‘Family’ Director Benjamin Finkel On Making A New Kind of Trauma Horror Film
Mary Beth McAndrews
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Horror films about deep family trauma are a dime a dozen nowadays, attempting to capitalize on seeming trends and sad horror lovers who are always looking to rip open old wounds in the name of a good scary movie. While wading through the offerings can feel exhausting, first-time director Benjamin Finkel has entered the ring with his new troubling (in a good way) genre film Family, which just had its world premiere at the 2024 SXSW Film Festival.
In Family:
11-year-old Johanna’s world is falling apart. She’s just moved across the country for her father Harry’s medical treatment, and as her father declines and her mother Naomi is consumed with caring for him, Johanna feels horribly alone. In desperation, she makes a call out into the universe for a good spirit to save her family. But as the long summer days wear on, and a series of increasingly disturbing events rips through her home, she begins to fear that something else has come instead — a terrifying presence from some dark corner of the universe that has latched on to her family and is now eating them from the inside.
We spoke with Finkel about his new deeply personal film and its catharsis, how to write good trauma horror, and working with kids.
Dread Central: What a nuts feature debut to have out the gate. How did the idea for Family come to be?
Benjamin Finkel: Oh my God. I mean, it was something that I worked on for a really long time. It’s a personal film. It came out of my growing up. My dad had cancer and he passed away when I was 14. It was just sort of the substratum of our lives. You don’t really pay attention to that as a kid when you’re a kid. I was homeschooled growing up, so it was just me and my brothers and our family.
Then [a sick parent] just becomes the backdrop of your world. I was reflecting back on that experience and how things just start feeling off and how the sort of reality that you’re in just starts to slightly shift. I wanted to really capture the feeling of that experience. I think that there are a lot of movies about illness and some of them are very, very good, but they are usually very logical and linear.
I wanted to make something that just felt true to what it was like as a kid to go through that experience. Then I wrote this script and people told me it was a horror movie, which was a surprise.
DC: You portray caretaking in such a different way than we see not just in the genre, but in film in general. You portray the horrors of caretaking and being around sickness. Yes, there’s a heroic aspect to it, but there are also darker sides to it. So I just wanted to hear more from you about writing that kind of depiction of caretaking.
BF: That was really important because I think that a lot of times people are like, “Well, this person is ill so the story has to be about them.” But in the actual experience of going through it, that person becomes an object. They become this thing you can’t look at. When you’re caught in their gravity, you keep on swirling around and you and the rest of the family are swirling around them and you start hitting into each other. Then all this conflict emerges around them because you can’t acknowledge what’s actually happening. I think the important part of this for me was the horror of the movie is the horror of the reality of the situation. It doesn’t end, it goes on. You’re stuck.
You’re stuck. That’s why it’s the feeling of being stuck in that room, that flickering room where you hear something has shifted and there’s a piece of news that you can’t take back and you’re stuck. That’s your reality now. That reality is a hard one. I think that’s why it was important for me the horror in the film not be draped around like a family drama. As we go deeper into Joanna’s story, we see that the reality is the horror film, the horror is the point. The horror is the experience of it.
DC: That’s super interesting that you say that because I was curious about making another movie about family trauma. For you as the writer and the director, what was that experience like trying to balance that tension without falling into horror tropes?
BF: Absolutely. Well, that’s the thing. There are a lot of movies about “Is it real? Did it happen? Did it not happen?” And I don’t want to criticize that, but for me, that thing that was so scary to me as a kid… I remember reading Goodnight Moon. Goodnight Moon was this totemic book for me as a kid. I don’t know why, but it freaked me out.
DC: Oh, it scared you. That’s so funny. I love that book.
BF: It’s my favorite book in the world! That book, it still is to this day, my favorite book. When I was reading that book as a kid, there was some part of my brain that wasn’t developed enough to tell that I was looking at pictures. I felt like I was looking at pictures of reality, not illustrations.
That is what felt so unnerving to me. The reason I was afraid of it was because it felt so powerful. And I think that’s the reason why parents in horror, and especially mothers in horror, are always these evil and violent figures. It’s because they have power. When you’re a child, anyone who has power, I think there’s a certain element of terror to that. So I wanted to really use that, use the reality of when I was a kid, whether it’s real or not, is it still can hurt you.
DC: I was a scared kid, so even if it’s not real, I don’t care.
BF: The hurt is real, the danger is real. And I think that reality is fluid. When something like the parent is ailing, when that’s happening and the world feels like it’s falling apart, the world actually is falling apart. It’s not just an illusion. It really is something that’s happening. That was my guiding star throughout making Family.
DC: Yeah. You talked about the world falling apart and talking about your history makes sense because again, she’s also homeschooled, so there they are in their own little microcosm. And I’m assuming your family was probably very similar. You were a self-contained microcosm. With having this be so personal, how was you writing Family? Was it cathartic? Was it hard? Was it all of the above?
BF: It was very cathartic. I think the great joy and privilege of getting a chance to make a movie is having other people come in and take the kernel of the thing and expand on that. I was very, very lucky with whom I was able to make this movie. Then the actors, it was just an amazing, amazing experience working with the actors on this. I think that was what I was most afraid of going into it. And it was just the most wonderful process. They were just fantastic. Ruth Wilson is amazing.
DC: She goes full Annie Graham, Hereditary vibes with the way she acts. Family gives us a nuanced mom who, even though we’re seeing her from the eyes of her kid, you feel the empathy coming from Joanna at the same time, which again, I don’t think we give enough kids empathy in movies like that.
BF: What was important to me was to take that experience of childhood very seriously. And I think that we diminish children, we diminish their feelings
DC: And don’t think they’re smart or understand anything. They’re just dumb flesh puppets to some adults.
BF: I think it’s so right. We do that as a culture. What was really critical for me going into Family, was to take those emotions very seriously. For me, at least, those emotions I had as a kid were the most powerful emotions, probably more powerful, more real, more intense, and long-lasting than the day-to-day things that you feel as an adult,
DC: You can emotionally regulate better, too. They don’t feel as big.
BF: I think that there’s a truth and a purity to what you feel as a kid that stays with you. And I wanted to let that be felt in the movie. The film is through Joanna’s eyes, but it was very important to me that there are moments where obviously we see that there’s this other side of things pushing through. We also go into the mom’s experience because that was something I’d always thought about. That was always very emotional for me, just thinking about all the times that my mom spent sitting in that waiting room waiting for my dad. I wanted to bring that on screen. Ruth was amazing and let go full force.
DC: I want to talk about Ruth, but first Cameron Dawson Gray, who plays Joanna, how was that directing her through all these emotions?
BF: She’s now 13, I think, but during filming, she was 11. That was terrifying. This movie is impossible on paper.
DC: Honestly, kind of, yeah.
BF: It’s a first-time film starring a kid with a lot of special effects and visual effects and animals. Plus it’s a very small movie with no money. It is not a possible movie. And I really think that because the fact that I had not made a film before, I was naive enough to go into it, and say, “Why can’t we do this?”
But really, the one thing I really was worried about was, “Who are we going to find who can possibly do this?” It’s every spectrum of emotion. For me, the north star of child acting in movies is David Bradley in Ken Loach’s Kes from the 1960s. I actually reached out to him over email. He had this wonderful thing on his website where you could ask him questions. So I did actually at one point just email him an entire list of questions. And he was so great and he wrote back to me with all these lovely answers.
DC: I love that.
BF: But that was the thing: “How do we find this person?” And we looked at a lot, a lot of child actors. It was interesting. You could just tell within five seconds whether it was someone who could pull this off, and most people just didn’t have that sense to them. But Cameron just came in and she was just a fully formed person. She was just incredibly professional and talented. She embodied that role just really beautifully. I think that her performance is sort of, not thanks to me, remarkable. She brings a real emotion to Family, which was important.
DC: And I do want to know how you got Ruth Wilson. I love her in everything she does, but here especially, she’s really turning out some incredible just emotional, raw work. So how did you get her to be a part of Family?
BF: Well, I mean, I was such a fan of hers, and the thing that I really, really, really loved was something I watched online. It was her is Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. She dies in a way I’ve never seen anyone die before. Spoiler alert for Ibsen here, but she kills herself at the end, which I did not know going into it.
Ruth hits the ground and flops across the stage like an insect, and it was the most beautiful, terrifying thing I’d seen. It was just this sublime, sublime moment. I was such a fan of her. We just reached out to her and she was incredibly gracious. She read it, she met with me, and it was a real privilege to work with her. She was everything and more. What was amazing though, was the way that she worked. There were moments in those scenes where she was going wild, where I could say something insane, “Be the hammer” or “You’re a skinless clown”.
That living room scene, to me, it’s Buster Keaton in hell. It’s this demonic slapstick where everything is going wrong and everything has no meaning anymore, and you’re just caught in that sweating room and the makeup is running. The feeling of being skinless and everything hurts, and you’re dragging yourself over glass. That was the feeling for me. She’s really just so inspiring to watch her do that. She just really went for it. She really, really did it.
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