“I don’t want to be desensitized to violence”: Franck Khalfoun On His New Gas Station Horror
Mary Beth McAndrews
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Franck Khalfoun is no stranger to crafting violence in his films. Just look at his 2012 remake of Maniac starring Elijah Wood. Or his claustrophobic parking garage horror P2. Plus, he’s a frequent collaborator with French master of horror Alexandre Aja (High Tension). With new his film Night Of The Hunted, Khalfoun dives deeper into the nature of violence with a gas station, a sniper, and a woman desperate to survive the night.
Read the full synopsis below:
When an unsuspecting woman stops at a remote gas station in the dead of night, she’s made the plaything of a sociopathic sniper with a secret vendetta. To survive she must not only dodge his bullets and fight for her life, but also figure out who wants her dead and why…
Dread Central spoke with Khalfoun about the beauty of gas station horror, how deeply Psycho affected him as a child, and how he approaches violence in his films.
Dread Central: I’m excited to chat because I love gas station horror with all of my heart.
Franck Khalfoun: That is so funny. I didn’t even know it was a subgenre.
DC: It’s not really, but there are some films that take place in gas stations like Splinter, for example, if you’ve ever seen that. And I love the gas station as a horror location. Was Night Of The Hunted always meant to be set in a gas station?
FK: Well, this was based on a short film called Night Of The Rat and it was a convenience store, gas station, and it was a sniper trying to chase some guy. There wasn’t a single word of dialogue. So that came to me through a producer who had seen this film and said, “Hey, let’s do a remake.” He gave Night Of The Hunted to a writer named Glenn Fryer who came up with a script, and it was a gas station. And so I came later on and I said, “Well, that’s a really interesting concept.” I immediately sort of saw the gas station and the decor and I imagined this was a perfect sort of American story.
We’re all at the gas station, everybody connects to it. To me, Night Of The Hunted is a Western that happens at a gas station. A guy rides into town, a girl rides into town, and something happens. She’s got to fight for her life, and then you walk off in the sunset. So I found that really, really interesting in terms of the gas station plus what it represents globally, global effects of global warming. The backdrop was really brilliant for me. And so now I had to try and figure out how this movie could maybe represent all of us. I didn’t want it just to be a survival film. I wanted to have a little bit more.
So I started injecting my ideas into Night Of The Hunted. All the concepts, all the subject matter that we deal with are sort of my contribution in terms of the writing. But I didn’t know that gas stations were [used a lot in horror], it’s funny. I’m going to look for them now.
DC: It’s not used as much as it can be, which is why I was excited about Night Of The Hunted because I know gas stations are hard to film in. There’s a ton of branded stuff. I mean, it’s got to be a pain to deal with all of the products. But like you said, everyone knows a gas station.
FK: It is, but I think you make a good point with the product. And the product was very, very important to me because if you’re going talk about making a movie, about making a commentary about America, I mean, what better place where you have both gas, you have chips, you have all the brands. All the things that are killing us are all there, oil and everything made from it, all the products. There’s a thought in there where we’re panning across product and he’s saying to her, “Look at what we’ve become.” And I felt that I was going to use every aspect of the gas station to try and talk about who we are, why we’ve gotten to this point, and how we’re all kind of responsible for all of this. We created this. We’ve created this dynamic between people.
We’ve created the shooters in a way, and I think we’re all responsible for how we behave. We have forgotten that we’re a society that’s supposed to be looking out for each other and we don’t do that anymore. The world’s blowing up. I wanted the movie to have another layer and be more substantial than just running away from bullets. You know what I mean?
DC: I was going to ask about that because I think it is such a simple premise on the surface. She goes inside, she’s by herself, there’s a shooter. So how do you make that a movie? I mean obviously, you have the script, but it’s a challenge to figure out how to make it visually varied, the subject matter. So I was going to ask about trying to make this sustained tension while also staying in that single location. I know you said you added a lot of your own kind of thoughts and opinions, so was that helpful in terms of helping make this narrative feel like a feature film?
FK: It is incredibly important and vital that there are multiple layers to a film like Night Of The Hunted. And it’s so much harder to shoot in one location. Producers often go, oh, it’s easy. It’s one location. And you go, yeah, but how are you going to sustain the audience’s attention for an hour and a half in a single location? So it’s a much bigger challenge and technically it’s very, very difficult to maintain suspense for that long.
I think people underestimate how technically difficult horror films are to make. They’re not comedies where you put actors in front of a camera and go, “OK, do your thing.” Suspense is all about stretching time and exploring locations. So when you have a single location, I mean if you look at the movie, you won’t find a single shot that repeats itself. And that’s really the key I think for me is you always have to be creative in how you’re going to film it, and it has to feel fresh every time.
And so as you go through Night Of The Hunted and you see each of the chapters of the film, you’ll see that the subject changes. There’s an evolution of the characters. They’re arcing progressively through the film. Both the protagonists and antagonists are all arcing. They’re learning from one another. And at the same time, there’s an evolution in the physical survival aspect of the film.
The progression of every element from lighting to production design to dialogue to writing, all of it evolves slowly. And it’s all about creating a rhythm and a pacing. You’ll watch it, you’ll be in a physical sort of confrontation, and then all of a sudden you’ll stop and they’ll talk and that’ll be measured. And then when you’re just thinking, “Oh, where are we going with this?” Boom, it takes off again. And that’s the key to making a movie like that work. I had the same thing happen with P2, which was a woman stuck in a parking lot.
My next movie will be in a closet. You remember Buried was a movie that was like that. Oxygen that we made with Alex Aja is also stuck in one location. So it’s way more difficult and challenging to do, but if you can pull it off, you’re immersed in it and you get to know the place. But to answer your question, yeah, it’s hard, but it’s just technical. And I think I’m getting decent at it. It seems like hopefully.
DC: I didn’t even connect the fact that a lot of your films are a woman stuck in one place. And so you’ve gotten good at getting creative with those where to put the camera and how to make it look different.
FK: Yeah. Dating has become difficult. Don’t judge me based on my movies. I promise I’m not that scary.
DC: So was that billboard there or did you guys put that billboard there?
FK: We put the billboard up. I had found that saying, driving I think in the Southwest. I’d seen that idea outside of a church and it struck me. And when I was thinking of a billboard to put [the sniper] on, I thought that it was kind of fun and genius. And I asked different people what they saw. Most people see God is nowhere, unfortunately. Very few people see God is now here.
And when he stands up and towards the end of the film, and you see that iconic, to me it’s iconic, shot. It’s terrifying. And it says so much about who we are, and how we’re willing to see the world. It’s our choice. A lot of this is our choice. She says at one point, “It’s my choice.” And I think it’s our choice whether we’re going to allow all this to continue or whether we’re going to allow our children to walk alone on the road of life at the end.
DC: I don’t want to spoil the ending, but I’m curious about that because it is a pretty gnarly ending in terms of hoping for the future.
FK: Sure. And this is not a Hollywood ending, we’re European. Not to spoil anything, but there are some open-ended things going on there that are left to interpretation. I think the viewers will have the opportunity to decide for themselves who’s behind it, who’s behind all of this. I have my own thoughts, but it was important to craft a film that allowed people to imagine the world and what they wanted to see in it. And so it is dark, but I mean, look at the world we’re living in right now. It’s not all rosy. It’s tough.
DC: Oh, absolutely. I love a good kind of gut-punch ending. I’m curious, what was your introduction to the horror genre? When did you get introduced to the world of horror as a kid?
FK: In the 80s. I mean, we had A Nightmare on Elm Street, and I saw The Shining and movies like that. But my introduction, I was about 10 years old and I was stuck at home babysitting my sister, and I was turning the channels and I got stuck on this black and white movie. I started watching, I got riveted. I was like, what is this?
And I started watching and I was like, what a strange character living alone in a motel with his mom living in a house behind him. I’m like, what is this so weird? And why is this mom so mean? Oh my goodness. And mom killed somebody. She’s a horrible human being. Why is she so mean to him? And I’m 10 years old alone in a dark house watching this thing, and at the end, I’m like, “Oh my God, where is she? What’s happening?”
And when he was carrying his mom dressed like her with a skeletal body, I was so shocked, and I was so moved and terrified that for two hours I sat there in the dark waiting for my parents to come home. I would not move from my seat. I was so scared. That was my first introduction to horror movies. And it marked me so deeply. I think that it’s infused in all of my films.
If you look at Maniac or P2, all of these antagonists suffer some deep psychological problems. I’m so glad that it was a master that sort of introduced me to the genre because it never left me. It riveted me for the rest of my life. And so I aspired always and read everything on the guy. All the movies I was exposed to in the 80s always pale in comparison because of my initial sort of shocking reaction to that very, very simple film. If you look at Maniac, you’ll see that he’s not scary and he’s sort of the guy next door. But psychologically he’s twisted. And it’s a reflection of my experience with Psycho.
DC: It’s actually really interesting talking about Psycho and then the rest of your films. Do you have a philosophy or approach to the way you think about presenting violence on screen?
FK: I don’t think it’s necessarily violence. I think it’s provocation. It’s not violence for the sake of violence. It’s really to tell the story about something else. What are you trying to say? And I think everything is measured right? It’s one of the great lessons we learned with Jaws. Less of the shark is a scarier shark. And you’ll find that in all the movies I make. I don’t harp on it. It’s measured at the right time. It’s like nudity in film, it’s measured and at the right times, too much of anything will desensitize you to it.
I don’t want to be desensitized to violence. I want you to see the abhorrent effects of violence. And if you measure it and put it in the right place, in the right context with the right wording, with the right dialogue, then you’ll be really moved and disgusted by it. You don’t laugh at the violence in my movies. You laugh at the uncomfortableness of it, but it’s not this glorified violence. It serves a greater purpose of showing and hopefully, the greater purpose is not to do this, to be careful. It’s a warning really.
I’m trying to elevate my participation in it. I came from the theater. In the theater, they always try and teach you, that you have a responsibility. I want to entertain and I want it to be fun, but I also want to see the greater meaning of what it is that we’re doing. And I don’t want to be preachy either. I want people to have fun, but I know that there’s a way to do both.
Night Of The Hunted comes to Shudder on Friday, October 20, 2023.
Categorized:Interviews
