A tale of love and nightmares, They Look Like People is a haunting, fun, emotionally rich genre piece that gives you plenty to ponder after the closing credits. Filmmaker Perry Blackshear and actors Evan Dumouchel and MacLeod Andrews ran a tiny, DIY production with a crew that consisted mostly of themselves, but they’d have had it no other way. Their goal was simply to make something together, bounce ideas off of each other and strengthen the bond and friendship they already had. In this regard, the project was a complete success. The fact that the movie kicks copious ass is just icing on the cake.

The movie follows Wyatt (Andrews), a disturbed man who foresees an impending war with otherworldly shape-shifters. Teetering on the edge of madness, he stays with his friend Christian (Dumouchel), who’s trying his best to understand Wyatt’s paranoia but struggles to come to terms with his bizarre visions. Confused and pushed to the breaking point, their friendship is put to the test, all leading to a heartstopping moment of truth that will change their lives forever.

I spoke with Perry, Evan and MacLeod during their visit to San Francisco this past February to talk about They Look Like People, which will be available to watch on demand in the coming months. To keep track of the movie, visit theylooklikepeople.com and like their facebook page.

I liked how the film explored mental health. I remember when I was battling depression I’d sometimes think terrible thoughts about my loved ones. It was really weird.
Perry: My friend went through a really tough time and started to think people were spying on him and also that people he loved were evil things pretending to be his loved ones. This friend is now extremely successful and married and is about to have his first kid. There isn’t anything deeply wrong with him, but I think that kind of thing can happen to anybody. It’s scary, man.

Evan: We’ve had a lot of people talking about how they can identify with what’s going on in the film. Maybe not just those kind of thoughts, but any issue you have with a friend. It resonates with people by simply asking them how they would react to a similar experience.

MacLeod: There has been a handful of people who very specifically have had similar circumstances with their friend.

Perry: We guys are really emotionally inept. [laughs] Sometimes when your friend is going through something, you’re just like, “Cool, man. Well…cool.” [laughs]

Evan: “Whoa, that sucks, bro.”

Perry: You can’t just say, “Call me if you have a problem.” There have been times when I’ve missed those kinds of signs. You have to kind of stay with someone. The movie’s about paying close attention to stuff like that.

What’s nice is that your movie is a love story between to guy friends who are very vulnerable. I feel like the media doesn’t really depict men as being vulnerable or needing help enough.
Evan: I would argue Whiplash is a love story between two men! [laughs]

You know what? I interviewed Damien Chazelle and I said that to him. I said that I felt it was a sexual movie, not in the literal sense of Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons being romantic, but in the tone of their relationship. He looked at me like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Evan: I definitely feel like it’s a love story, or at least a way that men can be men with each other that’s not about anything that’s sexually charged. There are a lot of different kinds of love. I think it’s important to explore that.

Perry: I wanted the movie to be about love between humans. People have said “bromance,” but I think it’s that these friends just happen to be guys.

MacLeod: But I think it is specifically about Christian’s experience and how he perceives masculinity; how he approaches women, how he wishes he could.

Talk about the scene where you’re doing judo with Margaret.
Evan: The take you see in the film is the first one. We didn’t know if we had the camera set up or the sound right. She had told us that she was a brown belt in judo, but that’s like someone saying they’re a concert pianist and you’ve never heard them play the piano. We were like, “Cool. She’s probably taken a few judo classes.” She proceeded to dismantle me. Everything you see, like when she asks me if I’m ready, I’m just being real to the experience prior to getting my butt kicked. [laughs] I got the wind actually knocked out of me. That’s all take one.

Perry: Right before she put the rear naked choke on him, she said, “I just did this at a wedding, and the guy passed out.”

How about tapping on her ass? Was that planned?
MacLeod: That’s just what happened. He was trying to tap out.

Evan: Mostly I was fighting for breath.

I was watching the movie in my apartment, and when she did the judo throw I was like, “OOOOHHHHH!!!” My wife asked if I was watching UFC, which I do a lot, but I told her, “No—this dude just got judo thrown on his ass on the fucking grass!”
Perry: Who’s the woman who broke, like, 100 girls’ arms?

Ronda Rousey.
Perry: Margaret used to do judo with her. But yeah, that was the first take, and we didn’t know what was going to happen, so you can actually hear in the footage all of us go, “OH MY GOD!!!”

Evan: Then we did four more takes, and we used the first one anyway. [laughs]

Just sitting with you I can tell you guys make a good team.
Perry: The whole reason I made the movie was to work with these guys. We bought the plane tickets for the movie before I wrote the script, which was a big leap of faith on their part. I told Margaret I was making a movie and it had no script, and she said yes. It was a really tiny crew and very collaborative. It was extremely hard. A lot of times the difficulty on set is navigating the different personalities and millions of logistics, but this movie felt like the four of us together, hiking up a giant mountain. There were no overlords.

MacLeod: I think we’re all sensitive to trying to take responsibility and work harder. If one of us would be tiring out, the others would be like, “I can handle this right now.” We’d kind of clap each other up.

Evan: We could all sense when we needed to be there for each other.

MacLeod: Perry’s been on tons of film sets and has seen everything that can go wrong on them. To us, an important thing was to come out of making this movie and still be friends. Perry presented to us this little constitution of ten laws that ended up being so important. One of them was to try and get eight hours of sleep a night. No drinking. If two of the three people take the other one aside and say, “You’re getting a little grumpy. You need to go have a snickers,” you have to stop and go eat something, no matter what. You start getting angry and short with people, and a lot of times it’s because you’re hungry. All three of us would do that at some point.

Evan: Another really important one was 20-minute naps after meals.

MacLeod: Snack time and nap time.

Perry: It’s basically preschool.

MacLeod: Preschool is kinda genius! It’s the basics of what people need!

That’s going to be the headline of the article, by the way: “Preschool is Kinda Genius.”
Perry: We didn’t have much money, but the equity we had was each other. It was very important to protect that and to make sure we were functioning.

MacLeod: The three of us working together was the point. The movie turned out great, but it was secondary to the process of working together. Protecting the friendship and the process was more important that manipulating each other.

Perry: I have a lot of director friends. On bigger sets, there are a lot of tough decisions to be made about relationships and success. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but our number one priority is to make sure we stick together.

Moving forward, how do you protect that bond? It’s going to get harder.
Perry: One of the biggest things I learned is that there’s more than one way to make a movie. Our way isn’t necessarily the right way, but it worked for us. The Duplass brothers make Hollywood movies, but they have a union crew. Once they set up the set, they get them out on the lawn for a day, and it’s just them and the cinematographer and the actors in a room. They protect the things that matter. We learned the things that are really important to us: the story, the characters, and the relationships. If other stuff started to infringe on those, we’d bring it back to what mattered. Hopefully, we can keep doing that even if things start getting bigger. My favorite thing about moviemaking is making them together, with your crew.

There’s a climactic moment of suspense at the end of the movie involving a paper bag. Regarding what’s underneath the bag: it could have gone one of two ways. I love the way you chose to go. I feel like most movies would go the other way. Was that always the ending, or was there a serious decision to be made about which way you went?
Perry: There was a decision to be made. The ending changed throughout writing the script a lot. Even though it’s a movie about monsters and scary stuff, it ended up being way more personal than we expected. The ending emerged from that.

Evan: I think it speaks to Perry’s use of structure and creating a truth to the answer to both questions. I’m really happy about it. The question exists in people’s minds of whether one or the other could be the case. Each could have been true for somebody, and that’s cool for me to hear.

Perry: We wanted to end in a way that gave some answers to some questions, but left others unanswered.

Another year, another Halloween, another batch of horror films coming out in theatres and festivals all over the world. Last year turned out to be a pretty interesting year for horror films, with titles like The Babadook and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night earning high praise from both genre and non-genre fans alike. This year the field seems to have gotten stronger, and with 2015 coming close to an end, I wanted to highlight the best horror films of the year. This list may come a little early, but with only a handful of horror films coming out soon and the strength of these nine movies, I don’t think it’s too outrageous to consider these the best of 2015 (but just in case, I promise to come back and add in Krampus if it turns out to be awesome). And besides, it’s all subjective anyway. Take this as a list of 9 really good horror films from this year that any self-professed genre fan should check out as soon as they can.

Backcountry

Review
Interview with director Adam MacDonald

Adam MacDonald’s directorial debut can feel like watching the first act of Funny Games in the wilderness. After an ominous opening, Backcountry establishes that its two leads (Missy Peregrym & Jeff Roop) will meet some sort of awful fate, but MacDonald takes his sweet time to reveal how and when these characters will suffer. Unfortunately, the film’s marketing took a less mysterious approach, so one look at the poster or trailer will let people know what to expect once MacDonald finally lets loose. But it’s a fun journey getting there, and once the film goes into survival thriller mode it has its fair share of legitimately horrifying moments. Watch Backcountry and you’ll probably steer clear of the woods for a long, long time.

Availability: Currently available on DVD, Blu-Ray, and VOD.

Green Room

Review

A punk band, a room, a dead body, and a bar full of neo-Nazis. That’s all Jeremy Saulnier needs to set up his latest film, which finds the band barricading themselves in the eponymous green room once they witness a murder at the bar. The bar’s staff (including Patrick Stewart, pulling off an understated yet intimidating performance) starts launching one attack after another to kill the witnesses, and the band simply tries to survive. Saulnier’s biggest achievement here is how realistic the film feels; no one makes any stupid moves, and that makes it easy to put yourself in these characters’ shoes. It makes things unbearably tense, especially when things get violent. Even the most hardened horror fan might find themselves having a hard time handling Green Room, which is low on gore but extremely high on ruthless brutality.

Availability: A24 plans to give Green Room a wide release in early April, but expect it to pop up at different film festivals until then.

The Harvest

John McNaughton, director of the horror classic Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, returns to the genre with something very different. A surgeon (Samantha Morton) and her husband (Michael Shannon) take care of their ailing son Andy (Charlie Tahan), but the arrival of Maryann (Natasha Calis), a new neighbour around Andy’s age, causes Andy’s parents to irrationally freak out when she tries to befriend him. McNaughton and screenwriter Stephen Lancellotti have crafted a horror film that feels surprising in today’s landscape, preferring slow-building tension and character development to shocks and violence. The presence of hugely talented actors like Morton and Shannon helps too, with Morton having a ball chewing up scenery in such an unhinged role (this might be the closest thing we get to Morton starring in a Mommie Dearest remake). It’s a straightforward film, one dedicated to telling a good, entertaining story more than anything else, and on that front The Harvest is lots of fun.

Availability: Out now on Blu-Ray, DVD, VOD and Netflix Instant.

The Invitation

Karyn Kusama’s first film in 6 years (and her first indie since 2000) is one gloriously twisted treat, the kind of movie that delights in shredding your nerves one by one before it unleashes its full power. After divorcing his wife (Tammy Blanchard) and not hearing from her for several years, Will (Logan Marshall-Green) gets an invite from his ex to a party at her house. Once he arrives Kusama starts gleefully tightening the screws, slowly revealing one piece of information after another as the party’s vibe goes from awkward to “Get me the hell out of here.” Will doesn’t know if his suspicions of something sinister going on are real or fake, but Kusama makes it obvious that the situation is a ticking time bomb. And unlike a lot of films that fail to deliver when the bomb finally goes off, The Invitation’s visceral finale will have people covering their eyes and shouting at the screen in equal measure. Horror movies this exhilarating don’t come along too often.

Availability: After premiering at SXSW earlier this year, Drafthouse plans to release The Invitation in early 2016.

It Follows

Review

Just as the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west, no best horror of 2015 list is complete without David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows. By now, you’ve either seen it or know the gist: young adult Jay (Maika Monroe) has sex with a guy and contracts some sort of curse that makes a shapeshifting entity slowly but surely follow her. Only she can see it, the thing can take the form of any person (including some severely creepy people), and if it catches up to her she’s dead. I may not be as crazy about It Follows as others who are already hailing it as the next horror classic, but it’s been a long time since a US genre filmmaker came up with a concept this good, and Mitchell’s direction—using 360 degree pans to heighten the paranoia and intensity—elevates the film well beyond most low-budget horror films from this year (the distributor was so surprised by the film’s critical and financial success it decided to bypass a planned VOD release for a wide theatrical run, an unprecedented move). To put it bluntly: if you’re a horror fan and you haven’t seen It Follows yet, what’s wrong with you?

Availability: Currently available on DVD, Blu-Ray, and VOD.

The Nightmare

Review

The Nightmare might not be the scariest film on this list, but it’s certainly the one that will linger with people the longest. Rodney Ascher, the director of Room 237, sets his sights on the unique (or not-so-unique, depending on how you look at it) phenomenon of night terrors. Ascher interviews different people in America and the UK suffering from intense, vivid nightmares, but instead of delving into medical or scientific explanations, Ascher strictly focuses on each subject’s individual experience. Ascher’s re-enactments of the nightmares are lacking to say the least (think of the cheesy re-enactments from Unsolved Mysteries and you’ll get an idea), but it’s the testimonials that get under the skin. Even if the nightmares aren’t real, it certainly feels real for these people, and hearing the conviction in their voices (along with some of the downright eerie similarities between different stories) makes it easy to take their word. Ascher closes his film on a brilliant note too, suggesting that viewers might get start getting their own night terrors after watching The Nightmare. You have to give kudos to any director who can make people dread falling asleep.

Availability: Currently available on DVD, Blu-Ray, and VOD.

They Look Like People

Review
Interview with director Perry Blackshear and cast

The problem with low-budget horror is that a filmmaker’s reach can get bigger than their grasp. On the other hand, directors like Larry Fessenden or Ti West can make the most of their limited resources, proving that sometimes it doesn’t take much to freak people out. Perry Blackshear’s directorial debut They Look Like People is yet another example of taking the smart approach to a small budget. Wyatt (MacLeod Andrews) gets a phone call from someone saying that a war is coming; hideous creatures have slowly assimilated the human population Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style, and in several days they will shed their human form to take over the world. Wyatt flees to New York City in order to save Christian (Evan Dumouchel), his old (and still human) friend trying to make a life for himself. Blackshear’s film can get severely intense and unsettling, but it’s also a remarkable story about friendship, independence and the need to belong (or, at the very least, finding someone to connect with). It’s rare to see a horror film, especially a directorial debut, feel this intimate, and it’s well worth celebrating.

Availability: They Look Like People is seeking US distribution at the moment, but it’s screening at plenty of film festivals. Check out the film’s website to see if it’s screening near you.

Unfriended

Unfriended is not the first horror movie to take place entirely on a computer screen, but it’s the first film that really uses the format to do something that feels groundbreaking. On the one year anniversary of a high school student’s suicide (the result of intense bullying, both on and offline), a group of her “friends” get forced to join a Skype call from an account claiming to be the dead girl’s ghost. The classmates don’t believe it until the ghost starts picking them off one by one. Director Leo Gabriadze lets everything play out on the computer screen of main character Blaire (Shelly Hennig), and the film’s intense commitment to accuracy (no fake software here, every program Blaire uses is the same thing any average PC/Mac owner works with on a daily basis) makes it easy to get immersed. But beyond the film’s relatability (all by computer programs!), Gabriadze does an incredible job crafting a narrative entirely through watching someone browse their Macbook, and at certain points—like long stretches of silence as Blair clicks around—the film can feel downright radical in its approach. It’s a thrilling film, both as a straight up horror movie and what feels like an entirely new approach to narrative filmmaking. It’s probably the first time since Spring Breakers that a film this experimental snuck its way into thousands of theatres.

Availability: Currently available on DVD, Blu-Ray, and VOD.

We Are Still Here

I won’t lie: when I first saw Ted Geoghegan’s debut feature We Are Still Here, I wasn’t sure what to think. Yet now, months after seeing it, out of the hundreds of movies I’ve seen this year, this one hasn’t left me. Taking place in the late ’70s in New England, a couple (Barbara Crampton and Andrew Sensenig) grieving the loss of their son move into a new home. Things start going bump in the night, but this is no ordinary haunting, and soon things get wildly out of control. Part of We Are Still Here’s appeal is that Geoghegan operates on an entirely different wavelength than any other genre director in the US right now. Its slow build up and ’70s setting will draw comparisons to Ti West’s House of the Devil, but the hilarious, splatter-happy final act feels more in line with Lucio Fulci and European horrors from several decades ago. It’s a fascinating mix of influences, combined with a mythology that Geoghegan uses to increase the scale of his film without sacrificing its claustrophobic atmosphere. And it has two great performances by Barbara Crampton and Larry Fessenden, two horror legends who get nice, big roles here. It’s a fun film that, despite its clear love for retro horror, is one of the more singular genre efforts to come out this year.

Availability: Currently available on DVD, Blu-Ray, and VOD.

Honourable Mentions

Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario isn’t a horror film by any means, but it’s one of the most intense experiences I’ve had this year in a theatre. On the opposite end, The Editor and What We Do in the Shadows are absolutely hilarious (one a Giallo throwback, the other a mockumentary about vampires), but they’re comedies first and horrors second. Sion Sono’s Tag also fell into the “not horror enough” category, even though its opening act could easily fit on this list. And this year at the Toronto International Film Festival I had a fun time with anthology horror Southbound and Sean Byrne’s The Devil’s Candy, which will hopefully find their way to a screen near you in the future. Also worth mentioning: The Blaine Brothers’ Nina Forever, which should go down as one of the most demented horror films of the year.

Even in this day and digital age of YouTube and GoPro, it’s still a small miracle to successfully actualize a fully fledged feature film. And it’s triple impressive when a single person takes on the bulk of the workload behind the camera. Shane Carruth is a perfect example of this trendy precedent. His achievement with Primer (2004), and the even more critically-acclaimed follow-up Upstream Color (2013), inspired a small army of young indie filmmakers to embrace a DIY approach and take the reigns on all the most crucial filmmaking elements—directing, writing, producing, shooting, and editing—all by themselves. Perry Blackshear is one such soldier. He’s done it all and more for his feature debut, tackling the sound design as well (an element almost as vital as directing in this particular case). The result is the mysteriously moody, and fantastically-titled, They Look Like People. But, when a finished film meanders with its story and characters as much as this one does, it becomes little more than an exercise in style.

The story follows Wyatt (MacLeod Andrews), a shaggy drifter who just came out of a long relationship and randomly bumps into childhood friend Christian (Evan Dumouchel). He, too, is feeling the effects of a broken relationship, still holding on to his ex-girlfriend’s things in his tiny New York apartment. The two instantly rekindle their boys-will-be-boys dynamic, but it’s not long before Wyatt’s current state of mind is exposed as downright certifiable: he gets mysterious calls in the middle of the night, and voices speak to him of monsters who look just like people infecting human minds and preparing to wage war. Wyatt is convinced this must be true because it coincides with the supremely creepy flashbacks he has of his ex-girlfriend (presumably), and various other oddities he finds in Christian’s house, not least of which is a “rape-y” basement (as one girl in the film calls it) that becomes Wyatt’s workshop in preparing for battle.

As a project resting almost entirely on the shoulders of its writer-director, They Look Like People is an accomplished little psychological thriller that, more than anything else, shows a megaton of promise for Blackshear. There is a very keen sense of cinematic mood-setting and an intricately layered use of sound (the buzzing of flies, the creaking of floorboards, etc.) that form a tangible atmosphere enticing enough to raise the hairs on the back of most horror fans’ necks. And, major credit must go to the director for never over-indulging with the scares, keeping the really meaty stuff firmly lodged in the audience member’s imagination, and creating an emotionally stirring climax that could’ve devolved into something much tackier were it in another genre director’s hands.

Once we delve into the story and the characters, however, a number of issues arise. We never find out much about either Wyatt or Christian to truly feel their suffering, the editing feels purposefully rushed, which at times works to great comedic effect (“you got a second?” cut to: back-shaving), but mostly creates a disingenuously choppy storyline, and the pacing stretches one’s attention spans to its nadir. There’s a moment in a whisper room that’s a great example of how a scene can detach from a film’s plot and float in the film’s atmosphere, signifying nothing and serving only to show an audience what a whisper room is. With that in mind, They Look Like People is tough to recommend as a viewing experience, but as an experiment in cinematic mood placement it fires on all cylinders. Most importantly, it should serve to propel its clearly talented writer-director-producer-DP-editor-sound designer onto much bigger and better things.

It’s a giant show this week as Oscar-nominated filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer joins us to talk about The Look of Silence, his follow-up to his critically-acclaimed 2013 documentary, The Act of Killing. Also joining the show is filmmaker Perry Blackshear, talking about They Look Like People, his new film about love and nightmares, as well as sharing his Favorite Bloodless Horror Scenes with Bernard and CJ. All that, plus our Indie Picks of the Week, on this very special edition of the Way Too Indiecast.

This week’s Way Too Indiecast is sponsored by MUBI, an curated online cinema that brings its members a hand-picked selection of the best indie, foreign, and classic films. Visit www.mubi.com/waytooindie for a free 30 day trial.

Topics

• Indie Picks of the Week (1:45)
• They Look Like People (7:15)
• Favorite Bloodless Horror Scenes (18:00)
• The Look of Silence (32:55)

WTI Articles Referenced in the Podcast

Phoenix review
Christian Petzold interview

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