Mention to Brendan Muldowney that his hellbound The Cellar is reminiscent of Lucio Fulci’s mindbending supernatural horrors and he takes the compliment. “Except there’s no gore,” said the director said. “I made it so my daughter could see it.”
The feature, which received its world premiere at South by Southwest this week, stars Elisha Cuthbert as a woman whose daughter goes into the cellar and disappears, and her search for what happened soon unleashes diabolical forces. It was inspired by Muldowney’s 2004 award-winning short, “The Ten Steps,” building on its idea of a basement with more stairs than it can possibly contain. When the short went online, Muldowney started looking at the comments and was pleasantly surprised. “People said ‘I really know what happened next,’ I went, ‘Oh, yeah, I wonder,’ and I started going through the logical progressions in my own head.”
The project took a surprising turn one day when he was talking with British film critic and genre fiction expert Kim Newman. “He just went, ‘Oh, I don’t think there’s enough substance in it’ – and he was right, because I just kept trying to develop it as the short over one night, and that wasn’t working. It was probably one day when I went, ‘Oh, that can be the prologue,’ and that’s when all that wonderful Fulci, Escher behavior started to come in.”
Now, with that advice and those influences in the story, he said, “I could make at least two more sequels with other houses.”
Austin Chronicle: Let’s talk about that decision to go gore-free.
Brendan Muldowney: The original short came from a mishmash of different places, but one of them was the original Robert Wise film of The Haunting. I was a big fan of how that created atmosphere and didn’t go anywhere gore. It relied on cinematic techniques and tracks and sound, and I just wanted to go somewhere like that.
And I wasn’t being facetious when I said I really wanted my daughter to be able to watch one of my films. My films are demented. They’re not for my granny, they’re not for my daughter. So I thought that it would be nice to make a film that was a bit more fun.
AC: But transitioning from horror to kids movies can be hard if you have a reputation for making horror. I’ve talked to filmmakers who’ve felt very pigeonholed by studios and distributors.
BM: In fairness, this was probably the best choice for me because the rest of the work I was developing was going even darker. They weren’t even elevated horror any more, they were just dark dramas. And I knew my producer was starting to go, “I don’t know if we can even finance these.” </p
On a personal, developmental level, obviously I’m going to go back to what I like doing next, but instead of sending me down the really darker road I’m bringing a bit of the fun into what I was doing, and I think that’ll actually be good for me commercially. Regardless of how it’s received, I think it will be good for me going forward.
AC: You bring the audience into your supernatural world with a single word – “eleven” – but you do have a whole world. What was your worldbuilding process?
BM: I did have to build it from the ground up – going into mathematics a bit before I even came to the idea of string theory, and There was a whole bit cut out with the professor which was cut out because it was too long. So there’s enough there to me to feel like there’s something there. I had one draft that I’m sorry I never got to do. It had giant spiders and giant crows, Hieronymus Bosch creatures walking round. So in a way some of it has some logic around it, and the rest of it is Fulci – a gateway to Hell.
The Cellar
Midnighters, World PremiereTuesday, March 15, 5pm, Stateside
Wednesday, March 16, 6:15pm, Alamo South Lamar
This article appears in Guide to SXSW 2022.
