Director Adam MacDonald’s fourth feature film, This Is Not a Test, is now in theaters, and as a big fan of his three previous movies, it’s one I’m very much looking forward to. To celebrate its release, we’re heading back to MacDonald’s very first film, 2014’s Backcountry.
Few would argue that the heyday of the animal attack subgenre was the 1970s through the 1980s. While understandable and overdue safety regulations have since severely limited what’s possible on the screen – with the result being a lot of subpar flicks trying to eke out scares with CG animals – fun and/or thrilling ones still slip through the cracks every few years or so.
Arachnophobia, Black Water, and this year’s Primate are a few examples, and Backcountry sits comfortably among them. It’s a film that builds terrific tension, atmosphere, and suspense before unleashing one of the most intensely frightening animal attacks in movies.
The Backcountry Blu-ray features a commentary track with MacDonald and his two lead actors. It’s a casual track, one more focused on anecdotes and memories than technical detail and thematic breakdowns, but it’s still an engaging listen for fans.
Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
Backcountry (2014)
Commentators: Adam MacDonald (director, writer), Jeff Roop (actor, producer), Missy Peregrym (actor)
1. MacDonald immediately wins me over by saying his favorite film is Na Hong-jin’s The Chaser.
2. The opening shot required flies to be hovering over a carcass, but when the fly wrangler arrived on set, he opened his bag to reveal that all his flies had died. “He was so stressed out.” They ended up going with CG flies, but at least MacDonald apologizes for it.
3. The song playing on the car radio around 2:00 is “Looking for Magic” by Dwight Twilley Band, and it’s an homage to Adam Wingard’s You’re Next.
4. MacDonald “stole” the title card drop from Michael Haneke’s Funny Games.
5. The first character note that Peregrym had after reading the script was that Jenn should have highlights. She felt it was a way to show her as a woman in control of the details of her life, something that wouldn’t be possible once they entered the woods.
6. MacDonald wrote the script three years before finally making the film, and he bought a can of bear spray immediately after finishing the first draft. The can sat on his desk until production began, and it is the same one that Jenn is holding in the film.
7. Their walk into the woods originally featured a big dog that comes barreling around a bend and scares Jenn, but it just wasn’t working, so they cut it. The German Shepherd wasn’t hitting his marks, and MacDonald was overwhelmed.
8. Alex (Roop) goes skinny dipping in the icy cold water, and the actor sat in a tent to warm up after. He was convinced that he had contracted “beaver fever” – a term I’ve never heard before, despite doing a lot of camping and still-water swimming in my youth – which is another name for giardiasis, aka Giardia. That name I am familiar with…
9. They were thrilled to get Eric Balfour as Brad because they wanted someone who could convincingly feel threatening to Alex – similar look but taller. Balfour wanted to do an Irish accent, and while MacDonald was hesitant, he ultimately said yes once he heard it.
10. The tension and uneasiness between Alex and Brad were inspired by a real-life incident of MacDonald’s. He and his girlfriend were at a restaurant, MacDonald went to use the restroom. When he returned, there was a man sitting at the table with her. “We all had dinner together, and believe me, it was so uncomfortable.”
11. 2003’s Open Water was an inspiration for MacDonald’s script. “I find it so sad that they never had sex in that movie, that they never got to make love one last time.” He used that idea here as Alex and Jenn endure the wrong kind of friction on their trip, all the way up to when tragedy strikes.
12. This was MacDonald’s first feature film, and he admits to causing some unintentional frustrations for certain crewmembers. The Steadicam operator grew annoyed as MacDonald was constantly hovering, watching the monitor, and bumping into the guy. Peregrym points out that sound techs were irked as MacDonald was constantly doing things off camera as ostensible support and encouragement for his actors, and “we never had anything clean.”
13. MacDonald says the two leads had completely different styles of acting, and it ultimately both informed and benefited the characters. “Missy really shot from the hip, very rock and roll, just going for it, trying things,” he says, adding that “Jeff I found very internal and working on the moment and understanding it, he really felt the role.”
14. The dead and partially devoured deer at 38:20 is a practical effect, and MacDonald requested it be in this specific position. He was inspired by a nature documentary about lions featuring one of them eating an antelope whose neck had been broken, leaving it to face the lion as the predator dined. “I found it so disturbing.”
15. The “bear” nosing around outside their tent was a combination of MacDonald pressing a fake bear head towards the fabric and an actual bear puppet that had been constructed for the film.
16. MacDonald praises his two leads, saying he knew they had the characters and relationship exactly right. That left him increasingly nervous about getting the growing terror and bear attack sequence right. Some of that came in editing, and he says that “as the movie progresses, we take out more and more of the sounds of life, the insects, the birds, and just doing more symbols of death… as foreshadowing.”
17. MacDonald says some people think Peregrym is “a cross between Hilary Swank and Kristen Stewart,” but he thinks she does her own thing. Peregrym is actually okay with that comparison.
18. Alex getting dragged out of the tent by the bear is actually two grips pulling Roop while he holds tight to Peregrym’s hand. The grips said afterward that they were worried they were going to dislocate his hip because the two were holding hands so fiercely.
19. “I took a cue from Werner Herzog here,” says MacDonald, adding that “listening to the attack more than seeing it is so much scarier.” He’s referring to Herzog’s documentary film Grizzly Man about an amateur naturalist who, along with his girlfriend, was killed by a brown bear in Alaska. The attack was reportedly caught on an audio recording, which Herzog listens to in the doc but does not share with audiences.
20. They show the proper respect and awe for scenes clearly showing both Roop and Peregrym in the same shot as the live bear. It might seem silly, but this is such a rarity for animal attack movies these days, and it adds genuine tension and grounded terror to this film.
21. “For all the High Tension fans out there, you know exactly where I got the idea for this,” he says over a slow-motion shot of Jenn running through the woods while holding her bloody arm.
22. It was Peregrym’s mother who suggested the helicopter scene – Jenn wakes in a tree to the sound of a helicopter somewhere in the sky – and they all loved it, both as a sign that someone might be looking for them and as a brief reminder of other people. They originally had shots of Jenn’s mother texting on the phone in the couple’s car, but they were cut in order to stay on the couple.
23. A woman in the TIFF audience fainted at the 1:15:37 mark as Jenn slips down the waterfall’s rock edge to snap her foot at the bottom. The bear attack didn’t faze her, but she apparently said afterwards that “I can’t do bones, I just can’t do bones.”
24. Nibookazo Provincial Park isn’t an actual place, but the word is real, and it means “to play dead.”
Quotes Without Context
“The humongous cock sock.”
“We were already pretty deep in the woods, and then we walked and walked and walked and walked and walked.”
“What I do know is that you farted, and it was a ‘quack,’ it was so tight.”
“This is my worst choice in the film.”
“Tim Hortons North Bay got a thank you, that’s interesting.”
Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.