Exclusive: Johannes Roberts Talks The Other Side of the Door
Staci Layne Wilson
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In The Other Side of the Door (review), Maria (Sarah Wayne Callies) becomes blinded by guilt after losing her young son Oliver (Logan Creran) in a tragic traffic accident. The horror only deepens after Maria learns about an isolated Hindu temple where visitors can communicate with the dead to say goodbye for the last time.
She takes the plunge and decides to try this dangerous experiment, and in her grief she disobeys a dire warning to never open the ancient door that serves as a veil between the living and the dead. Her failure to follow the rules causes her son’s restless spirit to return home and haunt his father and his sister (Jeremy Sisto, Sofia Rosinsky).
The director of the film is Johannes Roberts, who’s not really known for horror – but he was attracted to the story for a variety of reasons. Here’s what he had to say about it when we say down with him recently to chat about the newly-released DVD and Blu-ray of The Other Side of the Door.
Dread Central: It must have been quite exciting to have a horror film legend like Alexandre Aja produce your first supernatural feature… tell us what made you want to do a horror film.
Johannes Roberts: Yeah, I work a lot in thrillers and scary stuff, but I don’t really respond as a writer or director to slasher material. For me, I really like supernatural movies, and I think they deal with some very interesting themes. I’m totally fascinated with life after death, what happens after you die, how far would you go to bring someone back… those kind of topics really interest me, and that’s what sort of drove me to tell the story so I was really interested in examining this woman in her hour of utter, utter despair and watching someone so isolated and lonely. Mumbai is the craziest place you’ve ever been to, and I just imagined everything about that place that attracted you to it, the noise, the chaos, the color, is equally… when something as horrific as losing a child happens to her, that turns that place into a living hell, and it was all of these kind of things that I thought, ‘Wow, these are really interesting themes to explore in a script,’ so that is what really drew me to it.
DC: Are you a parent? Is that part of the interest in exploring this theme?
JR: I just had a son so it was a very dark… it was an interesting… not interesting, but scary proposition for me, what happens if you lose a child, and it’s the most terrifying, once you’ve had children, the most terrifying concept. Like I said, the whole thing about the world of the supernatural, what’s after death and stuff, personally interests me an awful lot so it was something I wanted to explore.
DC: Your score is by Joseph Bishara, who’s really a legend in the world of horror themes… what was it like to work with him?
JR: First of all, he’s a great guy. He was on very early in the process, we knew we wanted him, he’s a sort of lore onto himself, he goes off and sort of creates this crazy world; but yeah, the one thing I really wanted from this score was emotion, not just scare but that there was an emotional core to it. That was something we really worked on, a theme throughout the movie that just repeats over and over again. I’m very sort of influenced by… I like repetitive themes throughout the score. It’s almost like rolling a snowball down a hill, it becomes bigger and bigger each time, it sort of picks up the emotions of the movie and becomes more and more as the movie goes on. So the emotion was the real key that we understood and how to get into the feeling of a foreign culture, but not playing sitars and not doing a sort of Indian elevator music stuff. So that was it, and he just knocked it out of the park with a most amazing score. I love it.
DC: Your next movie is scary too – it’s about sharks, right? And your score on that one is by tomandandy… It must be quite different from The Other Side of the Door, right?
JR: Yeah, it’s a fantastic score, [but] it’s polar opposite to Other Side. It’s nasty, dirty synth, driving synth music but really, really… I want to say the word ‘vile.’ It’s twisted, and yeah, it’s great; it’s a pounding, claustrophobic score. It’s not like Jaws, but it has a sort of… it’s a movie about running out of air basically, these girls are trapped at the bottom of the ocean and they have to work out how to get back up with only a limited amount of air, and the score sort of gets that pounding, like ticking away with the air. It’s a very tense movie, like a nail-biter I think.
DC: What kinds of extras can you talk about on the new The Other Side of the Door Blu-ray to entice fans to check it out?
JR: There’s some pretty full-on sequences with, and this is a spoiler, with the dog at the end, the beheading, which we discussed about putting in or not in the actual cut, and it was very interesting watching it with an audience, whether we should see this little girl behead the dog, so that’s there. And there are more sort of gore sequences where we were just finding the tone of the movie and wondering how gory we should go with it so there are some cool scenes there. And then there is all the kind of behind the scenes where you can see the craziness of the world. It was absolute madness, so you’ll see a bit of that in there behind the scenes.
Synopsis:
In this chilling supernatural story from co-writer/director Johannes Roberts, a family’s idyllic life abroad turns to tragedy — then terror. After her young son dies in an accident, a grieving mother (Sarah Wayne Callies) learns of a ritual that will bring him back for a final goodbye. When she travels to an ancient temple to undertake the ritual, she discovers a door that serves as a portal to the afterworld. But when she ignores a warning not to open the door, the balance between life and death is upset. Now, an unspeakable horror is unleashed that threatens the lives of everyone she loves. This unpredictable film co-starring Jeremy Sisto delivers edge-of-your-seat thrills from start to finish.
Special Features:
- Six Deleted Scenes
- Behind the Door – Making-of Featurette
- Still Gallery
Categorized:News
