Editorials
20 Things We Learned from the ‘Storm Warning’ Commentary with Director Jamie Blanks
Australia has long been fertile ground for genre filmmakers, but they don’t often make the journey over to the bright lights of Hollywood. Jamie Blanks was still in his twenties when his short films garnered enough attention to do just that, and the result was a big hit with 1998’s American slasher, Urban Legend.
He chased it with the modest success of Valentine (2001) before returning home to Australia and making the entertainingly mean-spirited Storm Warning in 2007. It’s the tale of a couple whose relaxing day leaves them stuck out in a storm. Worse, they try to take shelter on a remote farm only to discover the three men who live there are less than hospitable.
Sadly, Blanks recently passed away far too young and with far too slim a filmography. He was a talented director, composer, editor, and writer, and a kind, friendly voice who was always happy to talk with fans and film lovers.
Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
Storm Warning (2007)
Commentators: Jamie Blanks (director), Everett De Roche (writer), Karl von Muller (cinematographer), Robert Taylor (actor), Justin Dix (special effects/makeup supervisor), Robbie Perkins (production designer)
1. De Roche wrote the script nearly thirty years before it went into production. “So all those people saying ‘hey, it’s just like Wolf Creek,’ we were there thirty years ago, we just took our time getting the film distributed.”
2. The opening scene, an overhead of a car driving along the coast, was filmed from a helicopter – but they couldn’t afford a fancy rig, so they were stuck with one that could only tilt up or down. “Everything that the camera saw had to be literally framed by the pilot, so he was effectively our camera operator on those shots.”
3. Blanks has fond memories of the marina where they filmed, as it was the first time his son was on set, running around, and yelling “action!’ and “cut!” It’s a nice, throwaway anecdote on any other commentary, but it’s especially affecting in light of Blanks’ recent passing.
4. The film was shot in twenty-four days, with only six of them being on location. The rest were spent on a sound stage, and then Blanks had a year to work on post-production. He used that extended time to write the score three times before being happy with it.
5. The early scenes on the boat were meant to suggest an increasingly cloudy day as a storm approaches, but they were gifted with a perfect blue sky instead. Blanks says it actually worked to their advantage as they were able to use the blue sky as a giant blue screen and more easily comp in some CG clouds.
6. The brief tour through the mangroves around 11:45 was filmed on a tight schedule made even tighter when their camera boat began to sink. “I was really cross that day.”
7. There’s almost a strobing effect around 16:20 as Rob (Taylor) and Pia (Nadia Fares) walk through the brush at night, and it wasn’t intentional. It had something to do with the digital camera seeing too much detail and not knowing what to do with it, and they didn’t notice it until post-production, at which point they were unable to fix it.
8. The house, both interior and exterior (including the barn), was built on a sound stage in Melbourne.
9. Hugh Jackman visited the set for some reason?
10. The baby kangaroo is a practical effect, later augmented with digital effects, and it operated on battery power. Unfortunately, the joey’s remote control was set to operate on the same frequency as the crew’s radio headsets. The result was one very erratic creature.
11. De Roche mentions that the inspiration for the film is basically the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” What he doesn’t mention, but what should be celebrated, is that he’s a legendary writer of Australian genre films with a filmography that includes Patrick, Long Weekend, Road Games, Razorback, Fortress, Link, and more.
12. Some have questioned Pia’s “MacGuyver-esque” shift in the film’s back half, but an earlier sequence cut from the film actually showcased Pia’s skills as a metal sculptor.
13. Taylor talks about having to take his character on a journey of impotence and emasculation in the face of their aggressively masculine captors, but he adds, “In actuality, I’d squash those two like a couple of bugs.”
14. Brian Trenchard-Smith was attached early on to direct the film, but they weren’t able to get it going at the time. When Blanks told him he was actually going to make it, Trenchard-Smith’s only question was, “Is the Shanghai surprise still in it?” He’s referring to the anti-rape device designed to shred the invading member upon insertion.
15. “I felt a little hamstrung on my first couple of movies,” says Blanks, referring to how his first films were American studio pictures beholden to MPAA rules and nervous executives. He was happy to shake off those restraints here, though, and went full bore with the fish hook kill and additional violence – much of which was then trimmed for U.S. release.
16. Poppy’s (John Brumpton) bedroom was initially designed to include an electrified grid (powered by a car battery) over his bed and swastikas on the wall. Blanks saw it and felt it was going a bit too far. “These guys aren’t reprehensible enough, they’re also nazis?” “And Eli Roth fans,” suggests someone, only for Blanks to say, “We draw the line there, man.”
17. “I almost didn’t do this movie because of this scene,” says Blanks at 1:15:00 as Poppy’s attempted assault of Pia leaves his giblets sliced up and trapped in a can. It was his wife who convinced him it would be a strongly memorable sequence.
18. The dog attack was crafted through a combination of performance, sharp editing, and a puppet of a dog’s head operated “vigorously” by Dix upon Brumpton’s nether region.
19. Poppy’s disemboweled body is a prosthetic effect, obviously, and Brumpton was so put off by it that he refused to be on set during its use. That didn’t stop the team from using it as an iced beer holder during their wrap party.
20. They built the hovercraft from scratch. It would lift, but it wouldn’t actually move forward, meaning they had to tow it with hidden wires.
Quotes Without Context
“We’re not gonna make any airline sales for this movie.”
“Unfortunately… that was a completely CG-generated dope shed.”
“Native animals in Australia are difficult to get permission to work with.”
“That’s the first time I’ve ever seen a director fire a dog.”
“As gruesome as I wanted to make the film, there was something about that moment that I just couldn’t quite bring myself to leave in.”
“Anyway, back to the horse porn.”
“I can smell it when I see that screen.”
“Even we’re squirming watching this.”
“I really despise and hate rapists, I find them most despicable human scum on the face of the Earth, so the idea of ripping his dick off, having a dog devour him, and then running him over with a four-wheel drive speaks to my sense of justice.”
Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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