Meet the Filmmakers Keeping Gore Funny

Photo of Simon Barrett and Adam Wingard.

There’s an emerging power couple on the horror scene: writer Simon Barrett and director Adam Wingard. You might know the mumblecore masters from their V/H/S franchise – a trilogy of found-footage-style horror films – and, more recently, the chilling gore-fest You’re Next, about a series of break ins by axe-wielding murderers.

Their new thriller, The Guest, gets its start with a slightly more discrete home invasion. The story begins when the Peterson family get a knock on their door from David, a polite and charming soldier who claims he was friends with the their fallen son in the military. Though he initially seems like the perfect guest, a sinister series of events make the daughter, Anna, question whether David is actually who he claims to be.

The film is a total genre pastiche, an example of horror-comedy executed succinctly, with a throwback 80s soundtrack comprised of a load of original, synth-heavy goth-rock. Curious about how the pair mastered that tricky scary-funny balance, we met up with them for a chat. 

VICE: Hey guys. What’s your filmmaking mantra as a duo?
Simon: We just had a think: ‘What’s the worst thing about horror movies?’ It’s always the characters and the performances. ‘What’s the worst thing about indie films?’ That nothing ever happens. So we thought we’ll take the great actors from indie films and put them in horror movies, and you’ve got the best of both worlds. That’s where we were with the You’re Next and V/H/S movies.

Your new film, The Guest, has way more black humour than your usual stuff.
We don’t like campy humour. That feels lazy to both of us. It’s more sarcastic, black humour. The only downside to that is that, in America, people can’t quite tell if we’re kidding or not. A lot of horror films are bad, but we have a lot of dry humour so people can’t tell if it’s just a bad movie.

I feel like a lot of that was down to Dan Stevens’ acting.
Dan’s a super funny guy. Right away we were both into the fact he got the jokes. I think he was also eager after Downton Abbey to do something with a dark sensibility to it. We both also generally like films that change tone as they go on and escalate in that certain way. One way of doing that is establishing a reality early on and then adding a ridiculousness to it once you’ve got the foundation.
Adam: We actually saved the shower scene towards the end of filming so that Dan was in the optimum shape for it. His abs really had to be the star of that moment right there. Doing that scene was funny because I found out there are all these little tricks they do to make someone look their best on screen. Twenty-four hours before shooting that, they stopped Dan consuming any liquids or eating anything. It was in New Mexico in the middle of the summer, too. Then, right before you shoot the scene, they gave him a Coke and made him do push-ups because the sugar makes your veins pop.

Maika Monroe was equally funny in her role as Anna. It was great to see an interesting female role in a horror movie. What were you going for with her?
Simon: Growing up in the 80s, I’ve always been attracted to how the kids in movies figure out what’s going on quicker than the adults who are always totally oblivious, like in Nightmare On Elm Street. We needed a character that was just smarter than everyone around her and immediately figures out what’s going on. If you look at a lot of films in the horror/slasher genre in particular, the female characters seem to be the least interesting characters in the entire film. We were in danger of that because Dan’s character is so fun, so it was really all about making sure she could hold her own.
Adam: She was also an entry point to that kind of 80s stylisation in the movie. I would send Simon a lot of this music. I wanted that goth-rock electro feel, but I didn’t just want it to be randomly put into the movie. I wanted it to be a part of the movie and who the characters were. Also, the whole point of that character is that she lives in this absurd, kind of depressing environment, and she’s probably developed this internal sense of humour as a kind of coping mechanism – but that doesn’t mean that it’s not funny.

And that depressing humour accumulates in the final prom scene…
Simon: The original draft was set in a high school, but we deviated that mainly because, in America, there were a lot of school shootings recently. A big one happened exactly when we were finishing that first draft. The way we found the location was strange. Randomly, when we were shooting in New Mexico, the mayor showed us a pre-existing Halloween maze. Even though we built a lot of what you see in the film, we more or less augmented a real Halloween maze that was already there. It was in the middle of nowhere, truly like an hour outside of anywhere.
Adam: When we saw it, we knew that was our location. It’s massive, too. If you just walk through it, it takes about 10 minutes.

And that’s the site of some good prom sexual tension, too. Or did I just read that wrong?
Adam: Yeah, in a way I always thought there was this disjointed sort of love element to Dan and Maika’s characters, and so with the ending I wanted to give it that prom feel. Obviously the music changes and gets more romantic nearer the end. I think there’s an interest between the characters, but obviously what he’s done at that point is kind of irreversible. And yet I still wanted to get that emotion out of it. It just kind of seemed to tie in the Halloween theme and play with even more coloured lights.
Simon: And the characters do get their prom dance. It just happens to be a rather violent one.

The Guest is in cinemas on the 5th of September.