DIGGING DEEP
In Irish horror The Hole In The Ground, evil comes home. Director Lee Cronin tells all...
“i wanted this film to feel a little bit like a whisper,” director Lee Cronin tells Red Alert of his feature debut, The Hole In The Ground. “It hits you in the back of your neck or crawls into your ear; it unnerves you in that way, rather than using screaming and shouting and banging drums.”
It’s an apt description of the director’s creepy, low-key, folklore-inspired horror story, which follows young mother Sarah O’Neill (Seána Kerslake) as she relocates with her son Chris (James Quinn Markey) to a small Irish town. Haunted by an abusive relationship, Sarah stumbles across a giant sinkhole in the forest, resulting in a few run-ins with a local woman who warns her that her son is no longer who she thinks he is.
A self-confessed horror fan, Cronin wanted to craft a film steeped in Irish culture – as well as using school yard murder ballads like “The Rattlin Bog” and “Weela Weela Walya”, his film also toys with the age-old changeling mythology. “The changeling mythology is something very primal,” he says. “I’ve taken the idea of a changeling and made it my own story, which is how a lot of Irish tales worked.”
More than that, though, The Hole In The Ground plays on fears very much rooted in reality. “I’m not a parent,” Cronin says, “but to bring a kid into the world, you don’t know who they’re going to grow up to be. They could be a sociopath or they could be a rocket scientist!” That’s why, he says, the sinkhole at the film’s dark heart becomes representative of the relationship between Sarah and her son. “I was working on this relationship between them, this single parent life, the trauma that can come with that,” he explains. “I thought it was like staring at a big giant hole in the ground; you don’t know what’s at the bottom.”
The Hole In The Ground is out on 1 March.