Arrow Video FrightFest’s annual August event may have moved online this year, but that hasn’t stopped the four horsemen of horror from selecting another belting line-up. One film that has already caught our attention is The Honeymoon Phase. Written and directed by first-time feature film-maker, Phillip G. Carroll Jr., the film follows the destruction of a young couple’s relationship after signing up to take part in a relationship study. The study aims to find a way to capture that lovey-dovey ‘honeymoon’ part of a relationship, and make it last forever. Things start well enough for Tom and Eve, they have their own secluded cabin – one rule of the experiment is that they have to isolate from the world for thirty days – and have a magical pod in the kitchen that sends in whatever they want to eat. Unfortunately the bliss doesn’t last long though as Eve becomes convinced that Tom isn’t quite himself; as cabin fever sets in she finds herself tormented at the hands of her lover…or is she merely letting her paranoia get the better of her?
Starring Carroll’s actual wife, Chloe Carroll, as Eve, The Honeymoon Phase is a wondrous blend of science-fiction, psychological thriller, and horror. As we were pretty taken with the film after watching it, we insisted on a chat with the mind behind it, and luckily for us, Carroll obliged. In the following interview we talk about the genesis of the idea, hidden Easter eggs in the film, and how the current locked down climate has led to the film taking on a whole new meaning.
How did you get into film-making?
When I was a kid, my favourite movie was Jurassic Park. For my tenth Birthday, a family friend of ours gave me a special edition VHS copy of Jurassic Park. So it was two tapes. The first one was the movie. The second tape was behind-the-scenes making of the film. It was pretty cool, I didn’t even know that they did stuff like that back then. Thinking back on it, it must have been a lot of money to ship those VHS’, they were giant! I watched the behind-the-scenes as a kid and was blown away that there was this whole other world behind the making of the movie. I asked my dad if I could use his video camera; I was about ten at the time. It was during the Olympics of 2002, I think that was Salt Lake City…it’s weird, certain things I remember and that I remember very clearly. We borrowed the camera, me and my brother, and we recreated some scenes from Jurassic Park with Lego. In the behind-the-scenes footage of Jurassic Park, they showed some of their stop-motion animation test before they decided they were going to full CG dinosaurs. So I got see how they did that, so we did stop motion with our Lego.
From there I just got the bug from seeing how my family reacted to it. Pretty much every family party then after… we would premiere a new short film that we did. With me and my brother and my cousin. It was just the coolest thing in the world making something that could emotionally impact people. Back then it was making them laugh. Then as you grow, you figure out that you can also emotionally move people, then that became a thing. When I was in eighth grade I did a whole little retrospective video of us growing up, to present to my class at the end. It’s funny to say as a creative person you’re like, ‘oh I love to make people cry’, that probably sounds so screwed up to anybody else (laughs), but to be able to do that to emotionally move somebody that was another moment where it was, ‘oh my gosh, these kids that I grew up with are crying over this video that I made.’ It’s such a cool feeling to be able to emotionally move somebody.
So where did the idea for The Honeymoon Phase come from?
My wife, Chloe (Carroll) and I, she plays Eve in the film, we got married in March of 2016 and really wanted our first feature film be a collaboration together. Both from her as an actress, and me as a writer and director. We were trying to come up with a concept that we could both be passionate about. Even though we are married and we are creative partners a lot of times, we do have very different interests too. This idea of a sci-fi thriller seemed like it was a perfect marriage of a lot of our interests. We had drawn a Venn diagram and put down some different ideas of things that interested us and we were laying in bed one night talking about, ‘okay, so we like the idea of doing a film about an experiment with a young couple, since we’re a young couple. What would that experiment be on?’ A lot of people try to explore their deepest fears when they go out to make a horror type film, and being newlyweds, I think our deepest fear was, ‘oh my God, did we marry the right person? Is this person going to change? Do I really know who they are?’ We thought it would be a really cool, probably screwed up thing (laughs), to explore in a film as a newly-wed couple.
You get some brilliant performances out of your cast. Given your connection to Chloe, did that help having that trust there with the performance?
Definitely. For anybody that’s seen the film, Chloe and Jim (Schubin) both make themselves so vulnerable in every way imaginable. So having that previous trust already built with Chloe, was very helpful. It was almost like our marriage was growing as we were growing this film at the same time. I’m sure there were some apprehensions…like for instance – I won’t say what it is in terms of spoilers – but there’s a scene we call the curling iron scene. Chloe was involved in every draft of the script and she read that the first time and was like, ‘no, absolutely not! This is crazy, I don’t want to do this.’ We sat down and we talked about it and eventually we both agreed it was so important as a visual metaphor for what was happening in Eve’s own inner life at that time. There had to be a lot of trust built up for that, among other things. But yeah, that connection gave Chloe and I a jump-start to building that actor/director relationship being married.
One of the big elements is the experiment, which needs this new couple to isolate together for thirty days. When you made the film, that wasn’t something you would ever have guessed your audience would actually be doing themselves…
Yeah that was unbelievable with the timing; the unfortunate situation that we’re all facing in the world right now with trying beat this Coronavirus. We had no inclination that we would all be facing that. It’s been interesting to see a lot of the trailer uploads from websites are calling it an isolation horror movie to, I guess, capitalise on the fact that we’re all isolating right now. It’s been interesting. Films take on a life of their own after you make them and I guess that’s just the world that we’re living in right now where this outside meaning is going to be applied to it. It’s fascinating to see how people react to it, especially now, and we’re so excited for the US release and then the screening at FrightFest to see what audiences think and what meanings they do apply to it now having lived Tom and Eve through isolation the last few months.
There are definitely some moments that will hit close to home for some people.
I think what’ll be interesting…when we wrote the film we always had in mind that it was an allegory for domestic abuse stories. With Tom and Eve it was something that we wanted to explore, and with everybody being in isolation at the minute, that’s one of the things unfortunately brought to light more. People are cooped up in their houses and situations like that are happening more and more. I’m not sure if that’s going to become more of a forefront theme in the movie or not when it comes out, but it was something that, when we were writing it, it was in the back of our minds. Without spoiling it, Tom’s possession of Eve, and the violence that stems from that.
It would make a great double-bill with Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man..
Yeah, that’s a really interesting thought and there are some parallel themes between the two films. Unfortunately with everything going on today, it’s something that’s becoming more and more apparent. On the flip side of that, at least these situations are being bought to light, so hopefully we as a society can address whatever the root cause of this hyper-masculinity problem is.
I guess today it would be considered a guilty pleasure, but me and Chloe love those domestic thrillers of the eighties. Films like Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal, I think they’re nineties, but we love those kind of films because we are married ourselves and it’s fun to explore the dark side of a relationship.It is something that we can all relate to. When you’re in bed late at night and you look over, I will never know what’s inside my partner’s head. No matter how hard I try. They could be saying one thing, but… Gone Girl is another one of our favourite films, and they handle that so well. From the opening frame, they explore that concept of what are you thinking. We joke, we’d love to do the forty-year-old, middle-aged version of this when we’re middle-aged, to see what changes when we do have kids. Do those anxieties grow or do you eventually fall into a comfort. It’d be fun to see what happens on that front.
The film screens as part of this year’s FrightFest digital event, how are you feeling about the screening?
It’s so exciting. This is my first feature film, so everything is new to me. So the littlest things bring so much immense joy. Chloe makes fun of me all the time because I’m one of those happy criers, so there’s been a lot of times during this process where I’d be crying just because it’s been so amazing to have a childhood dream come true. Even having these interviews is the most exciting thing, ‘oh my gosh I get to talk about the thing that I’ve been working on for years, and other people are hopefully excited by it.’ Especially the horror fans, the horror fans are the best. We were doing a couple of podcasts with horror lovers and they dig deep into theories and the world of the movie. That’s all stuff that we had thought out, and especially me as the writer, I had answers to a lot of those questions and it’s just fun to see people so into it.
I really liked how you quickly dispatched all the exposition around the experiment and Tom and Eve’s situation. It all plays out pretty much over the opening credits. Typically, a film would spend a good portion of the film setting up the characters, seeing their day-to-day, finding out about their cash issues etc., but here we jump straight in. Was that always intentional or is it something that arose as the film progressed?
We shot a lot of stuff in that first act that eventually got cut from the film, that did set-up the experiment more and their day-to-day life and what the stakes are for them. But with us, I guess this also goes into a business decision, which is probably hard to understand for people reading. But when you’re making a movie, it is a small business endeavour, or a big business endeavour if you have a larger budget, but we felt that everybody’s attention spans are so short today. We knew the film would eventually end up on streaming platforms, and everybody we know gives a film like two minutes and if they don’t really like what they see, they’ll just turn it off and move on. That was kind of in the back of our minds. We wanted to get to the point quick at the beginning so we could get to the fun stuff and hopefully hold people’s attention. We don’t have any superstars in the film. We don’t have a super high budget so there’s no special effects that can grab your attention right off the bat. We do have some cool stuff later on it the film, but we didn’t have a budget where we could have like a prologue scene or something to really grab people and keep them in their seats. I’m glad that it worked for you, we really wanted to get to the point and get going so we could get to the cool stuff in the house.
Speaking of the house, I want one of those pod chute things that just magically manifest whatever food or drink you ask for.
That would be the dream. Actually, on the home video release, there will be versions, in the US it’s on the Apple TV version, that have behind-the-scenes and deleted scenes. All those scenes that we cut from the beginning of the film that set-up things a little bit more, we do include. So if anybody is curious about what that stuff is, there is a way to find it.
FrightFest celebrates the dark heart of cinema, what films that fall within that bracket would you say are some of your favourites? I guess Gone Girl, which you already mentioned, is one.
Yeah, definitely Gone Girl, Fatal Attraction; The Shining was one that was an inspiration, Tom’s a writer in the movies so we reference The Shining a few times. Rosemary’s Baby is another that we love and that was a reference for some of the things going on in the film. Any time I think that a film takes a real-life anxiety and puts it on screen and explores it in a dark way – that’s a movie that I love. There’s supernatural horror and stuff, monster movies and everything, I love that stuff also. But for me and Chloe as a couple, when we’re on Netflix looking for a movie to watch, we really love those movies that explore real-life. Especially for couples, real-life issues that couples face.
People are in the process of picking their FrightFest films, why should they take a chance on The Honeymoon Phase? What are they going to get that they might not get from some of the other films playing?
That’s a great question, so The Honeymoon Phase I think unfortunately is very timely with everything going on today. So especially if you’re in a relationship, I think it’ll take you on a wild ride where at the end of it you won’t look at your significant other the same way again (laughs). Which is kind of twisted to say, but I hope that it’s a film that puts people’s own anxieties on screen about being being in a relationship. And hopefully bring some things up to talk about in terms of do you really know who the other person is? Maybe at the end of watching it, you’ll look over at your spouse and hopefully be a little bit closer for surviving The Honeymoon Phase.
Have you been using your locked down time productively and started working on the next project?
Yes. So in The Honeymoon Phase I wanted to do something that Pixar does a lot where they kind of hint at what they’re working on next. In the film, the book that Tom is writing, is the title of the next film that I’ve got in development right now. There’s no hints to the cover art as to stuff that’s in the film. But it deals with, again that topic of anxiety I guess. I love psychology and exploring the different human psyches and emotions that people go through on film. So this next project I’m working on genre wise is totally different, but it’s about a high-school senior whose anxiety, her inner voice, comes to life as an invisible friend. This doppelganger who looks just like her, and she has to learn to basically come to terms with her own inner thoughts. So that’s what I’ve got cooking right now, but we’ll see what happens. I’m hoping that The Honeymoon Phase will jump-start the careers of me and Chloe, and everybody that was involved in the film, so we can continue doing more fun projects that will hopefully entertain people.
The Honeymoon Phase will screen at Arrow Video FrightFest on Saturday 29th August 2020. Tickets are available here.
