Original subtitles

building down here.

The main element of a horror movie is

atmosphere

100%. I think the monster can be great,

the performances can be good, but if you

don't surround all that in a place in an

environment where those things could

happen, then it won't work.

This guy has a wonderful imagination

that just takes these flights that to me

are just brilliant. I imagine that GMO

has all kinds of little monsters and

dinosaurs and little creatures in his

mind, you know, chewing up things and

biting things. So, from a visual aspect,

you really see where he's going with the

movie.

Once you pass the hallway, you can you

can go to the left and look Jan Carlo

over with a smile and John Carlo will

respond to you and that's fine.

Okay.

I was very taken by the originality of

the script. I'm blown away with how he's

interpreted it onto film. I think the

imagination is what I was taken by and

then how that's transferred. I thought,

how could he possibly transfer this into

a film and make it work?

Yeah.

Yeah.

My immediate reaction was uh this is

really skillfully done. This is really

atmospheric. I really feel this world as

I'm reading it. And uh after seeing

Kronos uh GMO's first film, I just fell

in love with his work and I just thought

this is going to be really masterful.

Hey man, you got the plan.

The film he made before Kronos is a

vampire movie but not quite a vampire

movie. And this is in the same way this

is a sort of a monster movie but not

quite a monster movie in in the normal

way. It uses the genre to its own ends.

What I like about the genre is that it

allows me to uh create images that are

not possible in any other genre. I can

create for example uh very pure visual

design for example. I can say okay the

movie is going to be dominated by these

shapes uh like the arches for example

and these textures and these colors and

uh this visual approach.

It's very gothic in certain ways and it

has a lot of wonderful sort of

psychological terror elements. There's a

very slow build before the descent.

There's a certain point at which I get

dragged down here into the sewers. And

that for me is like Alice being pulled

through the rabbit hole.

The idea of layering the city into sort

of uh the above layer and then the more

subterranean levels appealed to me very

much in the sense that it was full of

the possibilities of Gothic images and

uh creating these subworlds sub levels.

It was very attractive to me.

It's a very kind of almost classic

gothic style to it. There is a lot of

really strong symbolism in it. There's a

lot of kind of Christian symbolism in

it. There's a scene in an abandoned

church, you know, with the little

autistic boy, Chewy, and the two mimics,

and they're almost like avenging angels,

but you don't know whether or not Chewy

is going to be hurt by them or just sort

of taken with them. And it's a real

morality play, and he wants us to have

as much humanity within the sci-fi

struggle as possible. It's important to

see the fragility of the balance uh both

in human relationships and in in between

men and nature. I try to do this not by

bringing it to the surface but by

putting it on the images, putting it on

the things that are not said by the

characters. You know, I have a couple

worried about pregnancy while we have uh

tons of insects breeding down below. I

have some really strange images uh at a

very visceral level of uh things that

could be read as metaphors for all of

this. But I trust the images more than

the words.

Hopefully the textures, the ambiance,

the atmosphere and the situations will

seep into the skin of people as opposed

to going for the big scare. And I think

that there's much it's much more

pervasive and perverse to try and sit

under the skin of people than to go for

the big scare. The easiest approach to

this would have been uh to say, "Oh, 6

foot tall insects. Let's, you know, have

a blast, right? And just make it a gore

fest or something." We tried to keep it

really classic and contained,

not to make it just a simple approach to

the genre.