Watch a Patriarchy Crumble in It Comes at Night
LatestThe devil is in the details of the new horror movie It Comes at Night, a $5 million production that opens in wide release today. The plot’s rough sketch will sound familiar to those familiar with the genre, especially the turns it’s taken in recent years: A family that’s holed up in the middle of nowhere fights for survival during what seems to be an outbreak of some sort of disease that has seemed to cast apocalypse on the world. The movie isn’t averse to tropes (it opens with the family killing a recently afflicted member), but it is terse when it comes to explanation (right down to the vague “it” of the title).
What separates It Comes at Night from typical zombie stories and other post-apocalyptical fare is its deep investment in the psychological manifestations of such a horrific scenario, which director Trey Edward Shults renders vividly, even when he’s reveling in ambiguity. The movie disorients not just via the palpable paranoia from Paul (Joel Edgerton), a patriarch whose overprotective tendencies are well-intentioned but flawed, but also by weaving in and out of the nightmares of Paul’s son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.). It Comes at Night is not just scary, it’s deliriously so. In refusing to hit his audience over the head and having faith in its intelligence, Shults has made a movie that works as the perfect counterpoint to the very dumb, other horror-ish movie that comes out today, The Mummy.
It Comes at Night was inspired by the death of Shults’s father. Jezebel talked to the director this week about his film, its politics, and the hope he has for his audience. An edited and condensed transcript of that interview is below.
JEZEBEL: Given that the basic outline of this movie is so familiar to pop culture audiences, did you have any trepidation about doing another seemingly post-apocalyptic/outbreak-type movie?TREY EDWARD SHULTS: It started from the personal and it spewed out of me so quick, so it just started there. I wrote it in early 2014 and it didn’t film till 2016, you have a lot of time to think about it. With this is the same way it was with Krisha [his first movie]: Is this going to click with people in a unique way? If you just hear the basic synopsis, it sounds like something you’ve seen before. I just believed we were doing it in the right way and I just had to follow my gut.
You also seem to have a lot of confidence in your audience for asking them to invest in a movie that’s subtle and ambiguous. Between your conception and your regard of your audience, it seems like this very bleak movie has a very hopeful meta-narrative.