Elijah Wood & SpectreVision Team Talk ‘Rabbit Trap’s 70s Folk Horror

While the 70s electronic music and Celtic folk horror vibes of writer/director Bryn Chainey‘s Rabbit Trap make it ideal for a cozy autumn movie night, they also make up the unique cross-section that attracted the team behind SpectreVision to the project.

With the film now available on digital after premiering earlier this year at Sundance, Deadline caught up with producers Elijah Wood, Lawrence Inglee and Daniel Noah about finding projects that fit their banner’s “full spectrum of weird,” like Rabbit Trap.

Wood said he knew the film was “very much up our alley” after fellow producer Elisa Lleras sent them a lookbook for Bryn’s project, “a movie set in the Welsh countryside in 1970s, whose one of the primary characters is a female electronic musician sort of in the tradition of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, these sort of electronic pioneers that are obsessed with. And it’s a folk horror film that we utilizes sound as its primary means of infiltration.”

“It spoke to all of our individual niche interests, so beautifully, and had such a clear vision that felt unlike anything we’d seen, that sort of was able to combine these elements,” added Wood. “And then you pair that with a filmmaker who has such an articulate vision for what he wants to accomplish and how he wants to accomplish it. We were so on board.”

In Rabbit Trap, musician couple Daphne (Rosy McEwen) and Darcy Davenport (Dev Patel) move to the Welsh countryside to finish their new record. While making field recordings in the ancient woodlands, Darcy captures a forbidden sound not meant for human ears. This brings a strange boy (Jade Croot) to their doorstep who draws them into an enigmatic realm where the line between reality and myth begins to blur.

For Noah, he appreciated that the script “doesn’t feel like it’s slave-ish to explaining itself, and it has the courage to be a little mysterious, to be a little ambiguous, which is something that is all too missing in cinema today.

“I think there’s this almost fearful compulsion to over-explain everything, and that’s not how life works,” he explained. “Life is mysterious and ambiguous, and so the film to us, is a beautiful representation of that type of experience that is just not captured very often in movies.”

As the film navigates the couple’s turbulent marriage and their decision to have baby, their strange visitor brings up old traumas for Darcy, which are explored ambiguously through sound and magic.

“What a remarkable environment and atmosphere to come at these sort of things, like unspoken traumas or anxieties about family, or a sense of the strange or where you’re being led,” said Inglee. “All these things were at play here.”

With a comic book, a podcast and a new Norwegian horror film also in the pipeline, read on about the SpectreVision team’s experience making Rabbit Trap, now available on digital.

DEADLINE: I loved Rabbit Trap, I saw it at Sundance. Tell me what you guys first thought when you read the script and how it fit into the SpectreVision mission.

LAWRENCE INGLEE: Let’s first say that it is a beautifully written script, right? Bryn is an exceptionally good writer, and the notion of rendering those descriptions into cinema would have been one of the big giant question marks when you first read the script because they were so elegant and beautiful.

ELIJAH WOOD: We were sent the lookbook from a colleague who’s also a producer on the movie, Elisa Lleras, who knows our taste, and read the script and saw this lookbook, and knew that it would be very much up our alley; a movie set in the Welsh countryside in 1970s, whose one of the primary characters is a female electronic musician sort of in the tradition of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, these sort of electronic pioneers that are obsessed with. And it’s a folk horror film that we utilizes sound as its primary means of infiltration. It spoke to all of our individual niche interests, so beautifully, and had such a clear vision that felt unlike anything we’d seen, that sort of was able to combine these elements. And then you pair that with a filmmaker who has such an articulate vision for what he wants to accomplish and how he wants to accomplish it. We were so on board. 

DEADLINE: Can you tell me a little bit about some of those cult influences that went into the making of this? 

DANIEL NOAH: I think some of what Elijah just mentioned, Delia Derbyshire and Suzanne Ciani and Daphne Oram, they’re sometimes cheekily called the ‘Sisters with Transistors’, but there was this movement of these incredibly brilliant British women in late 50s and early 60s who were absolutely breaking ground in experimental electronic music, and we’re huge geeks for that period. So, a movie about that was really thrilling. But I think in the cinema tip, there’s a great legacy of folk horror from the 70s, like Witchfinder General and Wicker Man, they have this this very peculiar haunting quality, but I think the biggest one was we talked a lot about Don’t Look Now and it’s kind of kaleidoscopic view of events. And one of the things I think that really thrilled us so much about Rabbit Trap is that it doesn’t feel like it’s slave-ish to explaining itself, and it has the courage to be a little mysterious, to be a little ambiguous, which is something that is all too missing in cinema today. I think there’s this almost fearful compulsion to over-explain everything, and that’s not how life works. Life is mysterious and ambiguous, and so the film to us, is a beautiful representation of that type of experience that is just not captured very often in movies.

INGLEE: And also, it was a representative of a way of trying to find a language to express things that you don’t know how to express, this poetic foundation. And we’ve all looked at this movie in different ways, and it can work like a Rorschach test in that sense, but for me, I read a script that was about the fear of having children for people who have been traumatized as children, and being aided in that healing from a supernatural force that’s walking them, dragging them through this healing in the middle of a marriage in crisis. What a remarkable environment and atmosphere to come at these sort of things, like unspoken traumas or anxieties about family, or a sense of the strange or where you’re being led. All these things were at play here, and just the literal texture of the movie itself was so unique and so beautiful that its relationship to the natural world, I think that’s another element that drew us in, and its commitment to the local nature of its mythology. 

DEADLINE: I really love the the whole Celtic folklore that I feel like I’ve seen a few movies lately that have really been channeling that, and this really expanded my love of that sub-genre. Tell me a little bit about filming in that specific location, with that beautiful countryside.

NOAH: It was a really glorious surprise to many of us who haven’t been there before, and one of the dark secrets of the movie, which I’ll reveal … is that it was shot in Yorkshire, even though it’s set in Wales. And this had to do with the smoking. The characters, of course, exist in the mid-70s, they smoke. It’s against the law to smoke in a workplace in Wales, so the production moved just like this, and we got to live in an equally magical world that sort of spoke back to the movie in many ways. Like every location scout starts to tell you about your movie in ways that you don’t expect, and here, our jaw kept dropping. It’s like, “There really is this cave? Wait, there really is cliff? There really is that forest?” And what have you. And so, every day it was an element that surprised us. Also, the weather was so wildly unpredictable. The movie was being shot in July, and there are days that it was like, “Oh, it’s winter today, everybody, and it’s going to be wet and cold like you have never felt before in your life in the middle of July in this forest.” So that was happening too.

DEADLINE: I really did love the whole element of sound in the movie and the way music is utilized as well. Can you tell me about working on that on the technical side and some of the challenges? 

INGLEE: Sound’s always been extremely primary for us, and we love to be in the mix. The mix is my favorite part of the filmmaking process, personally, and have mixed our movies in sort of slightly unusual ways, not to get too much into the weeds. But, one of the things we’ve often said is that it’s not necessarily correct to separate score and sound design, because every sound that you hear in a movie is part of the its music, and so this was a place we could actually literalize that. So, [sound designer] Graham Reznick and [composer] Lucrecia Dalt worked in tandem, and it’s difficult to kind of say who did what because they just built this sonic universe together that’s so incredibly alive, and so to get to have an opportunity to make a movie that’s literally about sound, not just celebrating sound in its creation, but about sound, was like a bucket list item.

DEADLINE: You touched on this earlier, just about accepting the trauma that we experience as children and trying not to inflict that on our own children, and that was another thing I really appreciated, how this movie explores so much sound, but when Dev’s character is finally ready to say what happened to him, that’s the one time you don’t need to hear it, you just know that he’s healing.

NOAH: I mean, it was a hot topic of conversation, and this may be shocking, but there were certain voices that felt we should hear what he’s saying on that tape, which we were just absolutely insistent on not doing it. I think one of the most thrilling moments for me was—when you’re workshopping and edit, you show the movie to friends—and so, we screened and edit of it, and in the scene where Dev tells a secret that we don’t hear, my friend next to me was like sobbing, and when the movie was over, I said, “You were really affected by the end. Can you tell me, what do you think was on the tape?” And he said, “Oh, it’s so obvious, they’re getting a divorce.” Well, he was getting a divorce. And I thought, “We nailed it. Everyone’s gonna put their particular issue on that recording.” And it was exactly what we hoped would happen.

DEADLINE: That’s great. Yeah, I love, like you said, leaving it up to the audience to kind of make up their own mind. I really appreciate that.

WOOD: Because, it sort of doesn’t matter what it is. It’s just that he had a trauma that he’s now articulated. And like Daniel said, it’s for the audience to kind of put their own experience on it, to make of it what they want, you know?

DEADLINE: Absolutely. What else does SpectreVision have going on right now?

INGLEE: We have our comic book imprint now with Oni Press called High Strangeness, it’s a series of stories about the paranormal, and the first issue was released on October 8, and we’re very excited about it. The first season is five interconnected stories, about different paranormal phenomena. And we also recently rolled out this podcast network called SpectreVision Radio, which is this extremely comprehensive overview of anything in any way related to genre or esotericism or the paranormal or consciousness, psychedelics, the full spectrum of weird, so it’s all part of the story that we’re telling with SpectreVision throughout our different divisions.

DEADLINE: Awesome. That sounds cool. Are you maybe considering adapting the comic books for film or television? 

WOOD: Potentially. It happens to be a great space to sort of incubate something. It wasn’t necessarily the intention behind this, it was really like wanting to partner with a company we loved. And Oni’s awesome, and they had this opportunity for us. So, it was something that we had wanted to express for a while, and it just kind of all coalesced. So yeah, maybe, we’ll see. And we also have a Norwegian film that is premiering at Fantastic Fest in a few days, called Dawning [aka Demring], that we’re really excited about, from a really thrilling Norwegian filmmaker [Patrik Syversen], who’s made something really singular and special that I think is gonna freak some people out. It’s great.