Interviews
[Interview] ‘Feed the Light’ Director Henrik Möller on the Influence of Lovecraft
Intervision Picture Corp. has summoned unspeakable horror from worlds beyond our own with the first ever release of Henrik Möller’s artful, award-winning exploration of Lovecraftian terror – Feed the Light.
Following a string of successful festival screenings, this underground Scandinavian riff on “The Color Out of Space” has arrived on Blu-Ray and DVD so a wider audience can finally be summoned to do its bidding. From producer/director/co-writer Henrik Möller comes a new landmark in underground Swedish horror, inspired by equal parts H.P. Lovecraft, David Lynch, and something far more disturbing:
“When her daughter is abducted by her ex-husband, a young mother will track the missing child and its father to a mysterious institution. But once inside, she will find herself trapped in a hallucinatory netherworld where reality turns amorphous, survival becomes parasitic, and an infested darkness lives – and feeds – in the light.”
Bloody Disgusting caught up with Möller to discuss this modern classic.
“I have always wanted to make a Lovecraftian film,” Möller told us in this exclusive interview. “The Color Out of Space is a film with a cosmic sensibility. The great unknown that brushes up against us and is never fully comprehended. My co-writer Martin Jirhamn and I rounded up the stories that had ingredients that we liked and could be translated to a film with a budget of 14 000 dollars. The Color Out of Space is one of his scariest because it doesn’t have tentacles och claws. It’s more like a virus or radioactive substance. We never fully learn its purpose here on earth and that makes your imagination kick into high gear. I remember The Festival and From Beyond where other stories we discussed. But eventually, we went beyond, updated it to the present time and created our own little universe with characters and detailed backstories that never had time to be explored in the finished film.”
Die-hard Lovecraft fans are an extremely passionate bunch, Möller discusses the pressure to satisfy them:
“Well, we never told anyone about the Lovecraft influence until I went over to the Lovecraft festival and thoughtlessly spilled the beans,” he explained. “I don’t think people looking at the posters will expect a faithful adaptation. But hopefully they will like it because the film has many Lovecraftian elements in it: The disturbing idea that there is an unknown world lurking just behind the invisible veil that is our reality that slowly begins to unfold before us, an unnameable entity that affects the environment in strange unhealthy ways, people worshipping the entity with high hopes of enlightenment, the finding of a book (in this case a pad) that contains information about the horror, obsession, insanity and some people don’t simply die but meet ends worse than death…”
While the film has a unique look having been shot in color with a few pops of color results in bold, striking imagery, Möller explains why it was dialed back:
“To make a long story short, due to budgetary constraints we didn’t have equipment good enough to produce the look we originally wanted,” he reveals. “So, we opted for the black and white grainy look that would emphasize the dirty concrete tunnels of the underground world we would descend into. The look of the three floors came from watching black and white TV as a child. Sometimes it could be slightly tinted blue and sometimes slightly green depending on the TV and the antennas reception. That way you couldn’t always remember if you had seen it on a color TV and your memory of it became like a distant dream.”
Aside from the obvious Lovecraft influence, he talks about some of his other inspirations.
“There were tons of literary and visual influences that gelled,” added Möller, who confirmed David Lynch and David Cronenberg were among his inspirations. “Any filmmaker with the aspirations to create a good horror film should look at the work of David Lynch. He was one of the early pioneers in using advanced sound design to create an uncanny feeling. Cronenberg is a master screenwriter of original and disturbing ideas. These two directors know that the unknown can be terrifying but that it also breeds mystery that intrigues us.”
Given the positive response Feed the Light‘ has received, Möllerd has considered going back to the Lovecraft.
“I certainly would but I would leave the literary adaptations alone,” he explained. “Although I firmly believe in updating Lovecraft, it would be fantastic to make a period piece set in Dunwich or Kingsport. Lovecraft himself encouraged others to use his creations in their own work and to add to and expand upon it. I think that is the best way to go.”
The Feed the Light Blu-ray can be purchased on Amazon or through other retailers.
Nothing is the same when two crewmates return to shore in Rose of Nevada, the latest by Enys Men filmmaker Mark Jenkin.
Time and reality blur for stars George Mackay (Wolf, 1917) and Callum Turner (Green Room, “Neuromancer”) in the hallucinatory time travel mystery releasing in New York and Los Angeles theaters on June 19, 2026.
But this isn’t your standard time travel movie.
Rose of Nevada bends time and genre in its exploration of Cornish identity and community, upending the lives of Nick (MacKay) and Liam (Turner). There’s a listless, dreamy quality to the time travel, and for inspired reason: Jenkin approaches it like a haunting.
While time travel was on his mind early in the writing process, Jenkin’s partner and collaborator asked a question that unlocked Rose of Nevada and inspired the filmmaker.
Jenkin explains, “I remember saying to Mary [Woodvine], my partner, who’s in the film, I said to her, ‘God, it really seems like I’ve fallen into this thing of either making films about ghosts or films about time travel,’ and then she said to me, ‘Yeah, but aren’t all ghost stories just time travel films, and aren’t all time travel films just ghost stories?’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, great. So I’m not making two types of films. I’m actually always making one type of film.’ But that was ultimately liberating because I thought there’s a nice gap or a crossover in the perception of genres, there’s a lot of room to play and to be free within that.”
“Once I’d abandoned the idea that I was going to master quantum physics in any academic sense,” the filmmaker continues, “It was incredibly freeing because I thought, ‘Well, I can just set my own rules here,’ and it really doesn’t matter what the rules are as long as you stick to them. You can’t bend them for the sake of the plot or for the sake of a character arc or something. You have to establish those rules upfront and stick to them, which made me really think I’ve got to limit the time travel element. This film can’t be about time travel.“
Bearing the brunt of the time travel disruption is Mackay’s Nick, a man struggling to support his family before the ill-fated voyage upends his entire world. It’s the type of role that was an easy yes for the actor, simply because of the filmmaker behind it.
“I saw Bait at the cinema when it was first out a few years ago and was so struck by it,” Mackay tells BD. “I just hadn’t seen a film like it. I want to work with the best directors. I want to work with the best directors and people who have a singular vision. As an actor, the process of work is almost my biggest draw, as well as what a story’s saying, but I think you learn by doing, and if I can do my bit in as many different ways as possible. The physicality and the discipline of Mark’s filmmaking, how that is so entwined in the DNA of the film, and therefore in the way that I work within it, that was the biggest draw. I’m just a fan of Mark’s. I was just very pleased to be involved.”
That reflects in Rose of Nevada‘s unique casting; Mackay initially was eyed for Liam.
“When I first got the call to meet Mark at the audition stage,” Mackay said, “We didn’t wind up reading scenes, but they said, ‘There’s a project. There are two roles in it that you could be right for, and Mark is leaning towards you for Liam.’ So, I had a look at Liam, Callum’s role, and had my interpretation of the script ready to talk about it and what I thought that character was, who he was, and how I’m thinking about how I might inhabit that or what I saw in him. And when we met, we didn’t talk about the film at all. We spoke about everything else. But following that meeting, I got the message, said, ‘Mark would like you to be part of the film, but he thinks you’re definitely more of a Nick,’ which I think I just may be a complete sheep because I went, ‘Of course I’m Nick.’
Mackay continued, “But it’s funny, I do have in my own life, I just started a family, and so much of my last few years of being has been trying to figure that balance and what that means and how you navigate that. So with family being at its core and all the kind of conundrums that come with staying level with that, that rang true. So I felt like I understood objectively, I have my interpretations of what both men mean to each other and within the story, but then once I was playing Nick, I just became about a very present focus on who he was and what his situation was. What I liked about him is that he’s a very straightforward bloke. In the best possible way, he’s quite a simple man. It’s just he’s in an extraordinary situation.”
Jenkin wrote Rose of Nevada during the pandemic lockdown that had forced a halt in production on Enys Men. He’d return to rewrite once Enys Men had been completed, creating overlap between films. “They are even more in conversation than you’d think because the first draft of Rose of Nevada was before I’d made Enys Men, and then everything I learned through the making of Enys Men, I fed into Rose of Nevada. But also the reaction to Enys Men, all the critics and writers and audience members who are telling me what Enys Men was about. I’m always the last to realize what I’ve done, I think like most filmmakers. You don’t really know what you’ve made a film about until the audience tells you. I was able to feed that into Rose of Nevada and also scale it up a little bit. So, yeah, in some ways it predates Enys Men, and in some ways it follows on from it,” he said.
Jenkin’s latest caps what’s unofficially been dubbed his Cornish trilogy, a moniker that initially surprised the filmmaker, but he’s come to embrace it. A recent revisit of Bait made it even clearer. “I can now understand why people are linking the three films together. I’d forgotten how linked they are, which is amazing, really, considering the first draft of Bait was written in 1999. So, most of my adult life has been one way or another making this trilogy. I am quite looking forward to starting the next chapter.”
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