Saw II-IV and Repo! director Darren Lynn Bousman built a new kind of horror film with Abattoir, which just had its World Premiere last night at the Los Angeles Film Festival.

Abattoir, which stars Dayton Callie (Halloween 2), Joe Anderson (Hercules), Jessica Lowndes (Altitude, Autopsy) and Lin Shaye (Insidious), centers on a real estate reporter who unearths an urban legend about a house being built from rooms where horrific tragedies have occurred. The investigation ultimately leads to the enigmatic Jebediah Crone (Callie) and the answer to the terrifying question, “How do you build a haunted house?”

We caught up with Bousman, who adapted Abattoir from a comic of the same name.

“I originally pitched this as a multi platform release (comic-movie-webseries),” he tells Bloody Disgusting in our exclusive interview. “The concept was to tell different pieces of the story throughout different mediums. The story was so dense, and the mythology so deep that our hope was to fragment the overall narrative; the more you immersed yourself inside the different mediums, the more you understood the world. Yet, it was important that each story worked individually.”

The concept came with the idea of furthering the haunted house subgenre, and trying something new. In Abattoir, a haunted house is quite literally assembled.

“How do I compete with the haunted houses sub genre? With Insidious, Conjuring, We Are Still Here, and every other well-made haunted house movie, I wanted to add something new, and to not rehash something that had already been done. So, for the case of Abattoir, I wanted to approach it as almost an origin story. How did this house come to exist. And more importantly, why? This is much more of a film noir, with elements of ghosts, and that’s something that I think separates it from other films.”

“In some respects Abattoir was the most difficult narrative I have ever told,” Bousman tells us when we asked about how tough is was to adapt such a complex story. “The mythology was so dense, and the overall dialogue so stylized, that it was very easy to miss or not understand what was happening. I think a great deal of this comes from the style we decided to implement. The writer, Chris Monfette, and I wanted to treat the audience with respect, and not beat them over the head with over-explanations and kindergarten exposition. However, this is a double-edged sword; major plot points were revealed though passing one-liners. If you miss them, you will be lost.

“This was very much a narrative exposed through dialogue,” he continued. “It forces the audience to pay attention to what is being said. I don’t feel this is a movie that works if you are only half paying attention.”

Harking back to Bousman telling us that Abattoir is sort of a horror film noir, he talks a bit about his desire to make an adult fairytale.

“I wanted to make this film an adult fairytale, yes. It’s hyper stylized in its production design and dialogue. You have characters set in modern times, yet interacting and conversing like it’s the 1940’s. At the time I was making this I was watching a like of hard-boiled detective films. I approached this as if Bogart and Becall made a horror film.”

Here, though, there’s spooks everywhere. And in every ghost movie the supernatural carry their own distinct look. Bousman tells us what his specific vision was for his entities.

“The vision here was that, after a tragedy, a vapor is left behind; a memory or an emotion. Those emotions are trapped, doomed to repeat the last moments, over, and over, over… forward, and then in reverse. Those souls are confined, not to go up, or down, but stay. Jebediah Crone is collecting these rooms of trapped souls. He takes the room, he takes the soul, and the more souls he collects, the stronger the overall structure is. However, Crone is not collecting ghosts, he is collecting tragedies.”

And with an independent ghost movie, having a solid VFX team is incredibly important. Bousman talked to us a bit about how difficult this process was: “The VFX was by far the most challenging thing we faced in creating this movie,” he explains. “My vision and my budget rarely aline. In my head I envision steak…in reality we had a baloney sandwich. My task as a director is saying, ‘Okay, how do we make this baloney taste like steak?’ It is a series of compromises. The trick is making those compromises feel like choices. This was the dance with VFX. I wanted to show the beach, and we had a single grain of sand.

“That said, when you watch the film the talents of my production team shine,” he adds. “Our production designer, Jen Spence, cinematographer, Michael Fimognari, and editor, Brian Smith, were able to craft my vision in such a way that the audience will feel as if they are seeing a beach when in reality it’s just single grains of sand.”

Fans of SAW should check their gore expectations as Abattoir isn’t that kind of movie, even though there are some seriously violent moments.

“I’ve stopped worrying about gore,” Bousman stated, adding, “I want the violence and bloodshed to service the story. This movie is an investigation…an investigation of a murder. The gore for me was much less important than the characters, and overall narrative of a woman dealing with loss and grief.”

Abattoir is seeking distribution out of the Los Angeles Film Festival. Watch this spot for acquisition and release news as it comes in.