Dave Boyle’s Never After Dark was the breakout horror hit of this year’s SXSW, and it’s finally hitting theaters on September 25, courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Never After Dark follows Airi (Moeka Hoshi), a psychic medium who travels Japan and helps lost souls cross over and find peace. Airi meets her match and is forced to confront the traumatic truths of her past when her latest spiritual cleansing unearths a violent and malicious entity. Airi faces threats from both beyond the grave and hiding in plain sight as her paranormal investigation intensifies.
Never After Dark is a masterclass in tension and pacing that evokes the patience and eerie atmosphere of J-horror classics like Ju-on: The Grudge and Noroi: The Curse. With Never After Dark’s release right around the corner, writer and director Dave Boyle breaks down the film’s reverence for the classics, the importance of practical effects, and Never After Dark’s unique approach to a ghost story and what it’s saying about the living.
BLOODY DISGUSTING: Why did you think that this story would be best expressed with Japanese characters? Was it always set in Japan or was that something that developed during the writing process?
DAVE BOYLE: I had just made a show in Japan, for Netflix, called House of Ninjas. My co-creator on that show, Kento Kaku, and I were talking about what to do next, and we wanted to do a theatrical movie. And we wanted to make another project in Japan. We had a great experience working together there. I had been kicking around this idea in my head for a while before that, just kind of like the central concepts, but it all started in Japan. When I told Kaku about the idea, he thought that it would make a lot of sense to set it in Japan. So yeah, it was always kind of where this story was going to happen.
There are so many ways that you could tell Never After Dark’s story, but it works so well as this loving tribute to retro J-horror classics. How did you go about properly respecting that subgenre’s atmosphere, tone, and style of scares?
DB: I think part of the way that we tried to show respect for the genre, as well as the grander J-horror tradition, was by subverting some of their usual patterns. We talked a lot about the touchstones of not just J-horror, but traditional Japanese ghost stories — Kaidan. One of the patterns that you notice when reading these stories and watching them is that the ghost at the center of it is usually the vengeful spirit of a victim, who is typically a female victim, nine times out of ten. In this ghostly form, this female victim finds herself endowed with powers that she didn’t have in real life. So there’s this real poignancy to our approach that also engages in some inherent commentary on society.
We take a different approach with this movie and the fact that our ghost — he’s called the “Slit-Mouth Man” in Japanese — is part of a long-running children’s story in Japan, kind of like “La Llorona,” called the Slit-Mouth Man. So right away, for Japanese audiences, there’s a signal that we are going in sort of the opposite direction. We’re trying to take the structure of a traditional ghost story in a different direction. The theme that we’re digging into in this movie is also the exact opposite of many Japanese ghost stories. What we’re trying to show with our central character is that the living are much more terrifying than the dead. It was important to come up with a central — for lack of a better term — gimmick and a ghostly figure to help us express this idea.
That was the central thing that we wanted to play with and explore with this movie. And then, along the way, we worked with a lot of incredible veterans of the Japanese film industry, whether it was our lighting director or production designer; everybody just brings a real sense of history and experience to the genre. They understood that we were trying to do something that was a little bit of a twist on the usual.
On that note, I love that with Airi you have this main character who is seemingly not afraid of ghosts. She’s such a complex character that feels like she has this fleshed-out interiority and backstory, even if it’s not all covered on screen. How was Airi developed, and was it a collaborative process with Moeka Hoshi? Did you do any research on mediums to better figure out her character?
DB: That’s a great question. Moeka and I had many, many long discussions about her character. We also prepared a lot of material so that she could understand the meaning behind all the things that she was doing and what all the pieces of her toolkit were for, where they came from, and that kind of thing. We made the decision early on that we wanted this movie to be relatively sparse in terms of exposition and to make it more of an experiential thing. There needed to be a sense of internal logic and a sense of weight behind everything that was happening. It takes a lot of discussion and teamwork in order to accomplish that.
One of the great things that I like about working in the Japanese production system is that the assistant directors come on earlier than they would on an American production. They function as a sort of research department. The script, you know, was fairly bare bones, as most Japanese scripts are. In a Japanese script, usually half the page is left blank for the director to sort of put in instructions and everything like that. The assistant directors did a lot of great work interviewing people from various traditions and gathering a lot of information about traditions, including shamanism, some of which translated into strong visual homages that helped inform Japanese audiences about what kind of tradition she might be coming from. However, we also wanted to present the kind of practice that she does — or the belief system that she comes from — as something that’s entirely unique. We wanted a sort of “universe feel” to the movie.
One of the most striking things to me about this film is that it’s largely a lonely, solitary experience for Airi. She just has the ghost of her deceased sister to interact with. Why did a spirit companion feel like the best foil for Airi, rather than another human medium?
DB: Yeah, it was a real challenge. There was the practical challenge of just how do you get to know this person if she doesn’t have somebody to talk to, and how do you orient people on just the very basics of what’s going on with her without some sort of companion. From the very beginning, I pictured her as being somebody who was terrified of the living, but comfortable with ghosts. So there were these twin challenges. There’s the challenge of how do you make that scary for the audience when she, herself, is not scared. Then there’s the challenge of how do you hint at the interior life that she might have? Fairly early on, while in the discussion process, there was the idea that she had a ghost companion. I love unpacking sibling relationships in stories. An older sister who she has now outgrown felt like a potentially interesting relationship that wouldn’t take a lot of explanation to get across. It just came naturally out of problem solving.
There’s an emphasis on practical effects over CG here, which gives Never After Dark this old-fashioned tactile quality that makes it feel even more real. Was that an important element for you during production?
DB: That was a big deal for me. It’s one of those things where you kind of make a decision early on, and then the waterfall effect of it kind of affects everything and everybody. We just decided early on that if there was ever a possibility of getting it in front of the lens, then we wanted to do that, rather than doing it in post. There is actually plenty of CG work in the movie by my friends at Spade&Co., who also worked on my Netflix show. I also have to say that my experience of working on House of Ninjas was also affected because I had come from something that was very green screen-heavy with a lot of visual effects that were very, very well done. But there’s just something about getting it in front of the lens and giving the actor something tactile to interact with and react to. It’s just so much fun.
I also think it makes it a little bit easier for everybody to catch the vision of what you’re doing. I really saw this movie as a throwback. So every department, from top to bottom, I told them that this movie is set in the early ’90s and that I want to treat this production like it’s in the early ’90s, too. We’ll use the tools that were available then, whenever possible. If it’s something like a clock running backwards, then let’s rig the clock to run backwards, rather than replacing it in post. There were some things that were just impossible to do without CG, but I always wanted to keep the sort of hand-made and tactile feel to everything.
A film I thought about a lot during Never After Dark was The Changeling. That’s another film that does a lot with a little. It’s all about the character’s reactions, and it’s such an intimate story, like this one.
DB: That’s funny because The Changeling is one of my all-time favorite movies and the one that I had everybody watch in preparation for this movie. It’s such a great movie and one that has sort of cracked the code on how to make a movie scary even if the central character isn’t scared. George C. Scott always seems like he’s mostly just peeved, yet the movie itself is very chilling and scary. That was definitely a big, big touchpoint.
That vibe is definitely apparent. Teeth are a recurring motif throughout the film that is especially effective and conjures a creeping sense of dread. How did that element come about?
DB: I felt that in the construction of the film’s villain, I did not want to get inside that guy’s head. I did not want to have a movie where there was anything about him that was rational and made much sense. So in the writing process, I tried to be as free as possible to just put in everything that scares me. The teeth were part of that. I tend to sort of think as I write, and this was reflecting on how you don’t always get the opportunity to just write a movie and then make it. There’s usually a development process where you have to rationalize every single one of your choices. In this, I had the very rare gift of a producer who just wanted me to be free and do whatever I wanted. The teeth motif was part of that because it was important to me to have a villain who was not totally understandable or rational.
Those types of things have their own internal logic, you know? I tried to sort of thread the needle about why he’s doing all this, but I didn’t want to explain it. I didn’t want to get inside his head. I just wanted him to be the worst possible enemy for our protagonist to come up against. For some reason, it’s the teeth that were the thing that scared me the most. I had a really scary dentist as a child too, which is maybe part of that.
Have you been thinking about what you’d like to tackle in your next feature and if you’re sticking with horror? Are there other styles of horror that you’re interested in digging into now that you’ve covered exorcisms and spirits, or is this territory that you’d like to stay in?
DB: Yeah, I’m working on a few things and largely hoping to stay in the horror or horror-adjacent space. I’d love that. I’m working on a sci-fi/horror project for Paramount that I’m really excited about. It took me a long time to get my first shot at doing a horror movie. I’d written a lot of them, but never really gotten a chance to direct one. So I’d love to stay in this space for a while. Horror and mystery — like film noir — are my two favorite genres, so I’m hoping to do more in those spaces.
