That terror is at the heart of the former Austinite’s latest film, Vicious, which premiered at this year’s Fantastic Fest ahead of streaming on Paramount+. Bringing the film to the city that helped form him as a filmmaker and film lover was an undeniable thrill for Bertino. “The first time I saw a Cassavetes movie, the first time I saw a Terrence Malick movie, the first time I saw Polanski, all of these things happened in Austin. I saw the Texas premiere of The Big Lebowski here. The first time I worked on a movie, I was a PA on a grad student thesis at UT, and literally that day changed my life and I fell in love with movies.”
The big question for any Gen X Austin film buff: Was he a Vulcan Video guy, or did he spend his time perusing the shelves at I Luv Video? “At one point I was Vulcan, and then I lived so close to an I Luv Video that I moved over.”
It’s clearly the horror sections of both stores that influence his filmography, and Vicious is no exception. In it, Dakota Fanning plays Polly, a lonely and desperate woman who makes the mistake of opening her door to a mysterious visitor (Kathryn Hunter) carrying an even more mysterious box. It’s an immediately unnerving situation: After all, Bertino said, “There’s something inherently strange about an unexpected door knock, even in this day and age. A door knocks at nine o’clock at night and everybody turns and is like, ‘Who the fuck is that? What’s happening?’ Especially now, when everyone knows everybody’s step and everyone knows when everyone is coming. There’s something really cool about, in the middle of the night, a knock on the door that can change your life.”
The question that emerges quickly for Polly is – why her? The terror comes from the possibility that there may be no reason at all.
Bertino’s films have always been built around a certain horrifying ambiguity. In his breakout film, 2008’s The Strangers, the terror came from not knowing why the home invaders had decided to target that particular house. Similarly, with The Dark and the Wicked, the exact nature of the supernatural forces plaguing one family are unclear to the audience. However, Bertino himself is OK with that kind of uncertainty. “I’m a kid of the ’80s,” he said, “so parents didn’t talk to you, there was no therapy. I just went outside and threw a baseball against the wall and worked out my problems. But I honestly think that those kind of fears became a huge thing for me, with the realization as a boy that bad things happen and you don’t get the answer.”
That sense of uncertainty seeped into his films, and into the films he watches. “I’m more frightened by what I don’t know than if I’m given all the answers. Because then I start to have a safety net and get to put it into an easier to control space. ‘Well, that will never happen to me because of X.’ No, bad things happen to all of us.”
Moreover, he doesn’t think he’s alone as a storyteller in wanting to tell tales in these grey areas. “I think studios and financiers are scared of it,” he laughed. “I think there are more filmmakers interested in it than the movies themselves end up being. … I remember the first time I saw Scream in the movie theatre. I had seen Drew Barrymore’s face on the poster – ‘Oh, so she’s the star of the movie’ – and then I was shocked. Watching how that safety net got ripped away made everything a little scarier.”
However, just because the audience doesn’t necessarily know everything that’s happening, that doesn’t mean Bertino is equally in the dark. The question when it comes to the filmmaking is how much Bertino knows about the cosmology when he starts writing. Does he know exactly what’s happening, or is he feeling it out?
“It’s a bit of both,” Bertino said, but with Vicious more than his other films it was much more about exploring the negative space. When he started writing, he explained, “I know what the box can’t do. … I automatically know, ‘I’m not going to let the box do this, I’m not going to let the evil have these powers,’ but I’m not always sure early on what it can do.” What clarified its limits for him was the process of exploring Fanning’s character. “The more I learned about Polly, the more I understood about the box because it was going to feed off of her.”
Polly is quite literally the center of the film, and Bertino knew that his script was going to require a performer that could hold the audience’s attention and sympathies. “I’ve watched a lot of one-handers and they live and they die on not just the performance but the charisma. It’s like a singer on the stage that has a great album but then you see them live and they don’t carry that same thing.”
While he was sure that Fanning was the kind of magnetic performer he needed, he was also playing with the audience’s familiarity with an actor who scored her first SAG nomination at the age of 7 for I Am Sam. In part, he was inspired by a quote from Alfred Hitchcock about Cary Grant, which he paraphrased as, “You cast certain people because the instant they walk through the door you’ve already done half your back story. … By casting Dakota, you immediately have all your childhood memories. You know what she looked like when she was 6, you know what she looked like when she was an awkward teenager, you have all those references, but at the same time she’s not that.”
Fortunately for him, this was exactly the kind of challenge she was looking for. “She read a script in which there was blood and guts and crying and she was barefoot in the snow, and she was like, ‘Sign me up!’”
When the ominous knock at the door comes for Polly, the fact that it’s a little old lady played by Hunter induces a state of confusion in the audience. Best known to American audiences for her performance as the witches in The Tragedy of Macbeth, her hilariously shocking turn as the sinister mother-in-law in The Front Room, and a small but memorable role on Disney+ show Andor, she was already a legend of the British stage and screen. Bertino said, “As I did research about her and came to realize all this work that she’s done in plays, and her amazing physical abilities and flexibility – she does yoga literally four times a day – but she has such a command of her voice.”
Putting Fanning and Hunter together was pure magic for Bertino. “I’ve never seen that level of pure talent and control,” he said. “In much different ways, they had that same talent and that same ability. They know their bodies and every tool at their disposal, so it was really interesting watching them work together and find the scenes.”
Vicious is streaming on Paramount+ now.
