Writer, director, and former actor Ruth Platt first came to our attention with the dastardly nasty film, The Lesson. The film played at FrightFest and was one of the first titles released under the FrightFest Presents banner. Now Platt has created another horror film, albeit a softer and more haunting one with echoes of Spanish ghost story movies. The film in question is Martyrs Lane and follows young girl Leah (Kiera Thompson) as she befriends Rachel (Sienna Sayer), a strange young girl who keeps appearing at Leah’s window in the dead of night. As the two girls begin to bond, Rachel starts to share secrets that have dangerous consequences for Leah and her family. Martyrs Lane has just landed on Shudder. Ahead of its release we sat down with Ruth to find out more about how Martyrs Lane was created.
Martyrs Lane is on Shudder. The streaming platform covers every possible aspect of genre cinema, where does it fit on that spectrum?
I think Shudder is such an interesting platform. I think they have this really great diverse, wide, eclectic mix of films. I guess Martyrs Lane is not overt horror. In the development of it as well it became a gentler ghost story and that wasn’t quite where I saw it originally. So it’s a bit of a gentler ride, but has dark undertones.
You’ve been working on this project for a number of years, part of the process included creating a proof of concept short. What advantages did this give you?
It was a very tough process because we had the feature and then I had to kind of do a reverse osmosis of making a short for this feature script and finding this or the essence of it, which I found quite difficult. It was a big learning curve. Tonally, we had to establish where it’s going to lie in the genre and how to root this whole story in this child’s eyes, in this child’s world. A lot of that became clear during the short. Casting was tricky because when you’re casting you really have to spread the net very wide to find the right children, because they’ve got to bring something of themselves. You don’t want children just performing, you want children who are very natural. They’re able to kind of evolve the characters with their own personalities. We had to find those kids and that was quite hard to do in short, but it helped an awful lot to create the world and to establish the tone.
You worked with children, albeit slightly older, in The Lesson, what is it that you enjoy about working with young actors?
When my children were small, I had to do a lot of work outside the film industry. I did a lot of drama teaching because I have an acting background. There are some amazing drama teachers around, and there are some not quite not-so-great drama teachers around where, you know, it’s all about ‘performing’. I love working with children because once you just strip all that away, they get it very easily. It is pretending, but it’s pretending in a very empathetic way. It is imagining yourself in that situation. What would you do in that situation? It’s just about the truth of each thought and each moment and they get that. Some kids are more emotionally intelligent and more aware of themselves and that’s more available to them than others. But I think all children do it.
Martyrs Lane deals with some dark topics and ideas. How much did Kiera and Sienna understand about their roles?
I left that to their really wonderful mothers. They’ve got really fantastic mothers, who were the chaperones on set. They had the script and I said, “look if you want to read it with Sienna and Kiera that’s fine. It’s up to you.” I think they did read it and they talked about it with them. But for me, I didn’t really talk about the difficult adult subject matter that much at all. We really focused on their relationship, their friendship, and just being in the present moment of each scene and each line. It was just about keeping them really present in each moment. Because as soon as they started thinking about this big story arc, they wouldn’t be in the moment. I just took that pressure off them. All they needed was to know exactly what they were thinking at that moment, what they wanted from the other person. Once they got that process, they just flew with it really, and it was lovely to see.
Going back to the inception – you’re a writer and a director, what comes first to you when you’re conceptualising an idea, the word or the image?
Interesting… I think it has to be the image. I guess because I also dream a lot, and have a lot of nightmares and write things down. Dreams speak to you in images. I guess the images are the subconscious or the unconscious, and then the writing is the conscious. It starts with the subconscious or the unconscious, and the conscious translates and makes sense of those images.
Despite its English setting, Martyrs Lane felt almost Spanish in its execution, were there any films that helped guide your style choices?
It’s really interesting and you’re right. It’s really interesting how many Spanish sort-of ghost story genre films there are. They did heavily influence me, even Spirit of the Beehive, which is a 1970’s Spanish film by Víctor Erice, it’s not exactly a ghost story, but there are definitely dark magical realism elements. Everything is filtered through this child’s imagination of the adult world. Guillermo del Toro, so Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone, The Orphanage, even something like Beautiful with Javier Bardem is a socio realistic film, but the ghosts are there, they’re part of that world. I don’t know why there’s so much of that Spanish tradition, but they definitely influenced Martyrs Lane.
Because of the pandemic, the post production was done remotely. There were of course challenges, but did you find any advantages to having the extra time.
It’s difficult to know. With my lovely composer Anne Müller, we never met. She’s in Germany, so we did Zoom and tried out themes and ideas. She was in the studio and we were collaborating. It would have been so lovely to have been in the same room, but then perhaps we never would have been; if she’s in Germany, maybe that would have been hard anyway. Perhaps it opened up possibilities that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. I’ve made micro-budget features and I’ve always been very heavily involved in the editing and perhaps this was good for me to step in and let Chris [Barwell] do his own thing. Luckily, I was able to be in the room for the sound design. I was really relieved because we worked very heavily on the sound design, me and Ben Baird. That would have been much harder remotely.
Dream scenario – a studio says you can make any project, original or not, money is no object – what type of film would you like to create?
I would love to do a war film from the perspective of a female perspective, possibly with some supernatural elements.
As difficult as the last year has been for films, horror, more than any other genre seems to have flourished. What do you think it is about horror that keeps it popular?
Horror now spans a wide spectrum of mini genres I guess. It can be crazy, it can be terrifying, it can be exploitative, it can be personal, it can be melancholy. It can be beautiful, it can be arthouse, it can be a slasher movie. I think there’s something cathartic about horror. We go around so much of our lives suppressing stuff from an early age. You have to suppress so much for obvious reasons, but I feel like it’s a safe valve to let off steam and explore our deepest fears. There’s so much rage in horror, put into a safe place, because there’s not many places you can safely express your rage for life, and life is rage inducing. I think that’s what’s so interesting about horror, the emotions that you can explore: rage, passion, violence, fear, grief, all those difficult emotions and difficult aspects of human life that perhaps you can’t do in other arenas.
What journey do you hope to take the viewer on with Martyrs Lane?
I think you can experience the film on several levels. You can experience it hopefully on an entertaining level. The experience of the fear and the tension and the story. I hope it perhaps speaks to them personally in some way and makes them reflect on their own family experiences, or childhood or experience as a parent, you know, that whole family dynamic. I think maybe there’s some elements of the film that can speak to people personally and in a more profound way.
Martyrs Lane obviously took up a lot of last year but have you started thinking what you might make next?
I’m just writing. I’ve got a couple of projects I’m in discussions with people about. It’s hard because I’ve always felt very outside the industry, and I’ve always felt like chances are thin on the ground to make a project. I just want to make sure that the next project I pick is something that I really think is the right thing to do next because films take so long to make. They are so hard to make, especially in today’s climate, so I just need to be very, very careful that I make something that’s going to be a step up.
Martyrs Lane is available to watch now on Shudder.
