Interviews
‘Family Dinner’ Director Peter Hengl on Easter Feasts, Bonfires, and Folk Horror [Interview]
Writer/Director Peter Hengl’s feature debut, Family Dinner, mines the discomfort and cringe of awkward family dynamics at the dinner table to deliver memorable holiday horror. In this instance, the holiday is Easter, a rarity in the genre space.
Just in time for Easter, SCREAMBOX Exclusive Family Dinner will be served on April 7. The Austrian horror film follows an overweight teen to her aunt’s farm before the Easter holiday, hoping to lose weight, only to discover something deeply wrong.
Ahead of the release, Bloody Disgusting spoke with Hengl about Family Dinner. The filmmaker discussed its origins, the importance of food and food styling for his feature debut, and finding inspiration from his love of folk horror.
“I remember childhood nightmares that I can’t mention because they would be massive spoilers to the end of the film,” Hengl teases about the personal origins behind Family Dinner. “I remember those nightmares, which are funny because I come from a very, very happy, very loving family. I have very, very, very loving parents, very supportive parents. But somehow, there was this idea that probably came at an age where for the first time as a kid, I became aware of the, let’s call it, the imperfection of my parents, realizing that your parents aren’t always perfect. I guess my subconscious kind of made me aware of the potential that parents can be evil. That’s essentially from where it came, combined with many different things.
“For instance, my producer/wife used to study nutritional sciences at the university before she chose a career in film. And so lots of different puzzle pieces came together. My wife has absolutely nothing in common with Aunt Claudia [played by Pia Hierzegger] and would be very angry about any comparisons. But somehow this turned into this weird coming of age story, and I think all good horror films are coming of age stories.”
From there, Hengl tells us how his childhood nightmares evolved into Family Dinner.
He explains, “Another thing that’s a huge influence for me is movies. There are a lot of horror movies I love, and I have a particular sweet spot for folk horror. From the beginning, I knew that I wanted to incorporate folk horror elements. It also made a lot of sense with the whole spiritual side of Aunt Claudia, and a lot of religious celebrations have a lot to do with food, which for most of the time we all love that, particularly with Easter, at least in the Catholic faith, which I was raised in. There are a lot of connections to food there as well as in the pagan background of Easter, which is already a religious tradition that has a lot to do with food and, of course, with fasting and withholding food and then ultimately splurging at a big celebration. So that fits the story’s requirements quite well and worked well with the rest of the story and where I wanted to go.”
Food is essential to Family Dinner in its eponymous Easter feast and the constant temptations for protagonist Simi (Nina Katlein). While Hengl’s film is fearless in turning up the horror, and it does, he took great care in ensuring the food looked enticing.
“I knew from the start that the food and the way the food looks had to be perfect,” he tells us. “My production designer and I got together very early on and essentially created a menu for the film. We created a menu of food we wanted to serve, and then we hired a food styling company that usually works in advertising. They created, I’d say, 80% of the beautiful food you see in the film for us. Interestingly, and that was very surprising to me when you think about food styling in advertising or films, the cliché you always hear is that they use a lot of stuff that’s inedible like hairspray to make, I don’t know, salad leaves glimmer or whatever. The guys we had didn’t do that at all. They were aware of those techniques, but they said, ‘No, we only create food that is edible.’ So everything you see on screen was completely one hundred percent edible. It sometimes didn’t taste too good because it had been standing around for quite a while or in the cold for prolonged periods, but everything was edible, and most of it was pretty tasty.”
Beyond food, Hengl shared his cinematic influences for Family Dinner, revealing a deep love of folk horror in the process.
“I mostly did this with the crew and the heads of department. There are a couple of movies that I suggested to everyone to watch. One of my all-time favorite movies is 1973’s The Wicker Man,” Hengl reveals. “One of the most recent movies I enjoyed and that left an impression on me regarding my own filmmaking was Ari Aster’s Hereditary, which is not just an amazing movie, it’s also an amazingly well made movie. Every single shot he has in that film is perfectly crafted, and it’s meticulous regarding its camera movements and everything. This is something that we really try to work towards.
“Of course, we were probably not able to live up to such a great example, but tonally, I felt this was a good inspiration. Although, of course, we tried to do our own thing. Also, during shooting, because we shot during Covid and we had to essentially stay in a hotel for the whole production. Most people even chose to stay in the hotel over the weekends because that was the safest way to do it, apart from testing and so on. I did movie nights on the weekend to show off some of my favorites. Some stuff like The Wicker Man and The Shining were films I screened and that they, especially our two young actors, greatly enjoyed watching. I hope.”
Family Dinner also introduces an old Easter tradition that never made its way stateside but perhaps should: an Easter bonfire.
Hengl explains, “It is a local tradition. It’s common in rural Austria to have bonfires around Easter, usually on Easter Sunday or the night before Easter Sunday. So that actually is a piece of local folklore, and I felt that fit the whole motive of the film very well.”
Get ready for a gnarly horror feast this Easter with Family Dinner, exclusively available to stream on SCREAMBOX beginning on Good Friday, April 7, 2023.
Exclusives
‘Tarot’ Filmmakers Spenser Cohen & Anna Halberg on Practical Creature Effects and ‘Insidious’ Inspirations
An evil curse gets awakened in Screen Gems horror movie Tarot when a group of friends recklessly ignore a sacred rule: never use someone else’s deck. Writers/Directors Spenser Cohen & Anna Halberg unleash a variety of Tarot card-inspired entities on the group through practical effects, and create an unexpected connection to Insidious along the way.
The film comes exclusively to movie theaters on May 3, 2024.
Bloody Disgusting spoke with Cohen and Halberg ahead of Tarot‘s release, where the pair shared more about the film’s practical effects-driven horrors and revealed how Tarot drew from Insidious in a specific way.
To start, though, the filmmakers reveal just how closely their horror movie sticks to the source novel Horrorscope by Nicholas Adams. The short answer is, well, it doesn’t at all!
Cohen explains, “It’s so different. We never even read the book and took nothing from the book. The only thing, the studio had a title that they liked, and so that’s why there was an association. Then we changed the title. So, now there’s literally zero connection to the book.“
“Sony had come to us wanting to make a horror movie about astrology, but there’s nothing that’s inherently scary to us about Zodiac signs. So, we came up with the idea of combining tarot readings and tarot cards with astrology, and that’s what ended up becoming the movie. There’s such incredible iconography in these cards that we really had a plethora of amazing characters to choose from,” Halberg adds.
Adain Bradley ‘Grant’ and Jacob Batalon ‘Paxton’ in Screen Gems TAROT
With a group of seven friends, expect to see their fates sealed by a number of cards. In other words, expect to see a wide variety of Tarot-inspired creatures tormenting the protagonists. The filmmakers stressed the importance of practical effects for their creatures.
Cohen tells us, “From the get-go, we said every creature is going to be practical. We were thinking of [David] Cronenberg, of Alien and The Thing, and we want our actors responding to real things, not a tennis ball. It always just looks better. You get better performances. With the designs themselves, if you look at the tarot cards and these specific characters, there’s nothing inherently terrifying about them, even though we associate the cards with being supernatural and terrifying. And [it’s] why we partnered with Trevor [Henderson], who was the only designer we met with. We were like, this is our guy because he has this ability to make the familiar feel unnatural.
“His designs are really grounded. I am sure you’ve seen a lot of his stuff where it’s like a hallway, and there’s something there, and something’s off about it, but it really feels like it’s in the space. We knew that he has a special brain for creating unique creatures, and he hadn’t done a movie, which is just shocking to us. Then, we knew that in order to pull that off, we would need a design team with equal skill. That was Dan Martin and his amazing team who worked hand in hand with Trevor to bring those to life.”
Larsen Thompson ‘Elise’ in Screen Gems TAROT
Great designs and practical effects are one thing, but it also falls to the performers to infuse these monsters with personality to make them memorable. That was also at the forefront of the filmmakers’ minds.
“In order for the creatures to translate, underneath all the prosthetics, you have to have great actors,” Cohen confirms. “We met with a lot of people. We were looking for people who were talking to us about the psychology and the movement and how they could move in a way that we hadn’t seen before or incorporate dance. We were looking for those outliers, and basically, everyone we hired approached the part as if there were no makeup or prosthetics. It’s like, ‘I am the Magician, so this is what I want to do. I’m going to have a limp. My body’s going to do this. I feel like my head is hunched.’ And we would watch these actors just embody these roles. It was really just picking great people, honestly. It’s hard to act through prosthetics and create emotion and fear and other things. You have to have an incredible control to be able to do that.”
Halberg elaborates,” Even though we enhanced some of the creatures with visual effects, we didn’t want to rely on that. So we needed people, like Spenser said, who each brought their own unique feel to these characters. They were just as important as all of the other actors in the movie and are so crucial to making sure that these sequences are scary and believable.”
Humberly González ‘Madeline’ in Screen Gems TAROT
One of the many Tarot creatures in the film is the Magician, who comes with an original song by the film’s composer, Joseph Bishara. While Bishara has delivered no shortage of great contemporary horror scores, including The Conjuring and Malignant, horror fans are likely more familiar with Bishara as the Lipstick Demon in the Insidious franchise. Cohen and Halberg can be counted among Insidious fans, so much so that they wanted an original song from the Lipstick Demon himself.
They explain, “We actually, in prep, we called Joe, and we said, ‘Hey, we’re going to do some kind of an old-timey song there.’ We knew something creepy, very Shining-esque. Then we had the idea to do a song called ‘I Saw You’ to be a pun on that whole thing. And actually use saws as the instrument. We found these YouTube videos, and our DP, I think, Elie [Smolkin] had found these videos of someone playing a saw. We were like, that’s terrifying.
“So we called Joe, and we said, ‘You know Tiptoe through the Tulips, how that’s like in Insidious?’ That’s the thing you leave the theater thinking about, and it gets under your skin. We were like, ‘Can you do that for us with an original song?’ He said yes. What you hear in the movie is basically what he played for us the first time. He was just like, ‘I have an idea. I’ll talk to you guys in a week.’ And then that was what we heard, and it was amazing.”
With so many entities and horror sequences, Halberg can’t pick a favorite. Instead, she offers one last tease, “I hope people come away with the realization that each of the sequences is so unique and different, and that each of the creatures is so special because we took a lot of time trying to craft each of these kills or scares to be their own thing and to feel different.
“Hopefully everybody can choose their own favorite.”
‘Infested’ Review – One of the Best Spiders Attack Horror Movies in Years
‘The King Tide’: An Island Town Rots with Moral Decay in Canadian Folk Horror Fable [Review]
Limited Edition Morticia & Wednesday Addams ‘Monster High’ Dolls Releasing Next Week!
TWO New ‘Evil Dead’ Movies Now in the Works; Sébastien Vaniček & Francis Galluppi Directing
“AHS: Delicate” Review – ‘The Auteur’ Gives Birth to a Lackluster, Laughable Finale
You must be logged in to post a comment.