team; including prosthetics by Shaune Harrison who has worked on some of the world’s highest-grossing blockbusters including the Harry Potter films, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and Avengers: Age of Ultron along with creature designs by Paul Catling (Maleficent, Thor, Fantastic Beasts) and longtime Wright collaborator VFX supervisor Paddy Eason (28 Weeks Later, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Grabbers).

We sat down with director Jon Wright to speak to him about his new movie and just how he plans on getting those goblins right…

How did you first get involved with Unwelcome?

It basically started with a conversation with [Mark Stay] who wrote the movie. We were talking about how we were pacifists. I was explaining that when I was a teenager, my dad took me out in the garden to teach me how to box, and I explained to him that I was a pacifist.

That was a great disappointment to him. He was very sad and upset about that. But when I was talking to my co-writer about the fact that we were both pacifists, we sort of had to give a caveat, which is if our families were involved in something, particularly talking about our children, I was thinking, ‘if my son was threatened, I would be violent, and I would probably be violent in a way that it wouldn’t be a casual thing, it would be very aggressive because it would be designed to bring whatever was going on to a very abrupt conclusion’.

So that was the beginning of the story: how can a pacifist be violent? What does it take to make a pacifist, violent? So that was the genesis of the story and that took us to this young couple who, at the beginning of the movie, get in a very violent confrontation, and they move from the heart of urban London to the middle of nowhere in Southern Ireland. But the violence comes and finds them in Ireland and it’s how they deal with it the second time round…

Did you and writer Mark Stay do much research into folk tales?

We’re big fans of folk tales and fairy tales. We’ve read all of that stuff and read all the Irish folk tales and legends. We were drawn to those sorts of myths. The technical side of it that fused with the idea of this theme was I had a notion about how to do creatures.

So they’re either going to be small creatures or big creatures but without getting into the details of it (that will be revealed further down the line), I had a technical approach that I thought would look really great. It’s like a fusion of old and new, technically speaking.

That led us to want to do goblins. There’s an old legend about the Far Darrig, which is the Red Men in Gaelic, who are goblins who dip their caps in the blood of their victims. They’re also known as Red Caps. We always thought that was a pleasing antidote to leprechauns and gnomes. These guys are very murderous and of course, that dovetailed into our theme, which was violence, what it takes to be violent, and these goblins are very violent!

What can you tell us overall about Unwelcome?

The film opens with a bang and then it’s a slow burn. The arc of the film is sort of like a ski jump. By the end it really takes off and it gets to a crazy place. The final third is extremely intense and violent and high pressure, and then it goes off to a completely other level right at the very end!

Goblins are a big part of the movie, they’re integral to the film, but it’s not really about creatures. It’s about people – we describe it as a modern reinvention of Gremlins meets Straw Dogs.

A big component of the movie is a home invasion and there are various twists around that home invasion. It doesn’t go the way you’d expect it, in several different ways. But it’s basically about people feeling unsafe in their homes and feeling scared of what’s out there…

From the looks of the trailer it seems that Maya and Jamie should be wary of more than just the goblins…

Yeah, exactly, and it’s how the goblins fit into that. They’re idealistic, wanting to do their best by the local people. They get involved with a family who are quite dangerous and it’s what happens when they fall out with that family later. That is the heart of the story.

Colm Meaney plays the patriarch of the family. Kristian Nairn, Jamie-Lee O’Donnell and Chris Walley are the kids.

What can you tell us about Maya and Jamie?

They are a young, liberal, modern couple, very urban in their outlook, and that’s what we’re testing. At the beginning of the film, they’re quite idealistic and pacifists and then the extremity of what happens at the top of the film drives them to doing something that maybe they wouldn’t have ordinarily thought. To go live in the middle of nowhere, to live in a village. Then the violence comes back to haunt them in a way that they weren’t quite expecting.

What kind of scares can we expect from Unwelcome?

You can expect a lot of tension and pressure. The film gets very violent. People who’ve watched it said to me ‘my God it’s incredibly violent!’ So I suppose I’ve got used to it. But that’s where it goes. It’s a horror movie.

It’s very much in the vein of modern horror really. This new wave of horror that I would have said started more or less with It Follows and goes through to Midsommar, The Babadook, Hereditary, Get Out, Upgrade and Don’t Breathe. All those modern horrors, that are horrors in one way and in another way they’re movies that have something to say. They’ve got things to talk about, how the modern world is different to how it used to be. So we very much are getting into all that.

What’s great about this film that’s different to how it would have been if we made it 10 or 20 years ago, is that we’re able to do all that. We’re being actively encouraged to really dig into some interesting and difficult themes and put all that through the lens of a horror movie.

What do you want audiences to take away from Unwelcome?  

Obviously not many people have seen it at this stage, but those who have seen it say that it’s a roller coaster ride. It gets to be very exciting and intense. Quite often the thing that comes back is it’s different to anything that’s out there. So, it’s a very fun ride but it’s quite a different film from what’s out there in the mainstream.

I don’t know if I set out to do that intentionally. I set out to make something that’s scary and entertaining but I just think the combination of elements, and the way that the plot twists and turns and takes you off in an unexpected direction seems to be quite satisfying to people!

Unwelcome is released in cinemas in 2022

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