BREAKING APART STEREOTYPES
Musician pens horror film with a complex character
As with most people who watch films, there have always been certain cliches that bothered Elizabeth Lowell Boland.
Some are more specific than others. As a singer-songwriter and musician who performs under the name Lowell, she admits there is “nothing more painful than watching a film about musicians.” Few get it right.
But she also has broader issues with how women are generally portrayed in movies, particularly horror movies.
“There seem to be two avenues for a woman,” says the Calgary native, in an interview with Postmedia from Los Angeles. “You can be weak and boring and stupid or you can be strong, the typical Wonder Woman type. But usually there was not much more than that.”
Lowell had no intention of falling into any of these traps when penning her first screenplay. Bloodthirsty, which she co-wrote with her mother Wendy Hill-tout, is a werewolf tale with a conflicted female musician as its protagonist. Grey (played by Lauren Beatty) is an indie singer-songwriter with a troubled past who is prone to vivid nightmares and the odd hallucination. She is also struggling to follow up a successful debut album and is suffering from writer's block. So she enlists the help of an acclaimed but enigmatic producer named Vaughn (Greg Bryk). Grey and her girlfriend Charlie (Katharine King So) decamp to the creepy home studio in the woods where Vaughn has been living as a recluse for years. As the producer's hold over Grey becomes increasingly intense, she also starts to get strange blood cravings in the night, which are particularly disturbing for the vegan singer-songwriter.
“I wanted to make this really complex character,” Lowell says. “We wanted (Grey) to be flawed. We wanted her to be strong, weak, conflicted — all these things that I think only a woman could really understand or be willing to write. I did tell myself that if I was going to write a movie, I was going to try and correct some of the stuff that bothers me as an audience member. Especially in the horror genre, which is rooted in misogyny. I thought what could be more fun than doing the exact opposite.”
Filmed in Edmonton, Bloodthirsty is a slow-burning and subtle horror film that, despite its title, relies more on atmosphere and smouldering tension than gore and shock. In fact, Lowell sees it primarily as a character study. As such, it was important to her that the characters seem authentic. As a songwriter and musician who has worked with Madison Beer, Demi Lovato, Jojo, Hailee Steinfeld and fellow Calgarian Tate Mcrae, it was also important that the music sounded authentic. Lowell is releasing the four-song EP, Bloodthirsty: Music from the Motion Picture, on April 23 on Arts and Crafts. It's the same day the film is available on-demand and the same day it starts streaming as part of the Calgary Underground Film Festival. Most of the tracks can be heard in some form or another in the film as Grey struggles with writer's block. Songs such as the title track, Greta's Song (I Love You to Death) and God is a Fascist are brooding, haunting and perfectly believable as material meant to come from an artist looking to break through a sophomore slump with a deeply personal new sound. The film has received two Canadian Screen Award nominations for its music: a nod for original score for composer Michelle Osis and Lowell and one for original song for Grey Singing in Auditorium, which was written by Lowell, Evan Bogart and Justin Gray.
Lowell wrote the songs specifically for the film. Given that much of her work these days is writing with or for other artists, it wasn't much of a stretch for her to write while channelling Grey. Besides, she co-created the character as a partial reflection of herself as a young indie artist.
The EP is the first music she has released under her own name since her own sophomore record, 2018's Lone Wolf. It was a few years before that release when Lowell and her mother, a veteran of the Alberta film industry and a producer of the film, began penning the screenplay as a writing exercise. At the time, Lowell was struggling with her own writer's block after her successful 2014 debut, We Loved Her Dearly.
“I don't think either of us realized that it would be as big as it ended up being,” she says about the screenplay. “We started with a small treatment for the script and then got a little bit of funding for it and then wrote a little bit more and then got more funding. Next thing we knew, we got not a big budget but enough to make a feature. I started writing the music alongside writing the script. The music was directly related to this lead character. So the writing really needed to be paralleled. Although it's a horror film, it's also a character study. Grey was growing throughout the film and transforming metaphorically and literally. So while I was writing the script I had to also reflect that growth in the music.”
Initially, Lowell had considered making Bloodthirsty her directing debut as well, but eventually found she was too busy with her music career to commit. Instead, Bloodthirsty was directed by Amelia Moses, who became part of the largely female creative team that includes Lowell, Hill-tout, Beatty and Osis.
A female creative team and strong female characters are just some of the feminist attributes of the film. Lowell said she also wanted to incorporate her own experiences in the music industry, with Vaughn becoming a magnified metaphor for some of the predatory men she met as an aspiring singer-songwriter. She left Calgary at 18 and moved to Toronto, initially to go to university but also to pursue a music career. Not long after arriving in Toronto, she began working at a strip club under the name Sara V. She did it for the money and quit after a year, pouring her earnings into her 2014 debut EP that she called I Killed Sara V. Solid tunes and this interesting backstory attracted a lot of attention. Even before her full-length debut, We Loved Her Dearly, was released later that year Lowell was featured as an up-and-coming star in Rolling Stone magazine.
While she has largely pivoted to writing behind-the-scenes, Lowell plans on releasing her own fulllength album later in the year. But the fact that her collaborations as a songwriter have mostly been with or for young female artists is no accident.
“I had some really awkward experiences in the studio when I was very young,” she says. “Generally, I was being thrown into rooms on a daily basis with these 30, 40-yearold men and talking to them about my first love and all these vulnerable topics. I didn't know it at the time, the more I think about it now it would have been nice to have a woman in the room to be that gatekeeper and to be my editor instead of someone who doesn't quite speak to what I am speaking to.”
It might be surprising to discover what Lauren Beatty thinks is one of the most pivotal moments in the horror film Bloodthirsty.
As the lead actress in a werewolf movie, one might assume Beatty would choose a climactic transformation scene, for instance, or perhaps the moment where her character first succumbs to bloodlust.
But the Toronto-based actress actually thinks the heart of the film is a much quieter passage.
Beatty plays Grey, a vegan indie rocker with a wolfish name who goes to a mysterious producer's creepy mansion to record her second album only to discover that her lifelong struggles with nightmares and hallucinations and sudden onset of carnivorous cravings may be linked to something deeply elemental in her being.
Greg Byrk plays Vaughn, a reclusive but much-sought-after producer who maintains a place of esteem in the business despite questions about his involvement in the death of another young performer years earlier. Vaughn's supernatural predatory habits make him a larger-than-life symbol of real-life unsavoury male figures who dominate the music industry. He seems to have a mysterious hold over Grey. But when the record is done and he suggests she stay at the house with him indefinitely, she rejects him.
“I say to him `I can go now, the album is done,'” says Beatty. “That, to me, is her saying to herself and also out loud to Vaughn `I don't need you.' There's this assumption that women need men or women need some kind of powerful man behind them to succeed. She is telling him at that moment `I don't need that. I know who I am. I've found my voice. I don't really need you anymore.' I think that is a pretty powerful scene.”
Yes, Bloodthirsty is a horror film. But it's a subtle horror film that is deepened by undercurrents of feminism, empowerment and the exploration of power. Montreal-based director Amelia Moses leads the female-dominated creative team behind the film. That includes writers Lowell, a Calgary native and acclaimed singer-songwriter making her screenwriting debut, and Wendy Hill-tout, a veteran producer and director in the Alberta film industry who also happens to be Lowell's mother.
Bloodthirsty is Moses's sophomore film. Her debut, Bleed with Me, is also due out this year and is a unique take on the isolated-cabin-in-the-woods subgenre, another trusty horror premise ripe for subversion. For Beatty, who also starred in Moses's debut, Bloodthirsty checked off a number of boxes that she looks for in a role. As a member of the LGTBQ2S+ community, Beatty said she is always eager to find projects where a same-sex couple (Katharine King So plays Grey's girlfriend, Charlie) is presented as normal rather than the centre of a traumatic coming-out tale. But mostly, Beatty says she loved the fact that this particular monster film was so human.
“Part of it was the practical effects of the werewolf, none of it was done with CGI,” Beatty says. “The makeup that you see is what we had on. That was partially due to budget, obviously. But, for Amelia, there was a big appeal in seeing the monster and human exist at the same time. I would go to the bathroom when I had this makeup on and I would look at myself in the mirror and I could recognize myself. It was my face built out into this monster. There is something really special that happens when you can see the human emotions through the werewolf makeup. There was a bit more of subtlety to it.”
Still, not everything was subtle. The team behind Bloodthirsty, which also includes Calgary-based filmmaker and horror-flick veteran Michael Peterson as producer, certainly lucked out with the setting. Filmed outside of Edmonton, most of the action takes place in a mansion on the edge of the woods that apparently required very little embellishment to transform into a creepy horror-film backdrop.
But Moses also avoided other tropes. There is very little gore and very few bumps-in-the-night scares. Audiences will never see a full moon. Nobody gets bitten by a wolf.
It all plays into Lowell's initial idea for the screenplay, which was loosely based on her own experiences as a young female musician dealing with things like predatory men and a sophomore slump.
“It's funny when people say `it's a horror film, but also a character study,'” Moses says. “Because, to me, those things are intertwined completely. Obviously, not every horror film is going to be looking at internal, emotional struggle. But I think it's the perfect vehicle for that because the horror to me is just an extension of the character arc.”
Moses has now completed two horror films and says her approach is to maintain an unsettling tone throughout rather than rely on sudden jolts.
“For me, it's the slow build. Creating the atmosphere and the tension and the feeling and the mood is my priority. I really like horror films where it just feels really uncomfortable. It's not a bright scene where everything (is) OK and now it's a dark scene where everything is scary. You always feel a little bit off and a little bit at odds with what's going on.”