Kyle and Adam Newacheck On Their New Thriller ‘Stranger In The Woods’
Mary Beth McAndrews
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Brothers Kyle and Adam Newacheck are no strangers to the world of comedy. With Kyle executive producing series like What We Do In The Shadows and Adam directing episodes of series like Workaholics, the two obviously know how to be funny. So now, with Adam’s new film—which Kyle produced—Stranger In The Woods, they’re going in the opposite direction to see just how scary and tense they can be.
Read the full synopsis below:
A woman goes on a weekend getaway trip to the woods with her friends in hopes of recovering from a traumatic event. But when her dog vanishes, their sanity unravels, leading to a chilling fight for survival.
We spoke with Adam and Kyle, as well as with star and writer Holly Kenney, about casting dogs, making movies with friends, and the horrors of What Lies Beneath.
Dread Central: Holly, I want to start with you because you wrote the script. I wanted to hear about how you came to this idea for Stranger in the Woods.
Holly Kenney: Yeah, this is my first-ever screenplay, which is wild.
DC: Congratulations. That’s amazing.
HK: Thank you. Thank you so much. The thing that I think the reason why it worked and why it happened is because it started off with me just trying to make a short story. I want to make something, I want to act in something, I want to be creative with my friends. But realistically, we probably can’t make a feature, so let’s just make a short story. And then I came up with this version of Stranger in the Woods as a short story that was like 50 pages. I gave it to Adam and he was like, just make it a feature. So then I just came up with the rest of the story. But I think the reason why it worked is because it’s been a collaborative project from the beginning, really.
This movie has gone through so many rewrites and so many drafts. The main plot was always there, but there have been so many adaptations and differences. We really kind of went down so many avenues to see what would really work for this story and for these characters. But it has been a project that we started in 2017.
When I tell you I didn’t know how to write a screenplay, I was Googling everything. I was like, how do you write in a music queue? Teach me, Google, teach me everything. Or I would show it to Adam and he’d be like, “Oh, you do this. This is how you would phrase that.” So the fact that Stranger In The Woods was a collaborative piece, I think is really what made it work. And we’ve all been so involved in the script process for years before we even made the movie. So I think that was huge and crucial and so helpful when it came time to actually filming too.
DC: Yeah. Then for you, Adam and Kyle, it sounds like you are all friends and have been all working together for a while. It sounds like Adam, you came in very early in the process and were helping read the script. Kyle, when did you come into the process with Stranger In The Woods ?
Kyle Newacheck: I think I read it for the first time in 2019. So I think it had gone through a few drafts and it was brought to me. I believe Adam had already been working with Holly. Brendan, who plays Sam in the film was also working on it and noting it up. Then it came to me, and that’s when I read it. I just remember coming off of directing Murder Mystery and understanding how really, for one of the first times, the thriller genre, the Twist, and how important that is as the backbone of this comedy that I was making. That script was written by James Vanderbilt who wrote Zodiac, which is also just a fantastic film. Then when I read Stranger In The Woods, I remember thinking like, “Oh, this functions really well.”
Yeah, it’s their first attempt at this, but this is really functioning at a high level. So I think although I wasn’t prepared to greenlight the film in 2019—we did that in 2021—it just sat in my head as like, well, that’s probably ready. That’s ready to really cook. That’s ready to get going. So yeah, I think that’s when I was brought on. And that’s where Adam comes in, because I know he worked on the screenplay the whole time, valuing how we could actually do it. We don’t need anybody else to go do this. We can do it ourselves. And so Adam had that way through, and then he just had to convince me to say yes. I don’t know how that happened though, Adam.
Adam Newacheck: I can be pretty convincing when I know I can make it. I knew I could make the movie. There was no question about it. I knew that when I got the script and we finally got something that was like, “Okay, we’ll make a few changes here and there.” But once I realized that there are two things that I love. The first thing was the producer in me was like, I know I can make this movie. I know we have the equipment. I know we have the people that can do it. We have the locations. So there’s that side. That was for me, very easy to convince.
And then the other side was, these are themes that I wanted to explore with the survivor story and believing victims and things like that that I wanted to personally explore. I didn’t know a ton about it. So for me, it was on the creative side. That’s really why I wanted to Kyle and get this off the ground.
DC: Cool. Well, I was going to say, Holly, it’s such an interesting story and it’s complicated. I recently just directed, side note, an indie film about believing survivors and about sexual assault. So watching this as a female director and seeing this from a female writer was really awesome. I was just curious what that process was like for you. And I know Stranger In The Woods was collaborative, but with tackling such sensitive topics layered into the thriller slash horror genre, what was that experience like for you both to write and then also have to embody that physically as an actor?
HK: It was a lot. Yeah. There were a few times when I was on set and I was like, what have I done?
But I think writing this was very a therapeutic thing for me. And Liv is a character who I unfortunately think people can relate to in some way, shape, or form. Obviously, probably not her exact story, but the themes of gaslighting and manipulation and not being believed, and also just trying to get through every day as if everything’s fine. When your world has kind of crashed and shattered and fallen apart, and you don’t know who you can trust, you don’t even know if you can trust yourself. You just have to keep going every day as if nothing’s happened to you, even though the worst has happened to you.
So it was therapeutic writing it out and then getting to actually play. It was, I think, even more daunting to me than writing Liv. Really, I wanted her to just be real. I didn’t want her to be some dolled-up damsel in distress.
I wanted her to be a young woman who has gone through the wringer and who’s trying her best every day. She’s rough around the edges, and she’s not who she used to be. And you kind of see the ripple effect that causes not only for her, but for the people around her. I think that’s something that doesn’t get talked about enough with trauma and things like that is how other people start to view you differently. Other people start to treat you differently and how that makes you feel and things like that.
So I really just wanted her to be grounded in reality and real and vulnerable and kind of a hot mess. And so just making sure that that was my focus and my goal every day of just bringing that to light, but also making her smart. I wanted her to be a smart woman too. There’s a classic horror tropes that are in there because I love horror and I love thriller, and you’ve got to include ’em a little bit. But it was important to me that she wasn’t a damsel in distress, that she wasn’t a superhero, but wasn’t helpless. Finding that middle ground of she’s just a real woman trying to survive.
DC: Yeah. I was going to ask about everyone’s horror vibes with horror, because you have the slasher set up here, and obviously you play with that and subvert it. Holly, it sounds like you are a big horror fan, but then Adam and Kyle, I know a lot of the work you’ve done in your filmography is in the comedy realm. But comedy and horror aren’t so different. So what are your relationships to the genre?
KN: I mean, I love a good thriller. I think the slasher genre is not really necessarily my genre. I’m not like, “Okay, all the blood, give me all the guts, give me all that.” I’m not that type of a movie watcher. I am definitely a puzzle solver, and that’s my magnet to the genre. Set up a really good puzzle, set up a really good story that keeps turning and moving in ways I don’t expect, and then bring it all together in the end. I love active watching. I love being an active audience member.
Even when I was growing up watching Murder She Wrote, and Matlock with my nana was big. Watching Colombo, even going so far as The Boxcar Children and Scooby-Doo, they all have mysteries. And it’s always how do you get to that part where it’s all solved and done and that’s my love of the genre. Yeah, that’s where I come from.
DC: And then Adam, what about you about your relationship to the genre?
AN: I feel like just the word horror is such a broad word. You know what I mean? It encompasses so much stuff. I mean, the movie that I always say scared the crap out of me is What Lies Beneath with Harrison Ford.
DC: That movie scared the shit out of me! Even the ads were scary!
AN: Everything about it freaked me out. And so that, as opposed to actual slasher movies, I like them. I like all the mystery, especially some of the early Saw films and things like that I like, but mine is the mystery aspect of it. The blood’s cool. I always just immediately go like, “Man, I wonder how they did that.” But the thriller side of it is what I absolutely love.
KN: And with What Lies Beneath, you have the psych element, and I think our movie also has a major psych element. And that’s really fun as filmmakers to dig in and try and set the tone for that psychological tale.
AN: And with comedy, I mean, yeah, you said, right. Me and Kyle have done a lot of comedy and shows like that, and whenever I head off and I’m in between shows or commercials that are mostly comedy, I tend to do dramas or thriller-esque shorts. All my stuff is that. So when I do my comedy, I love it and I have so much fun, but when I set off to do my own thing, I tend to go towards more genre-based things.
DC: Cool. So this must’ve been so cool as your first feature film, Adam.
AN: Yeah, this is my first feature and it was the best way for me. Look, the dream is always to make these huge movies, but for me to learn how to make a feature, this was the best possible way. I was surrounded the entire time by my family. We were shooting it at a location I’ve been going to since I was zero.
DC: I was going to ask about that. Okay. So that’s like a family group place you’re very familiar with.
AN: Yeah, absolutely. My dad and my grandpa built it in 1969, and I’ve been going there since I was a kid. It’s its own character.
DC: I know people always say that, but it has an especially distinct lived-in look, so of course it’s going to feel like its own character. And was that taxidermy creature actually something already in the house or was that acquired for the film?
AN: That actually was our art director, Cass. When we got there, she didn’t have a chance to make it. She was taxiderming the night before we were filming, making ’em up there for us. She happens to have been an amateur taxidermy person. And so she came up, just hand deep in a squirrel taking off ears from a bunny and she’s just putting it together for us. And it turned out, so she made all four of the big taxidermy ones.
HK: And I got to say too, when I was writing this and I realized I wanted the taxidermy to be Frankenstein pieces, I was like, “Oh, people are going to be scared of me and they’re going to be weirded out by me.” Then here comes Cass, and she’s just like, “I’ve got this. I’m so excited. I was born to do this.”
AN: I will say that one of the beautiful things about this is as much as we made horror, our crew and my DP love horror. Everybody that was on the crew was a big horror person. When I would get to a point where maybe I wasn’t as versed as the best way to shoot something or really go down the horror thriller path, I could look towards the people around me on set and be like, “What do you think?” And almost always, they’d have a great idea. So again, going back to what Holly said at the beginning, it was so collaborative.
DC: Did you guys stay in that in the house the whole time while you were filming?
KN: Yeah. The way that we framed it was we had, I think five of the crews stayed in one set, five of the crews stayed in another set, and then we had cabins all around and we kind of took over this one street and this old side of the road. It’s called the Slide In. It’s this old trucker stop. We met the people who run it and got in there and we reawakened this little town for a sec. It was pretty cool.
AN: Yeah, the town was so amazing. I mean, at one point we were running out of bear traps for decorations, and a dude that is a woodworker up there just drives up in his golf cart. Bill, he just gives us some bear traps he made so we could use ’em as props and stuff like that. So it really was absolutely amazing, and it was such a family thing. My parents were there, obviously our parents were there. Kyle’s wife was there with his kids. She was a producer on it. Even Koda, Kyle’s dog, was there.
DC: I was going to say, whose dog is that?
KN: Yes. That’s my dog. The first real piece of casting was Koda. I remember. It was like, “Okay, we’ve got the dog, we can make the movie.” That becomes part of the question. How are we going to make the movie without the dog? Because dogs cost a lot of money and you’re trying to figure out who’s going to train it and all that. I was down in LA and we were talking about Stranger In The Woods, and Koda was right there. I told her to sit, told her to lie down. She did both of ’em. And I was like, “I think we can do this. I think Koda’s our dog.”
AN: Kyle, I love that you’re executive producer, producer, editor, and animal wrangler.
DC: In moviemaking, we all have to wear so many hats.
KN: We love it. I love it.
DC: And I do want to shout out Teddy Spencer as Clayton. I just love him in this movie and the way when he gives you this vibe of being creepy, but also kind of endearing.
KN: Teddy is my oldest friend. We’ve known each other since kindergarten, and Adam grew up with him and me and Holly. All four of us went to the same high school. So we were kind of in the arts together during our formative years. Then Teddy came down to Hollywood for a little bit, but then he went and got his master’s in theater. So he went to Dallas and to Chicago, and he’s more of a stage actor.
Then it kind of came time to cast this, and once we had the rest of the cast, it was like, well, I don’t really want somebody that you might recognize. There’s no real point in stuntcasting something like this. We’re having such a wonderful familial experience with all of our friends here in the core. We don’t need to bring somebody else in who might have a weird ego or anything like that. So we grabbed Teddy, and thankfully, he was like, “I’ll do it.” And when Teddy commits Teddy commits.
AN: I think he’s an inherently vulnerable person. He will let you in. And so when you place him in the antagonist role, he’s going to bring that vulnerability to it. That confuses you a little bit. And he is great because what he looks like in Stranger In The Woods is not a good first impression of him in real life. He is absolutely ripped, he’s got that big beard.
Then you talk to him and he’s the sweetest man on the planet. Everything is so thoughtful and amazing, and he grows cactus, and he is a green thumb guy. But if you don’t hear him talk and talk to him, if you just look at him from a distance, you’re like, “He’s scary”. But, he’s so amazing. And he truly brought it on that first day. His first day was that opening scene, and he hadn’t really been integrated with the team yet, so it was actually perfect.
HK: He also smashed his head into the deck really hard on a day. We all thought he was done. He’s a trooper. A real-life, literal teddy bear.
Stranger In The Woods is out now on VOD.
Categorized:Interviews
