Vertigo Releasing
The Wretched arrived on Digital HD on 8th May and tells the haunting tale of a teenage boy who realises that there’s something not quite right with his next-door neighbours. For some reason they suddenly forget all about the children that they have – not your everyday occurrence. As the boy begins to investigate the mystery he finds himself on the hunt of a mythological being know as The Wretch. With echoes of Fright Night and feelings of an early Amblin movie, The Wretched offers viewers an almost nostalgic horror story. It’s the type of film that we don’t see all that much anymore, which is a shame, because as The Wretched proves, they can be really rather good.
It’s written and directed by brothers Brett and Drew Pierce, whose father helped out with the practical effects for that little know horror film The Evil Dead. Growing up in that environment obviously sparked something in the pair and The Wretched marks their second whirl at a feature film. The film is certainly a family affair with Drew placing one of his own children in the role of stolen baby. We met the pair fleetingly at last year’s FrightFest, but took time out from quarantining to catch up with us via phone to discuss the project.
Your dad worked on The Evil Dead, is that where the love of movies began for you both?
BRETT PIERCE: Yeah. I mean we just grew up around him and Sam Raimi and those guys. They went and shot the movie in Tennessee, and they finished it and they realised that the movie didn’t have a good kaboom ending. So they got in league with my dad and buried themselves in my mom’s basement in our house in Detroit, and came up with this big meltdown sequence to give the movie a big ending. So we were around them when I was about two and Drew was a newborn.
DREW PIERCE: But it’s also just the ripple effect because it was such a successful movie. Growing up with our dad and we watched Sam Raimi just blow up and get famous, make Darkman and then move into the Spider-man franchise. Our entire life they were kinda heroes. It made us realise that we could make movies. In our minds they had kind of made it in our back yard so we thought you just make movies by getting your friends together.
It’s definitely where it started, but it was also because our dad – the real job wasn’t doing special effects – the real job for him was transferring movie to VHS tape back in the eighties. He actually transferred the original Star Wars movies for the first time, which was cool. What was really cool about it, we were these very middle-class kids living in Detroit, but we got every VHS tape in the world. We just lived and breathed movies. We watched movies over and over again because we always had like two hundred VHS tapes.
BRETT: We essentially had our own Netflix.
Vertigo Releasing
The Wretched is tonally different to your previous film Deadheads, did you always want to switch things up?
BRETT: We love horror movies. There’s just something so cool about the genre, you can do so many things with it. We always wanted to make a really dark scary genre movie. That was always our goal. I think we grew up with Alien and The Thing and a lot of these really scary claustrophobic horror movies and wanted to emulate that. I think the reason why we made Deadheads first was it was sort of a response to the fact that we had so little money and resources to work with. In a weird way we did the Kevin Smith thing and sort of made fun of the subject matter because we knew we couldn’t really honour it and do it justice at the time. We just didn’t have the capability.
DREW: Out here, when you make a film, everyone always wants you to make a sequel, or another movie in the same space the next time. But as the filmmaker that made it, as soon as you make that movie, you’re hungering to make something else. We always wanted to make just a horror film. With Deadheads we got our silly fun road-trip comedy out of our system, but we were hungering to do this sort of thing.
From all the supernatural beings, what made you want to tackle a witch story?
DREW: They’re so interesting and they haven’t been done to death. We were so excited about the idea that the witch doesn’t really have its own set of rules. We’ve lived through the last fifteen / twenty years where we’ve figured out every possible rule you can have for a zombies and vampires. Brett and I love witch mythology, but when we started thinking about what the hard and fast rules for witches are, we realised there weren’t any. We just got really excited trying to figure out those rules. We went and started looking at witch mythology…
BRETT: …We combined a couple of rules from a couple of different witches, from Black Annis to The Boo Hag, and a few others and created a witch from all these mythologies. We created a set of rules that we wanted to play by that in a lot of ways, helped create a lot of drama and exciting sequences for the film. It was just exciting to be, ‘hey, there isn’t a lot of rules, we get to kind of invent them, but work within these mythologies’.
DREW: I think also, we just love our mother so much. We’re total mama’s boys, and there’s nothing scarier than your mother being taken over and not being the loving, nurturing figure.
BRETT: Yeah moms as the villain freaks us out.
The Wretch has the ability to wipe people from other people’s memories, which is a pretty horrific feat. Did that come from the lore or was that something you added?
BRETT: That was actually an invention that Drew came up with. We had actually already written the script and were feeling good about it, and late in the game during a draft Drew was, ‘hey I got this other idea.’ At first I was a little annoyed because that meant we needed to re-write the script from the beginning again, but it was such a good idea that we couldn’t pass up on it.
DREW: We just asked ourselves what would the best power? If a witch wanted to get away with eating children and nobody actually having any idea that it’s going on – what is the universal power. We didn’t want to make them so magical that they could do anything, so we were like, ‘okay, she can make the parents forget that they ever had children in the first place.’ That would be so dangerous and would explain why witches could still manifest and work today.
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I like how the film has a very early Amblin feel, then there’s some elements of Fright Night and The Lost Boys albeit played in a more serious way. What films inspired and influenced you?
BRETT: Those are honestly a lot of them. It’s very easy to mark exactly what you just said as what Drew and I grew up on. You’re always influenced by the things that you grew up on. It was definitely Fright Night, Rear Window, The Thing, Alien. The original Halloween actually a lot in the photography, for the director of photography and us, was a big example of how we wanted day time and night time stuff to look. We shot the movie on anamorphic lens just because we think they’re beautiful, but ananmorphic’s were used a lot back then so it automatically creates this nostalgic vibe through the way that we shot. But we just love it because it just feels so cinematic and wide and beautiful.
For the practical effects that came from dad always drilling down our throats, practical is the way to do it. We’re obviously inspired by The Evil Dead and The Thing and Fright Night because if you can do it in camera, it’s so much better. It looks beautiful. People dig it. The actors dig it, because they can react to it. It’s a weird thing, we kind of almost wanted to try to make – I hate to say old-fashioned – but an old-fashioned horror movie where we got our hands dirty.
The poster and the creature design are so striking, how did you guys come up with the idea?
BRETT: A lot of that credit is owed to our special effects artist Erik Porn who did an amazing job, but it’s also the design. Drew is a fine artist in his own right, he does a lot of character design and storyboard work for major films and studios. So Drew did a bunch of drawings and designs of The Wretch before we even shot the film, and worked really closely in line with the guy who was doing the sculpts, Erik Porn, who was actually making the witch suit. Drew had all these beautiful designs that Erik modelled them off of. She looks very similar to a lot of Drew’s original designs.
Erik would sculpt the face, and different parts of the witches body, and send us pictures. It was amazing because Drew would take those pictures, and would just put them in the computer and draw over them, like shave down the face a little bit here, make the nose flatter, bring in her rib cage a little bit to make her feel a little more feminine and less masculine. It was a real back and forth.
DREW: A really cool collaboration.
BRETT: Yeah a collaboration between Drew’s designs and working with Erik Porn. And the international poster is one that Drew made. We actually just took the lead actress who plays The Wretch as the mother Sarah, Azie Tesfai, and we went and shot pictures in our friend’s tiny little apartment down the street. Then Drew put together the poster with her with the mask on the back of her head. I’m lucky to have Drew because I am a terrible artist.
They say two heads are better than one, how is it working together?
DREW: It’s great. We’re so similar, but we also have totally different strengths and weaknesses. It’s just this great balance. Brett’s a morning person, and I’m a total night owl. When you’re shooting a horror movie it’s so great to have that. You have all these day scenes, but also so many long nights. More than anything because it’s just so hard making movies, so just having someone else, having a duplicate of yourself, that’s on the same page with you, makes it so much easier. We work in our own little bubble for so long before we make the movie. We storyboard the whole movie out, we talk the script to death, we work through the designs of the creature. We just really work through getting the movie ready so much before we shoot that, when we’re on set, it doesn’t really matter which one of us you talk to, we’re both on the same page and are both so familiar with what we want to pull off that there’s really no argument or confusion. Honestly it’s so nice. I don’t know how other people make films by themselves without going absolutely insane.
There’s another saying that goes, never work with children or animals, you used both – how much of a challenge did this pose? I’m guessing the fact that you had one of your actual children in it raised the stakes a little.
DREW: Yeah it’s challenging because children and animals are unpredictable. You have no idea what they’re going to do and there’s no real way to coax them through it. Sometimes you’re just stuck hoping they do what you want them to do. So there’s that whole element, but then there’s the whole timing thing which is why they say never work with children because there’s restrictions in terms of how long you can shoot with them and when you can.
BRETT: This especially applies to horror movies because you have night shoots. It’s very hard to have kids on those.
DREW: So it really just turns into this logistical tricky thing to work out. We just thought it was is vital to the script – I mean we’re making a witch movie – we need kids!
BRETT: There’s so many instances where we shot whole scenes with the kids out of order so that we could just get them out of there in time. Then we would shoot the whole scene with any of the adults and try to pretend the kids were there. So we’d design the scene around getting all the shots with the kids appearing and then get all the shots with the adults when the kids weren’t there. So it was tricky. Then with animals…honestly the one thing when you go into making a movie you get all excited and think, ‘yeah we got kids in the movie, it’ll be okay. We’ve got a raccoon, it’ll all work out fine,’ then later you think maybe I should have made this a little easier on myself and just cut the raccoon at least, but (laughs) we were just too excited at the beginning to do that.
Now there’s a scene involving a baby monitor that is sure to freak out a lot of parents, are you purposefully trying to traumatise parents with that?
DREW: Also I was a new dad right when we writing and developing that scene. I think it just freaked me out. The idea that you don’t really know what’s going on in there. You’re baby looks creepy as Hell when he’s rolling around with his white eyes, just staring back at you. It’s just eerie in general so we knew we had to put it into the movie.
BRETT: It was also the weirdest scene to shoot. That was at night, the sun had just gone down and we had thirty-five / forty crew members in one of the houses that we were shooting in. We had to lull the baby – Drew’s son, my nephew – to sleep. Sneak him into the house with all the lights turned off and the crew trying to be super quiet so we don’t wake up the baby. Put him in the shot (laughs) and then film the scene. There’s just this house full of crew and everybody’s just trying to be dead silent and not wake the baby during the scene.
Having a little one myself I know that not waking a baby is no small feat. But that scene just reiterated my aversion to baby monitors, it all started with that scene in Insidious where Rose Byrne hears the noise over the monitor…
DREW: And she races upstairs and he’s standing over the crib. That scene is so terrifying.
BRETT: It’s so creepy.
DREW: There’s a little gag in our movie where she basically walks up to the door because she hears her baby crying. You already know that there’s a creature in the house somewhere, and the baby stops crying. We love the idea that she goes back to sleep. Every parent’s done that a thousand times, but here you’re like, ‘did the thing just eat the baby?’ The baby stopped crying, but why did it stop crying?!
BRETT: I’m just excited for Drew’s little boy to get older so he can tell his friends ‘my dad put me in movie where I get eaten by a witch’ (laughs).
It’ll be like the kid from Labyrinth, who grew up saying ‘I was the kid who was taken by the Goblin King.’
DREW: Well it’s funny because the little guy is so aware of the horror movie. He always points at the poster and says ‘poster, scary. I’m in that movie.’ (laughs).
Both Deadheads and The Wretched had great festival runs, how important would you say festivals are to indie filmmakers?
DREW: I mean they’re vital. For indie film it’s almost always your theatrical. You get to travel around with the movie, all over the world and show it to people. It’s such a learning experience. I don’t know if people realise, but for filmmakers every time you show it to an audience you’re learning about the decisions you made and you never really know until you show it to a big audience how people are going to digest it and how they’re going to feel emotionally. You learn so much about every shot, every edit you ever made when you show it to somebody.
BRETT: We also live in a world where theatrical releases for independent film is just shrinking all the time. So a lot of times your chance to see your movie in a theatre with the audience, your only chance is gonna be at festivals like FrightFest. Outside of the benefit of helping get it distributed, it’s the only real validation that a lot of filmmakers get when they finish a film.
Vertigo Releasing
Obviously at the minute it must be really tough for people because everything is cancelled.
BRETT: I feel so bad for everybody. I hope in a weird way that it draws attention to them that they didn’t get seen and that more people seek them out. To work so hard, for a lot of these things; we worked on this for three – five years. A lot of people are the same and to have that taken away from you, and I know that there are worse problems to have – they could be sick or something like that- it’s still heart-breaking.
DREW: For most indie films it’s at least a two to three years process to get to the festival. You spend all that time writing, and finding money, then producing and shooting and post. It’s so exhausting and then trying to get into a festival…so for these people that have killed themselves for three years and to get into SXSW or one of the big festivals and then not – it’s kind of the point where you finally feel, ‘alright we did it guys! We made it!’ because there’s things that want to dead end your movie every step along the way. Every couple days of shooting you think you’re done. You think something has dead ended your shoot. So to get through that and get through post and then still have something like Covid just destroy your movie.
BRETT: I think it’s just from Drew and I making our own movies, we’ve always, even pre-this, been super supportive of indie movies. Rent movies on VOD of independent films because they’re not going to get the push to theatres. There’s a lot of amazing great stuff in the theatres, but you’re not getting a good variety if you’re not checking out what everyone that’s trying to make it is putting together. That’s what keeps us all fresh. I just watched a friend of mine’s movie, Bliss, recently, by my friend Joe Begos, and man, I wouldn’t be able to make that movie, but he inspired the Hell out of me because it’s so him and unique. I needed to see that movie because it helps keep me creative.
I read that you’ve been working on a werewolf movie – how’s that going?
BRETT: We’re working on it kinda all the time. It’s actually a script that we wanted to do before The Wretched, but we realised we’d need more of a budget if we were going to try and do a full-on practical werewolf. It’s a new take on the werewolf that we haven’t seen anywhere else before that is just something that we’ve been dying to do for a long time. Every time we talk to people that we pitch it to they’re afraid to do it because they know a practical effects werewolf is very difficult. But that’s almost exactly why we want to do it. We just want to prove it can be done and it can be really cool.
The Wretched is releasing in the midst of lockdown in the UK, why should people opt for it as their isolation viewing?
BRETT: Drew and I went into making The Wretched because we wanted to make a roller-coaster of a ride of horror. Something that’s exciting and the stakes are always changing. We see so many horror films that are just, the first scene there’s a creepy ghost in the house and guess what? By the end of the movie all you learn is there was a creepy ghost and we got it to go away. So we wanted to build as much story and excitement and progression of the story. You’ll get a fun roller-coaster ride with a bunch of occult, witchy exciting, weird, creepy mythology. We’re just hoping that we’re a good escape for right now. Despite the dark subject matter, it’s a fun movie. So take a break and just enjoy a good old popcorn movie one night.
The Wretched is released on digital on 8th May courtesy of Vertigo Releasing, and will be available on the following platforms: Apple TV, Amazon, Sky Store, Virgin, Google Play, Playstation Store, Microsoft.
