When a mild stroke diminishes her ability to care for herself, Judith Albright (Barbara Hershey) moves to Golden Sun Manor, an assisted living facility with a sterling reputation.

But despite the best efforts of the staff, and a budding friendship with fellow senior Roland (Bruce Davidson), strange occurrences and nightmarish visions convince Judith that a sinister presence is haunting the massive estate.

As residents begin to die mysteriously, Judith’s frantic warnings are dismissed as fantasy. Even her devoted grandson Josh (Nicholas Alexander) thinks her fears are the result of dementia, not demons.

With no one willing to believe her, Judith must either escape the confines of the manor, or fall victim to the evil that dwells within it.

A fun yet chilling gothic tale, The Manor is sure to surprise you with its terrifying monster and a surprise twist. We spoke to its writer and director, Axelle Carolyn about her love of horror…

When did you first get the idea for The Manor?

It’s a very personal movie in some ways because it was derived from very dark moment in my life, seeing my dad have dementia in a nursing home. So it was seeing what nursing homes are like, and seeing a person you love change and go through the most extreme version of aging you can possibly go through.

I always seem to process things through the supernatural somehow, I’m a huge horror fan, and there are little things that happened. Like one night he woke up my mum and he says: ‘You don’t mind all those people watching us when we sleep?!’

Isn’t that just perfectly ripe for a supernatural interpretation of dementia? It just seemed so horrifying and isolating for him. At the same time, it was something I had to deal with and process and to me, the easiest way to do that is always to write a horror story about it.

At the centre of this movie is the relationship between a grandmother and a grandson, what made you want to explore the dynamics of this particular relationship?

Partly because I just liked the idea of her being liked by someone younger, without it being about just the fact that they’re related. She’s genuinely fun. She’s genuinely someone they have something in common with. She wears a more sophisticated version of the way that he dresses, they have the same interests.

They used to have a scene where they discuss horror movies together and how she’s the one who allows him to watch horror and his mum is not okay with that. Which is very much what I had with my grandma.

My grandma wouldn’t watch horror, she was very different from Judith, but it had that little kind of complicity with her in that she knew what I liked. So I would show up and as soon as my mum was gone, she’d be like, ‘I taped this off the TV yesterday’ and it’d be anything from Ghostbusters to Bruce Lee to whatever. Something she knew my mum would not approve of. She would never have watched herself  but she was like, ‘I think you might like it’.

So there was something rebellious about that that I’ve always thought was awesome and I wanted audiences to think about that.

The Manor explores some very deep themes like loneliness and mortality, what is it about horror that makes it a good platform to delve into themes like these?

I think there are a couple of things. If I’d made a straight drama about this, it would have been very depressing, and I’m not even sure I would have watched it, to be honest! Because it’s a very dark and very personal topic. But if you make a mystery about it, that has supernatural elements and then it turns out to have a big monster in it, it’s fun!

Of course, you are aware of the themes but you don’t have to have a whole reflection about it. You can do that if you want, but you can also just enjoy the movie and have a good time.

I also think the more serious kind of cold-light-of-day answer is that horror is usually made on a smaller budget than most dramas and most movies that are considered more mainstream, so you can go to places that are more unusual. You can have characters who are less representative of the very typical mainstream audience member. The nice thing, in this case, is that I hope that it has a wider audience because I think these are concerns that everybody can have.

What do you want audiences to take away from the film?

I’m hoping that people find this is an entertaining movie that maybe at the end leaves you thinking. I hope. But it doesn’t have to, as long as you’ve had fun watching it!

The Manor will be released on 8 October on Prime Video.

The post Welcome To The Blumhouse: Interview With The Manor’s Axelle Carolyn appeared first on Sci-Fi Tips.

After 60-something neighborhood activist Lupita (Adriana Barraza) discovers that her beloved local bingo hall has been taken over by a mysterious businessman named Mr. Big (Richard Brake), she rallies her elderly friends to fight back against the enigmatic entrepreneur. But when her longtime neighbours begin turning up dead under grisly circumstances, Lupita suddenly discovers that gentrification is the least of her problems. Something terrifying has made itself at home in the quiet barrio of Oak Springs, and with each new cry of “Bingo!” another victim falls prey to its diabolical presence. As the cash prizes increase and the body count steadily rises, Lupita must face the frightening realization that this game is truly winner-takes-all.

A wickedly original horror movie with a fiendishly funny twist, we spoke to Bingo Hell director and co-writer Gigi Saul Guerrero about playing bingo over Zoom and how she was inspired to write the move by her grandmother…

How did everything start for you with Bingo Hell?

I had worked with Blumhouse before, for the Into The Dark series, and they were like, ‘alright Gigi, what do you have next?’ and I’m like, ‘wow, okay!’. So one random day, I was talking to the co-writer of Bingo Hell, Shane [McKenzie], and he just said to me: ‘Guess where I was last night? I was at a bingo hall – they’re crazy! They’re the most competitive seniors I’ve ever seen in my life. I had no idea that bingo was such a competitive sport!’

So I said to him: ‘Listen, my grandma, my abuela, she’s obsessed with bingo too she plays it all the time with her brothers and sisters in Mexico!’

Then he said the magical words: ‘I wonder what would happen if we took bingo away from them?’ and I was like: ‘They would murder somebody!’ [haha] They would legit kill somebody, and they would get crazy, so we just got so inspired by the idea of seniors kicking ass in a movie.

Also bingo is a universal game that everybody knows, so it all started from there!

It was simply giving Blumhouse two sentences of an idea, and they were like ‘that‘! It’s super cool how open they are to these wild ideas.

We guess that with writing the movie during a pandemic you weren’t able to conduct much research in bingo halls…?

No, it’s true but I did show up to a few of the Zoom bingo parties that my grandma would have with her relatives! In Mexico it’s called loteria, that’s the Mexican bingo, and they would play it all the time on that!

You know, I’d never thought I would Google documentaries about bingo, never did I think they would even exist and there was so much cool stuff about bingo and the game. So it was really cool research. It was so interesting how much this game means to all the players. A lot of them have been playing it for over 30 years, going to the same hall. So it was a really cool experience to research so much of this game.

What was the process like co-writing the movie with Shane McKenzie and Perry Blackshear?

That process was a lot of fun, I think all of us got very inspired during the pandemic to write ALL the things! But with times like these (because it’s still going on), I feel like we need a lot more fun in films. We need so much more escapism and it’s okay to laugh with a horror movie. It’s okay to poke fun.

So our direction and our process was ‘how do we want to see our grandparents in this film?’ We wanted to create the true meaning of community and the true meaning of friendships. Those money-can’t-break friendships. It was so much fun creating colourful characters because if you look at the heroes of Bingo Hell, they’re all different. Different race, different colour, different accents. So hopefully it’s a representation of where a community can and should go.

Speaking of those colourful heroes, what was it like creating characters of an older generation?

Well we all know they’re the most charming, the cutest, but God bless them, they’re stubborn [haha]! They’re the most stubborn human beings on earth, so it was easy!

For me, I am my grandma’s best friend, my abuela really is my best friend, I love her to death. So creating the lead character of Lupita was easy for me. Because I’m so close to my grandma, I know her like the back of my hand. So, I personally was really inspired to dedicate this character to her. So that was a lot of fun.

Bingo Hell has a mixture of comedy, social commentary and gore – how was it to get the balance right for all of those elements?

At the end of the day, that balance was the characters, if this was with kids, or the typical young adults, I don’t think it would have worked. With that charmingness, that stubborn cuteness that seniors bring… they’re so wacky, they’re already the wackiest people out there! So I was inspired to bring back that vibe of movies from back in the day that we love like Cocoon, or Batteries Not Included.

I haven’t seen a film like that since a long time ago, so why not put them in a horror setting? It works out really nicely. I think at the end of the day, horror and comedy go hand-in-hand; they’re perfectly parallel, which is why I think it works. Then you see a lot of people nervous laughing when they see the gore! So I think it already works out, the two genres blended together.

What is it about those two genres that go so well together?

I think a lot of us, when we’re scared, we try to find quick solutions of how to feel better and a lot of it comes through laughter. When we’re nervous, when we’re afraid, we can laugh about it too.

I like to say that horror movies are escapist films. We see a lot of stuff on the news that is heartbreaking. With this genre, you can actually mould and bend very intense subject matters, sometimes social commentary, and why not put some humour on it? It’ll get us to pay attention. It’ll get us to talk about it after the movie’s done.

My goal is not to make people suffer through those 90 minutes, with this film especially. So I think if you can bring humour, laughter and gore, blend those together you get the famous juice of fun!

What do you want audiences to take away from the movie?

Our goal was to make a horror movie you can invite your grandparents to watch with you. So you can be like, ‘look the heroes are you guys’. But also we want people to walk away from this, not just for the love of our seniors around the world but also the love of community, the strength of friendships is exactly what this movie represents. Money can manipulate you but strong friendships can never be broken. So we wanted to really make a movie that stands for that.

Bingo Hell will be released on 1 October on Prime Video.

The post Welcome To The Blumhouse: Interview with Gigi Saul Guerrero for Bingo Hell appeared first on Sci-Fi Tips.

“I was watching industry trends and over the past 10 or 15 years we’ve had a real resurgence of the vampire medium,” Payne explains. “Whether it’s something like Vampire Diaries or True Blood, or even way back to the Twilight stuff, there seem to be a pretty archetypal character that was used in all of those vampire mediums, which was a young white woman who was a bit of a damsel in distress, and dealing with things the way that she might.

“I just had a strong reaction to that. No shade to those shows and movies, I do like them, but I thought about how maybe a black woman might respond differently and how the black women in my life might respond very differently and very specifically in that exact same situation.”

This idea also caught the eye of the movie’s director, Maritte Lee Go: “The script came across my desk and I was completely enamoured with it. I’m obsessed with horror. I love vampires, and I’d never read a script like this, I’d never seen a young woman of colour slay vampires!

“So I really felt like it was something for me. If there’s something that I’d love to do or if I know something’s meant for me, I get these tingles all over my body. As soon as I read it I got those and I was like: ‘This. I have to do this.’ So I pitched on it for Amazon and for Blumhouse and they luckily loved my pitch!”

Indeed, Black As Night is part of 2021’s Welcome To The Blumhouse – a group of four films released on Amazon Prime from up-and-coming filmmakers. After the success of the 2020 WTTB movies (which included sci-fi drama, Black Box and familial thriller, The Lie), this year’s movies are taking a definite horror vibe, and Black As Night fits in very firmly with that, though adding a dose of humour at the same time.

“It was so interesting because it would teeter on horror and comedy, and I love that,” Go continues. “It feels like a very well-rounded story. I really just felt like I was that girl, trying to figure out who I was, to find my inner beauty, but also had dreams of just being a badass.”

That badass is the film’s protagonist, 15-year old Shawna (played by Asjha Cooper) who vows revenge on the newly-discovered group of vampires after they kill her drug addict mother.

“I wanted to really give my character a take-charge attitude,” Payne says of Shawna. “I wanted to give my character the vibe that she is really willing to get shit done and not be a foible amongst vampire politics. I wanted to make her a hero.”

Indeed, after discovering the vampire leader’s lair, she gathers a group of friends together to take on the undead – not a move you’d usually expect from a teenage girl who discovers monsters are living in her neighbourhood!

And these are real monsters. Don’t be expecting a handsome potential romantic interest from these vampires; they’re here to feed and they don’t care what destruction they leave in their wake.

“I felt like the romance would not be with the vampires,” Payne confirms. “I think that the young women that I knew, that I was very inspired by, would probably think the vampires were gross. I wanted to get rid of the idea that these blood-sucking monsters were something sexy and romantic and actually make them the monsters that I think they would be in real life if they existed.”

With clawed fingers, and eyes that burn bright as they stalk their prey, it was also the director’s intention that these were vampires that you would be afraid of. “I definitely wanted eyes that had never been seen before,” she tells us. “Jessica from Veiled Optics did an amazing job. She’s one of two people in the whole world who can paint contact lenses. So each contact lens was hand-painted by her and they covered the full sclera.

“As you’ll see, there are different tribes of vampires and so we had a design for each of the tribes. I did a lot of work with the makeup effects team on how their nails would be, what their skin texture would be. Also, teaming up with VFX and working with all of these department heads creatively was such a blast because we saw what had been established, and we were able to take that and run with it for this modernised storytelling of it.”

This is certainly a modern telling of a classic vampire story. This is a world where Twilight exists, where Payne’s previously mentioned ‘resurgence’ of the vampire medium has taken place. So when Shawna sees a monster sucking the blood of a human, she’s in no doubt as to what it is. “I wanted this to be a world where vampire media existed and that she was aware of it,” Payne nods. “I’m not into world-building so I didn’t want to start from scratch and try to explain why vampires existed. I just wanted to live in a world where Buffy exists and Dracula exists, and she has some knowledge about it.”

Black As Night certainly takes on a Buffy vibe in that it melds horror with comedy, and mixes it in with serious topics. Set in New Orleans, Black As Night focuses on the impact of Hurricane Katrina and the devastating aftermath left in its wake. It’s been 15 years since the disaster and still plenty of people in the local community have been left struggling to regain what they lost. “I’m old enough to remember when Katrina hit, and follow the devastation of what happened afterward,” Payne remembers. “So I’m always interested in these big societal, cultural and political issues that affect black people just in my day-to-day life.”

It’s these people who the vampires target for their nightly meal. These are people who, when they disappear, won’t draw attention and won’t be missed, so the undead can feed to their heart’s content without any interference: “Vampires are predators and predators do not feed on male models and aristocracy and rich people,” Payne tells us. ”Predators take advantage of the most vulnerable of the species and I think in our society, the most vulnerable people are the people who are not wealthy, who may be struggling with addiction, who may be out on the street. The people who have really been pushed to the periphery of our community in our society.”

“Audiences are getting smarter,” Go adds. “There’s a lot of stuff happening in the world that we are all thinking about that is just bubbling under the surface. There’s a lot of rage, and we want to get our voices out, but put it in a way that it can be accessible to everyone. The cool thing about horror is that it can be translated in any language, and the world understands.”

Just like plenty of the horror greats before it, Black As Night uses its genre platform to comment on modern societal issues.

“When we’re talking about what’s happening in the United States today and while we were shooting it, the Black Lives Matter movement was happening… [the movie] just had so much inner turmoil and frustration,” Go says. “To express that in such a medium that would reach the world, it really brings empathy and understanding to people who feel like they’ve been marginalised and never been seen before.

“That’s really important for me. My purpose in what I want to do in this world is, I want to first and foremost entertain, but bring empathy and understanding through entertainment, through horror. To explore what it is to be a dark-skinned female, and understand what it feels like inside their head and the issues that they’re going through. That no matter where you’re from, what your skin colour is, that we all have the same fears and that we can all attain greatness!”

“People go to the movies to see things that are fantastic,” Payne adds. “I mean if you really want reality, you look out of your window and it’s pretty boring. We want to see things that are exciting and fantastic and there’s something innate in us about the fear of death and being attacked by monsters and things that go bump in the night.

“Specifically with what we’re doing in this movie and the more recent generation of social commentary and horror movies and thrillers is, monsters are a useful metaphor. When I think about vampires, I don’t just think about the sexiness and the romantic nature of these vampires swooping into people’s lives and ravishing them. I think about, what does it say about addiction? Vampires are addicted to blood. What does it say about, again in this movie specifically, what does it say about how we treat the members on the lowest rung of our society? I just loved working on this particular script because the metaphor was so strong for us.”

With such a strong sense of social commentary in the script, alongside genuine monsters and a good dose of humour, it was important that the young cast of Black As Night could understand just what was needed from them. “In all honesty going into it I was like, ‘I don’t know if it’s gonna work’,” Go laughs. “But we found such talented actors who were able to play very grounded characters and bring themselves to it, but also were able to flip into comedy and then horror was… we just had these very versatile actors who could do all that.”

What results is a movie that the filmmakers hope you haven’t seen before by taking the popular notion of vampires and flipping it on its head to reveal a nasty side that you don’t see too often and a heroine you see less often still. “What I’d love for people to do is to see something that’s been done a million times for years on end,” Go tells us. “And to see this movie that has taken that kind of classic vampire tale and twisted it and modernised it in and put it into their own words.”

“I would love people to consider how we treat the outcasts and marginalised of our society,” Payne adds. “I would love people to maybe think about their preconceived notions of skin complexion and how that affects people. Certainly in the black community we’ve all experienced some version of colourism, and I want people to come away thinking about the things that really affect places like New Orleans but honestly affects cities all over this country. About the housing rights and creating safe environments for people to live and not pushing them out due to gentrification or other means of eliminating their housing options.”

“I want people to realise that they can tell their stories too, that there’s no limit to what this world wants to hear, that you are all so valuable, and your voice matters,” Go agrees. “I also think that it’d be amazing for people to walk away and say that your exterior, or your circumstances don’t define who you are.

“Your strength comes from within, because we’re going to see Shawna who’s a badass! We haven’t seen a hero like this before and to have that type of hero is groundbreaking and I just hope that connects to women alike.”

Black As Night will be released on 1 October on Prime Video.

The post Black As Night: Biting social commentary appeared first on Sci-Fi Tips.

Back in October 2020, four new thrillers were dropped on Amazon Prime as part of the collective Welcome To The Blumhouse. With tales of murder, obsession, rivalry and even a machine that allowed you to explore your mind, there was plenty on offer for genre and thriller fans alike.

Now, Welcome To The Blumhouse is back and this time we’re invited to a nursing home, a small town in Seventies California, New Orleans to battle vampires and… a bingo hall…?

Watch the retro-looking teaser trailer here…

Four films will be released in pairs as part of Welcome To The Blumhouse, with two (Bingo Hell and Black As Night) out on 1 October, followed by Madres and The Manor on 8 October.

Find out more about the films below…

Bingo Hell

When a sinister figure threatens the residents of a low-income community, a feisty senior citizen tries to stop him in Bingo Hell, a wickedly original horror movie with a fiendishly funny twist. After 60-something neighborhood activist Lupita (Adriana Barraza) discovers that her beloved local bingo hall has been taken over by a mysterious businessman named Mr. Big (Richard Brake), she rallies her elderly friends to fight back against the enigmatic entrepreneur. But when her longtime neighbors begin turning up dead under grisly circumstances, Lupita suddenly discovers that gentrification is the least of her problems. Something terrifying has made itself at home in the quiet barrio of Oak Springs, and with each new cry of “Bingo!” another victim falls prey to its diabolical presence. As the cash prizes increase and the body count steadily rises, Lupita must face the frightening realization that this game is truly winner-takes-all.

Black As Night

A resourceful teenage girl leaves childhood behind when she battles a group of deadly vampires in Black as Night, an action-horror hybrid with a strong social conscience and a biting sense of humor. Fifteen years after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, a new threat leaves its mark on the Big Easy in the form of puncture wounds on the throats of the city’s vulnerable displaced population. When her drug-addicted mom becomes the latest victim of the undead, 15-year old Shawna (Asjha Cooper) vows to even the score. Along with three trusted friends, Shawna hatches a bold plan to infiltrate the vampire’s mansion in the historic French Quarter, destroy their leader, and turn his fanged disciples back to their human form. But killing monsters is no easy task, and soon Shawna and her crew find themselves caught in a centuries-old conflict between warring vampire factions, each fighting to claim New Orleans as their permanent home.

Madres

Beto (Tenoch Huerta) and Diana (Ariana Guerra), a young Mexican-American couple expecting their first child, move to a small town in 1970’s California where Beto has been offered a job managing a farm. Isolated from the community and plagued by confusing nightmares, Diana explores the rundown company ranch where they reside, finding a grisly talisman and a box containing the belongings of the previous residents. Her discoveries will lead her to a truth much stranger and more terrifying than she could have possibly imagined.

The Manor

A malevolent force preys upon the residents of a sleepy nursing home in The Manor, a gothic tale of terror with a modern twist. When a mild stroke diminishes her ability to care for herself, Judith Albright (Barbara Hershey) moves to Golden Sun Manor, an assisted living facility with a sterling reputation. But despite the best efforts of the staff, and a budding friendship with fellow senior Roland (Bruce Davidson), strange occurrences and nightmarish visions convince Judith that a sinister presence is haunting the massive estate. As residents begin to die mysteriously, Judith’s frantic warnings are dismissed as fantasy. Even her devoted grandson Josh (Nicholas Alexander) thinks her fears are the result of dementia, not demons. With no one willing to believe her, Judith must either escape the confines of the manor, or fall victim to the evil that dwells within it.

Bingo Hell and Black As Night will be released on 1 October, and Madres and The Manor will be released on 8 October as part of Welcome To The Blumhouse. All on Prime Video.

The post Welcome To The Blumhouse: A new set of scary tales awaits… appeared first on Sci-Fi Tips.

Part of Welcome To The Blumhouse, Evil Eye follows Pallavi (Sunita Mani) and her mother Usha (Sarita Choudhury) as they navigate their relationship over thousands of miles (the former lives in New Orleans while the latter is in India). It’s a mixture of family drama and horror as Usha’s past comes back to haunt both mother and daughter. Having been the victim of domestic abuse as a young woman, Usha’s skeptical when Pallavi introduces her to her new, seemingly ‘perfect’ boyfriend, Sandeep (Omar Maskati). Despite actively encouraging her daughter to find a match, there’s something about Sandeep that she doesn’t trust – there’s something about the way he acts that feels dark and familiar…

“When I first read [the script] I was like ‘why did they send this to me? This is not my thing…’ and then as it went along I was like ‘oh!’” Sarita Choudhury tells us. “I just love that the story of [Usha’s] past and the abuse (which is in itself horrifying) was set under the umbrella of horror. I just love that. I was like ‘this is double horror!’”

This mixture of family drama and horror not only appealed to the cast, but it also called to the film’s co-directors (and twins) Elan and Rajeev Dassani. “We just found it to be such an amazing mix of very authentic complex drama and supernatural thriller,” says Elan. “It was a perfect combo!”

The other element to the script that especially appealed to the directors was its focus on Indian culture mixed with genre, something which stood out as unique: “[It] uses the Indian culture and its Indian mythology in this sort of thriller context that I hadn’t seen before,” says Rajeev. “We’re very familiar with Indian mothers who want their kids to get married, because obviously that’s our own history and so it was fun seeing that and then translating that into this whole dark back story!

“We wanted to begin almost as a family drama, so begin almost like a rom-com in some ways where you have the quote-unquote ‘overbearing mother’.”  Rajeev continues. “You have the mother who wants her daughter to get married. The daughter who doesn’t want to be told what to do. I think what we wanted to feel is that initially, [the film] seems fun but then this sort of sense of anxiety and foreboding starts to permeate through as the mother gets more and more obsessed. We liked this idea that we, the audience, and the mother, both have this sense of something dark is coming, but we’re not really sure what it is…”

At the centre of this story is the relationship between Usha and Pallavi. Whereas many films may focus on the stereotypical overbearing mother and frustrated daughter, Evil Eye takes on a different note; showing the two women fully in their own right: “Usually the setup is that you only follow the daughter,” Sarita says. “The mother comes in and out as the nagging mother and you might find out something about her later, but they were equally shown, which I’ve never seen.”

With the vast geographical differences between Usha and Pallavi, this relationship is largely told over the phone as the two continuously FaceTime each other; an element to the filmmaking that threw up a few troubles for its actors: “It was not easy!” Sarita laughs. “Then I got so used to it and then I started to realise, ‘oh, you can do things when you’re on the phone that the person you’re talking to can’t see’. So that could be interesting. For an actor that’s fun because it plays with private and public. But at the beginning, it was tricky to get used to.”

“I kind of had to trick myself,” Sunita adds. “It was pretty bizarre. I would be like in this dramatic moment in a one sided monologue with myself imagining that Sarita was on the other line. But then I would pull out of that moment and see that there is a reader in the corner trying to hide herself off-frame! It was really bizarre to pull out from those moments. Not having a scene partner kind of allows for that so you’re like ‘oh my God, we’re making a movie where I’m just staring at a phone’ [haha].

“It was satisfying to see it cut together because it was shot so one sided. I did have some sense of Sarita’s scene based on footage I was able to see. Or just knowing who she is, we really bonded pretty early on in the filmmaking process, of just having that tone to carry and that someone to miss was informing a lot of me talking at myself.”

However tricky the phone scenes were to shoot, it clearly shows two characters’ dependence on each other, calling at all times of the day for advice, support or even just a general chat: “It’s easy to show co-dependence because, first of all, she calls her a lot and the daughter answers a lot!” Sarita laughs. “There’s this great moment where Sunita’s character says: “You know I spend so much time rebelling against my mother that I forgot what I really want to do”. She says something like that and I thought, ‘oh, that’s so interesting’. That is what co-dependence is and I love that because when the secret comes out and the past comes out, suddenly both of them are left with new lives.”

“I definitely relate to the mother-daughter relationship and the constant battle that they’re in,” Sunita tells us. “But I also see the dependence that they have on each other and I think that’s such a signifier of the kind of cultural divide and generational divide that is still relatable. I think it’s so important and quite realistic. The whole movie is about this relationship to me. That’s what drew me to the script and I loved having those long-distance phone calls, it felt a bit like a theatre piece or something when we were shooting it.”

Pallavi’s new relationship throws up a lot of painful memories for Usha, as we slowly find out throughout the film that she suffered from domestic abuse as a young woman and subsequent PTSD: “In the genre of horror or thriller or whatever it is, it was so beautiful to take such a real, deep subject and treat it delicately in this kind of other-fuelled situation that ends up being pretty violent,” Sarita explains. “I thought it was so clever and moving that they could do both. I think we were worried at times because we wanted to make sure you didn’t make that subject trivial on any aspect, so we really had to monitor it to make sure it was okay.”

“We actually spoke with experts who work with PTSD and work with domestic abuse to make sure that the portrayal of it was accurate,” Rajeev tells us. “To us, the film is ultimately about the cycle of violence. It’s about the way women are often abused but then return to their abusers or can’t escape from the trauma from it.”

“Also, we’ve all seen the [physical] stereotypical domestic violence being portrayed,” Elan adds. “But the reality is that there are a lot more microaggressions. There are a lot more things like ‘don’t see your friends’ or ‘you don’t need a job, just stay here’.”

“Isolating these kinds of psychological manipulations was a very interesting thing to portray,” Rajeev continues. “Sandeep in this film seems like a great guy, but if you pay attention, you’ll see him doing these things. You’ll see him isolating her. You’ll see him paying for her, so making her dependent on him. These things seem good but in reality they are tools used by abusive men.”

For her part, Usha turns to the ‘Evil Eye’ mythology to cope with the demons of her past and deal with its traumatic aftereffects: “I think often when people go through trauma and aren’t able to go to therapy and deal with it or share it, they pick solutions that work for them,” says Sarita. “To protect her daughter, a common device in a country like India, is to go to astrology, mythology, the gods. But it becomes almost like such an obsession in controlling her daughter that it loses the reason. It overtakes her.”

The unique combination of this genre element with South Asian culture was not lost on the cast: “It’s South Asian – a South Asian family in a horror genre. That was new!” laughs Sarita. “It’s hard to say, but when I saw it I remember just thinking: ‘Oh, there’s this unexpected deep understanding of another culture that is our culture.’ It raises a border because you watch the film and it’s all South Asian. We’re cooking South Asian food. We’re at altars. We’ve got these mythological objects and yet the story is very familiar. I think the universality of it is going to really appeal to people because I don’t think they’re going to expect that when they’re watching it.”

“I have never been presented with this opportunity to play an Indian American character so close to my own experience,” Sunita adds. “[Pallavi’s] own sense of American identity and independence and ideas about dating and success, alongside the more culturally traditional perspective. But it was a central story in this movie and we were very careful to treat that as normal. It’s something we all have experience with – the directors, the rest of the cast – so it is enmeshed in our day-to-day.”

Though primarily shot in New Orleans, the film switches between the US and India as Usha and Pallavi start to gain new understandings of each other, and though the two countries are thousands of miles away, the directors wanted to make sure audiences can see the close connection between the two characters.

“[We want audiences to see] India as this place where people are just like us, where people have problems,” Elan says. “Technology has allowed us to communicate over these huge distances, but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re still connected. Even 4000 miles away you still have mothers and daughters who can connect to each other, who can talk to each other and be concerned about each other. The emotional issues that they have can still stretch across those huge boundaries.”

“This is a story about the day today, it’s not exaggerated,” Sunita continues. “We’re not spelling it out, we’re just immersing you into it and treating it as part of the experience instead of a gimmick. That’s just something I’m protective of because I hadn’t really encountered it before. Sarita [Choudhury] was the first person I knew was cast in the movie and that really set the level of humanity and intrigue for me. I was like ‘oh, I definitely want to work on this film, and she’s been cast as the mother, how amazing!’”

It may seem a little odd to cast Sarita Choudhury as a stereotypical overbearing mother but as we’re sure you’ve realised by now, not everything in Evil Eye is as it seems, and this is certainly true in its portrayal of its two female protagonists: “When I first read it, I was a little scared,” says Sarita. “I was like ‘I do not want to play an overbearing mother. I haven’t done it. I don’t know how to do it’ and then as I followed this story. I was just thinking of all my relatives, my aunties, and thinking ‘what if they had a story that was never told and they were trapped in a cultural position?’ I just felt like this really deep feeling of ‘I need to do this’.”

Indeed, we soon find out that Usha is a force to be reckoned with, not just as a potential mother in law, but someone who has overcome tremendous hardship. “We love the fact that the main character is this Indian matriarch who usually is sort of stereotypical but in this case has a rich and layered back story,” Rajeev says.

“Usually in films you have a main character who is an Indian matriarch who wants her daughter to get married and they rarely get front billing. You rarely see the fact that they have their own life,” says Elan.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree and Pallavi certainly takes after her strong mother, forging a successful career in New Orleans. So when she falls under Sandeep’s spell, it takes her by surprise: “She’s totally independent and carving out her own place in this world [but then] she’s really drawn to something that she never saw for herself,” Sunita says. “It’s not really part of her plan. It’s part of her mother’s plan, something she has spent a long time resisting. But I think the immediate validation that she senses and gets from Sandeep – to have that common, shared background. Like Indian American kids and knowing what it’s like to be like pressured into arranged marriages. It’s the deep sense of validation and understanding that I think she didn’t even know she needed and she gets that [with Sandeep] which pushes away other intuitions. I think that it’s likely the comfort, that validation, that she’s not getting from her mother she’s sort of getting from Sandeep.”

With a boiling pot of genres to contend with, Elan and Rajeev focused on the film’s visuals to put across its main themes – the two have largely worked in special effects (including on big budget TV shows like Scandal, Covert Affairs and How To Get Away With Murder) so this was a natural path for them to take. “We wanted to make sure to demonstrate everything that was going on through visuals,” Elan says. “How do we show you where these people’s heads are at? How do we show this descent into obsession in terms of the visuals?”

Indeed, with themes such as psychological and physical domestic, there are some scenes in Evil Eye that were paramount for the directors to effectively get across.

“Bringing that that cinematic psychological sense was really important,” Rajeev adds. “Like the water sequence, for example, was not really a part of the original script. We felt like we needed and wanted something very dramatic and very intense to put the audience in the minds of our characters and that felt like a really interesting, evocative, visual way to cinematically give that sense.”

Putting their skills as visual effects artists into good use and creating an immersive, effective family horror, Elan and Rajeev have certainly succeeded in making the leap into directing. But what was it like working with your twin as a co-director?

“It’s funny you ask that because I think our like first… not fight… but first we needed to figure out who says ‘action’,” Rajeev laughs. “So we initially every take we would swap…”

“…and that worked terribly!” Elan laughs.

“Disastrously!” Rajeev agrees. “So we ended up [saying] ‘okay, you’ll do the morning scene. I’ll do the afternoon scene’ [haha]. But on a more serious note, I think what we found is that our tastes are very similar, though not always aligned and so what was actually really nice was that even when we disagreed, we would talk together and work it out. In that sense we actually make each others work better by kind of testing everything a little bit against each other to make sure it really works and tells a story which is great.”

There’s obviously a real family element behind the camera and on-screen for Evil Eye, and the directors hope that the message audiences take away from the film is to look a bit deeper into your own family. “[People may say] ‘there’s no way these guys cast Surita Choudhury as your typical mum’,” Rajeev says. “Who would do that? Then you find out [Usha] has this amazing background and you start to think ‘wait, do all the women in my life have fascinating backgrounds?’ Of course they do. We’d like to see if audiences ask the question: ‘Who else in your life is more interesting than you realise?”

“And if you ask our mum [what the message is], she would say: ‘Listen to your mum!’” laughs Elan.

“Exactly!” Rajeev agrees. “That’s her message.”

Evil Eye is available on Amazon Prime Video now.

The post Welcome To The Blumhouse: Evil Eye appeared first on Sci-Fi Tips.

Check out this thrilling teaser trailer for Welcome To The Blumhouse, a collection of spine-chillers from Blumhouse and Amazon Studios, with the first four films – The Lie, Black Box, Nocturne, and Evil Eye – set for release on Prime Video this October.

The four films in more details are:

The Lie (Released on 6 October) – written and directed by Veena Sud, and starring Mireille Enos (World War Z), Peter Sarsgaard (The Batman), and Joey King (The Conjuring).
Synopsis: When their teenaged daughter confesses to impulsively killing her best friend, two desperate parents attempt to cover up the horrific crime, leading them into a complicated web of lies and deception.

Black Box (Released on 6 October) – directed by Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour and starring Mamoudou Athie (Underwater), Phylicia Rashad (Soul), Amanda Christine (Bunk’d), Tosin Morohunfola (Friend Request), Charmaine Bingwa (Trees of Peace), and Troy James (The Flash).
Synopsis: After losing his wife and his memory in a car accident, a single father undergoes an agonizing experimental treatment that causes him to question who he really is.

Nocturne (Released on 13 October) – written and directed by Zu Quirke, and starring Sydney Sweeney (The Handmaid’s Tale), Madison Iseman (Jumanji: The Next Level), Jacques Colimon (The Society), and Ivan Shaw (Insecure).
Synopsis: Inside the halls of an elite arts academy, a timid music student begins to outshine her more accomplished and outgoing twin sister when she discovers a mysterious notebook belonging to a recently deceased classmate.

Evil Eye (Released on 13 October) – directed by Elan Dassani and Rajeev Dassani and starring Sarita Choudhury (Jessica Jones), Sunita Mani (Mr Robot), Omar Maskati (Unbelievable), and Bernard White (The Matrix Revolutions).
Synopsis: A seemingly perfect romance turns into a nightmare when a mother becomes convinced her daughter’s new boyfriend has a dark connection to her own past.

The first four films of Welcome To The Blumhouse will be out this October on Amazon Prime Video.

The post Welcome To The Blumhouse: Four chilling films due this October appeared first on Sci-Fi Tips.