‘Gateway’ Director And Cinematographer On Shaping Their Irish Haunted House Film
Mary Beth McAndrews
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Some films find a way to snake their way into your brain, snuggling into your frontal lobe, and poking you in that squishy grey matter every so often to remind you it’s there. Niall Owens‘ new film Gateway is one such film, at least for this writer, a gut-punch of a slow-burn with some cosmic implications. And just recently, it arrived on the horror streaming service Shudder.
In Gateway:
When four troubled criminals decide to set up their drug operation in an abandoned house, they find a mysterious locked room. As the house lures them each into this secret space, it confronts them with their innermost evil and their darkest thoughts, ultimately pitting them against each other.
We spoke with Owens and Gateway cinematographer Ger Murphy about their urban haunted house tale, Irish horror, and navigating small, abandoned places while filming.
Dread Central: Niall, this is your baby. You wrote and directed Gateway. I wanted to hear just very simply to start off where the idea for this twist on the haunted house slash possession movie came from for you.
Niall Owens: To be honest with you, it was born out of, in a way, necessity. I had a location for another movie I was hoping to do with Ger. Then that movie fell through, so I still had the location. It was like, okay, I need a story. So a friend of mine who works in the police department, he’s a drug squad officer. He told me that in Cork especially, there was an increasing instance of grow houses and people growing marijuana.
I thought that’s a really interesting way to get characters into a building that they’re not supposed to be in. But at the same time, they’re kind of beholden to it because they need it. And so if you marry that with a building that has something that is detrimental to them, but at the same time they need it, it comes back to that thing with horror movies of why don’t they just leave? That’s the classic question. Just run away. And it’s a logical question. I ask it myself.
In this instance, I needed their need to outweigh the danger to a degree until it was too late. So that’s where [Gateway] came from. And then I love movies that begin a certain way. From Dust Till Dawn is a great example. It starts out as a crime caper, and then at one point, it flips into a crazy vampire horror movie. I like that idea of surprising an audience where they kind go, okay, I was expecting one thing, but now I’m being taken in a different direction.
DC: So how quickly did you write the script then, if you already had the location and had to secure it?
NO: Gateway would probably be the least structured writing process I’ve ever done. I’ve always adhered to the three-act structure and adhered to all the different rules in terms of putting a script together so that way it’s formatted correctly. With Gateway, what it ended up being was the first draft was 60 pages. It had the bones of the story in terms of the mechanics, the place, what happens, et cetera. But it didn’t have an emotional core. It didn’t have a spine that you could attach everything to give it a sense of purpose, if you want to call it that.
Then I realized this is ultimately a film about grief. So that’s the central core between Mike and the character of Hannah. Then I layered that within what I already had, and I got it up to about 80-something odd pages. It wasn’t the classic writing process. It was a very kind of piece-by-piece, but it worked. It’s one of those things where you’re like, is it luck? I don’t know. It’s ethereal. Who knows?
DC: Yeah, that’s awesome. Then how did you and Ger work together to create the look and feel of Gateway? I really love how stark this movie feels in a lot of ways.
Ger Murphy: Well, essentially we were in a house, so we’ve been filming in these type of houses before. It’s quite common for a lot of people. They’re small. So it was really about how to get the story out. When we’re interested in faces, we said it’s perfect because we didn’t have the space to be giving massive long shots and things. We’re quite experienced in regards to working with a lot of bigger sets and things, so we understand using space and how to tell a story within the space.
So we’re just incredibly strict from the start when we came up with a plan. Everything had to follow a certain set of rules in our own head to bring power to each scene because otherwise, I think in houses and things like that, you can get lost because you’re just flipping around. If it was just handheld, I don’t think it would have the same appeal. Obviously, there are certain handheld shots, but they wouldn’t give a certain strength to some of the images and allow a lot of our characters to operate within a really small frame, which allowed them to be powerful, I think, in quiet moments.
DC: Cool. Were there films that you both maybe had in the back of your mind while you were writing and also shooting? I got a lot of Session 9 and Kill List vibes from this, so I was just curious, what else maybe influenced y’all while working on this project?
NO: That’s a good question. For me, I think actually what I thought of a lot was a movie called Dead Man’s Shoes by Shane Meadows, which is a great revenge thriller. It’s not a horror film, but what I loved about it was that it had this feeling of you’re there on the street with the character, you know what I mean? You’re with him. It’s a beautiful, beautiful film with amazing performances from Paddy Considine and Toby Kebbell.
But the way in which they shot that, you were there with them. And the thing is, for me, what was essential with Gateway is to feel like you’re there with them. So I always wanted a very grounded aesthetic, not to get carried away with trying to do anything flashy. It just wasn’t that movie. It needed to be about the story and it needed to have a look that would have a flow to it. I wanted the audience to feel that these were real people as opposed to people actors playing gangsters in a horror movie.
GM: Niall’s a very story-driven person. I’m a very image-driven person. So sometimes I’d pick a film that might not necessarily suit to fit in with Nile’s story as such. So I used to use Animal Kingdom a lot, the Australian film, because once again, it was a lot of stuff in houses and holding along, but it was also just as Niall said, it was just such a basic feel for each of the characters to come through. And I always loved that film to come through for that.
DC: How did you go about making this location feel varied visually when you’re in an empty, falling-apart house for an hour and a half?
GM: Can I say one thing?
DC: Of course.
GM: Niall always brings me into small places to shoot, and it freaks me out, to be honest. But when he showed me the house, we walked in the door, and I have to say it was the wallpaper that got me. There was so much texture in the wallpaper. It was so different in each of the rooms that it allowed us to start planning and detailing and adding in framing and bringing different little worlds into one small space. I dunno, for Niall, it may have been something different.
NO: Ger’s shot everything I’ve made and we’ve established a good understanding in terms of visuals. And the thing is we both appreciate that the camera is another part of the story. It’s another part of the narrative, and it needs to feel like it’s part of the narrative and not something that’s trying to one-up the narrative. Gateway is minimalist out of necessity. It’s a very show, don’t tell kind of situation. You know what I mean? A lot of showing things without going too deeply into exposition and character relationships.
I’ve seen a good few reviews and people ask the question and it’s a very pragmatic question, which is, what is the gateway? Why is it there? And all these questions, they’re valid questions, but they’re not questions I was ever interested in answering, even for myself. It’s just there. I always liken it to a black hole. And the way I described it to my composer, Tony, was that once the characters learn about the house, they have essentially crossed the event horizon, and they’re always going to that house. The house is inevitable for them, and they end up there. There’s no changing it. They’re going there regardless of whatever happens to them. But that’s how I liken it in my head,
DC: Very cosmic horror in a way. I know it’s not the typical cosmic horror, but it plays with those tropes in a really interesting way. An unknowable room is very cool.
NO: To be honest with you. I can’t say it’s deliberate.
DC: Oh yeah, definitely.
NO: But I had a very definite idea. As Ger already mentioned, we laid down rules. We’ve done it for everything we’ve ever made. We make decisions to start, and we adhere to them throughout the process of making that particular film. We’re very conscious that this is a canvas and all the elements that are on the canvas make up the whole, make up the image, and they all have to flow and be in synchronicity. I’m very proud of the fact that we achieved that.
DC: Irish horror to me is such a specific subgenre in my heart. Why do you think people are drawn to Irish horror? What about Irish horror feels so unique? Do you think that there’s a difference or is it just me as an American thinking that there’s a difference?
GM: I know Ireland traditionally, we believe in fairies, essentially. So no matter who you are, you hear all these stories all your life. There’s always a little something extra to every person or every story you hear. It’s because we come from fantastical ideals/ I’m from a small village, but if you don’t tell a good story, the person’s going to turn around and walk off. You have to add that something for them to grab onto and to feel it. So I know for me, that’s it. But I’m very village-focused, I’m very much a country person.
NO: One other thing with regards to Irish horror, I would look at it much like a Japanese or Korean horror film. When Ringu came out or
, they had a different texture to them. They had a different feel like Irish filmmaking. It has a different feel to American filmmaking and it’s closer to English filmmaking. So I think English Irish Horror or UK Horror, they would be very closely aligned. I think a lot of the time they deal with characters that are very much middle class, lower class, and there’s a real texture to those stories that don’t have that sheen that a lot of the bigger American movies would have.
The French would have a different texture altogether, like Switchblade Romance [also known as High Tension]. I would’ve watched a lot of Japanese horror when I was growing up, and that had a whole different feel. So I think it’s each culture revealing its own approach to horror and then the texture of that. There are lot more filmmakers and there are a lot more stories coming out of Ireland in terms of horror. If you can get the money. That’s the challenge. It’s not cheap.
Gateway is available now on Shudder.
Categorized:Interviews
