Plumbing the horrors that lie within
What comes at night? ‘Krisha’ director probes the darkness within good people.
He’s earned critical raves and the backing of the hottest upstart distributor in town, but lately, “Krisha” filmmaker Trey Edward Shults has been plagued by nightmares over the release of his new movie, “It Comes at Night.”
“At night is when my brain gets active. It’s when my insecurities and my fears come, and I’m in my own head,” Shults, 28, says in a Hollywood mixing studio days before A24 opened his sophomore feature. “Night,” an unflinching piece of postapocalyptic psychological horror, drew so-so returns at the box office but garnered significantly better reviews than its opening weekend rival, Universal’s bland “Mummy” reboot.
“I see people expecting a monster movie and hating it,” Shults shrugs with a halfsmile, quoting moviegoers who might come in expecting fanged creatures in the woods, a horde of zombies or some terror-inducing killer in the shadows. “‘What comes at night? Where’s the monster? ’”
The fear that drives “It Comes at Night” is far deeper and more insidious than mere monsters. On paper, it reads as horror catnip, perhaps the antithesis of a domestic drama like Shults’ debut film, “Krisha”: After a mysterious viral outbreak turns humanity against itself, a trio of outbreak survivors (led by shotgun-toting papa Joel Edgerton) warily welcome strangers into their remote homestead in the woods.
Like “Krisha,” the awardwinning $30,000 indie debut that starred Shults’ own aunt Krisha Fairchild as a black sheep home for the holidays, “It Comes at Night” is a terrifying take on family tensions pushed to the brink. Edgerton, Christopher Abbott, Carmen Ejogo, Riley Keough and newcomer Kelvin Harrison Jr. star in the claustrophobic thriller, a horror movie not about the evils that lurk outside but those that lie within.
Shults’ pictures have more in common than you might think. Both share intensely personal ties to the filmmaker’s own life, a probing preoccupation with filial trauma and guilt and the visceral sensibility he conveys using film to explore difficult emotional terrain.
Shults speaks in a low baritone, engaging and open, easy with a laugh despite the heavy subject matter. His mother and stepfather are both therapists, he says. It’s probably why the two movies he’s made so far feel like cinema as therapy.
“It Comes at Night” opens on Ejogo’s Sarah bidding a tearful goodbye to her infected father, whose body is racked with symptoms of the sickness that’s annihilated the outside world.
The scene was inspired by a real moment Shults had with his biological dad, from whom he was estranged for a decade. “A lot of our relationship went into ‘Krisha,’ because he battled with addiction. His life was good for a while, but then it went off the rails, and I felt I had to cut off our relationship.”
He visited his father as he was dying of pancreatic cancer, a moment Shults calls one of his most traumatic experiences. “He was so full of regret for everything that he did, and I was trying to help him find peace,” he says. “It was the closest I had ever come to death.”
“It Comes at Night” was born of processing that trauma. “It started with that opening scene, where she’s talking to her dad — that’s what I was saying to mine. It came down to the word ‘regret,’ the regret he felt. I think regret is a huge part of this movie.”
Shults searches to explain the headspace he was in when he wrote “It Comes at Night,” going from his father’s death to reading books on genocide and human behavior, mulling humankind’s disposition toward tribalism and violent self-defense.
Between being kicked out of flight attendant school and picking up a dream job working for filmmaker Terrence Malick, he’d also done work for a family member he described as a survivalist “prepper,” helping reinforce the relative’s home in the event of unforeseeable calamity.
Bits of this found their way into “Night,” in how Sarah’s 17-year-old son Travis (Harrison), navigating his own burgeoning curiosities, hopes and desires, and quietly wrestles with the decisions his parents make in the name of protecting their own. Shults admits there’s a lot of him in Travis and his own stepfather in Edgerton’s Paul.
“There are worse things than death,” he says. “Worse is losing your humanity, and that is 100% the struggle I had with my stepdad. He’s told me, ‘I’m not wired like your mom; I’ll do whatever I have to do for my family.’ I battled with myself over if he was crazy or not. What Joel says in the movie — ‘You can’t trust anybody but family’ — he’s said to me my whole life.”
His first draft spilled out in three days. Shortly after, he rewrote and then finally shot the “Krisha” feature he’d been trying to make for years, keeping the script for “It Comes at Night” in his back pocket. “Krisha” premiered at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas, in 2015 and A24, the company behind “Moonlight” and “Ex Machina,” acquired the movie and signed on to make what Shults had next.
“It Comes at Night” is a major leap for Shults, who found himself working with seasoned producers, a bigger crew, a budget just under $5 million and actors he wasn’t related to.
Edgerton had just finished “Loving” when he signed on to star and executive produce, enticed by “Krisha.” “It’s masterful in that it was able to elicit such terror out of a kitchen-sink drama,” he says by phone. “He could turn someone cooking a turkey into a sequence that is cinematically dreadful.”
A slow-building anxiety creeps through “It Comes at Night” in subtle moments between actors and haunting work by “Krisha” cinematographer Drew Daniels.
Shults knows what he wants, his producers say. And they hope viewers find relevance in the film’s underlying parallels to today’s social climate.
Producers David Kaplan (“It Follows”) and Andrea Roa (“Tramps”) remember being struck by that relevance while watching an early cut the day after the presidential election. “We both found it a bit cathartic, to watch the movie under those conditions,” said Kaplan. “It is about people making decisions under duress, and making decisions from a place of fear, and how that can spiral out of control.”
Edgerton points to parallels between the characters’ desperate trajectory and America’s immigration policies.
“It feels like this microcosm of a refugee story,” he says. “Here you have a house that could represent a country, and a family that could represent the people that live in that country, questioning whether to invite other people in. We are the family that holds the keys.”
Shults can’t deny there’s an unintentional timeliness to the streak of isolationist paranoia that runs through the film, which he wrote before the election, when talk of Donald Trump’s proposed border wall dominated headlines.
“I thought he was a joke, that he wasn’t going to win,” Shults shakes his head. “It was weird to be working on the movie and editing the movie and see it reflect things that were happening in the world.”