THE ENDLESS
The directors of the year’s smartest sci-fi movie talk time-twisting and terror...
IT’S ONE SERIOUSLY COMPLEX MOVIE
1 Stone circles. Weird skull-shaped rocks. Doomsday cults. The Endless is a film crammed with brilliantly weird elements. “We want people to be frightened by the ideas in the film,” nods director Aaron Moorhead, who co-directed with his buddy Justin Benson. The pair also star as friends who return to a remote cult on a mission that, inevitably, goes wrong, with time itself becoming an enemy. The film’s plot slowly slots together to form a sprawling, super-smart puzzle. “It’s like a Rubik’s cube or a Russian doll where there are a lot of pieces inside other pieces; when you turn a piece it starts to form a pattern,” says Moorhead.
LOVECRAFT WAS (SORT OF) AN INFLUENCE
2 “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” That famous HP Lovecraft quote opens The Endless, but Benson and Moorhead have never actually read any of the writer’s work. “Everybody we love, loved Lovecraft,” says Moorhead. “Everybody we’ve grown up with read Lovecraft, so we were inadvertently influenced by him.” If anything, though, they were more intent on crafting something that, tonally, was as clever-scary as Gore Verbinski’s The Ring. “That’s one of the scariest studio horror films ever made,” reasons Benson.
IT’S LOOSELY PART OF A LARGER UNIVERSE
3 Benson and Moorhead’s characters also appeared in their debut film, Resolution (2012), a horror mystery about a recuperating junkie. But you don’t need to have seen Resolution to watch The Endless. “It’s in no way a sequel,” says Moorhead. “It’s like serialised TV that has an episode that has nothing to do with the other episodes, but it’s still in that world. It felt kind of punk rock to make a micro-budget universe. I’ve never seen that before.” Adds Benson: “If someone has seen Resolution, there’s about three billion small connections, like oddly perfect continuity.”
FEAR IS A BIG FACTOR
4 “My girlfriend’s an experimental fear doctor,” says Moorhead, hinting that he got a few tips about how to ensure audiences were left squirming by some of the crazier things The Endless serves up. “We’re always trying to look at things that are worse than hell, or worse than death. How do you land on worse than death?” he muses. Benson jumps in: “As humans, we’re like, ‘You know what’s worse than death? Never dying.’ That’s freaking weird!” The concept of never dying is one thread in The Endless, and the film does some pretty hellish stuff with time loops that’ll have you sweating into the nail-shredding climax.
THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING
5 The pair haven’t ruled out more stories set in this universe, but for now Moorhead is in production on his next film, Beast, which is loosely based around the true story of British magician Aleister Crowley. And the directors at one point pitched to helm the Hellraiser remake. “That’s one of those franchises where if somebody had a big budget with all of those elements, it would be so cool!” says Moorhead. “We pitched a vision of our remake and it was soundly rejected. They said it was too weird. Too weird for Hellraiser!” With The Endless already on the road to becoming a cult hit, we wouldn’t be surprised if Clive Barker came calling...
The Endless is in cinemas from 29 June.