‘Recluse’: How Physical Media & Childhood Ghost-Hunting Laid the Foundation for Henry Chaisson’s Film [Tribeca Interview]
I open up my computer to start writing up my interview with Henry Chaisson, director of the horror movie Recluse, and my heart drops. My audio recording from the day before is blank. A note from the cloud says it’s still processing. The audio file has been corrupted or, rather, intercepted.
This feels fitting after watching a movie about a cassette-tape-obsessed audio engineer named Joan (Sasha Frolova) who returns to her family’s cavernous house in New England to care for her burned and dying artist father (Xander Berkeley). There’s something charming about the stilted and reserved Joan, who, instead of refreshing a feed for this week’s episode of her favorite podcast, listens to scratchy personal recordings for comfort.
I somehow managed to download the file, uncorrupted, to my phone. This little recording device ironically had sat on the table between Chaisson and me, its screen like a black mirror, while I asked him questions about the eerie sonic landscape of Recluse. “I love horror movies about sound, because it’s a bit ambiguous, and you’re not entirely sure what you’re hearing,” he told Dread Central.
Against the backdrop of an artist’s house, there’s “this more ambiguous layer of sound that’s telling us, ‘Oh, something really bad happened here a long time ago,’” Chaisson, who also served as composer on the film, said. “I thought it would be interesting — especially in a theater, hearing it in surround sound.”
While writing Recluse, Chaisson drew from his own experiences of ghost-hunting at his grandparents’ house with a tape recorder. “One time I caught a voice and still don’t know… Was it a neighbor or a cousin messing with me, or was it genuine? It haunts me, for sure,” he confessed.
Sound has always been important in the genre: Doors creaking, bones cracking, blood-chilling screams. But from Hush to Undertone, horror movies about auditory experiences specifically have continued to freak viewers out. Chaisson drew inspiration from John Travolta-led Blow Out, in particular, for the film’s more “tactile” feel. While Recluse takes place in the present day, Chaisson wanted to highlight the fact that Joan is returning to the space of her childhood.
“When I look at artifacts from when I was a kid, it is all VHS tapes and audio cassettes, and they are spooky,” he said, adding that his parents don’t throw away anything. “It’s all in the basement, in boxes.”
Apart from Chaisson’s own spectral connection to cassette tapes, Joan’s knack for personal archiving may be inspired in part by Chaisson’s mother, who was a school librarian. “The idea of cataloging things and having a museum of your own family has always been in my head,” he said.
Traveling to an eerie place alone, events that feel like dreams, ghostly encounters: These are all the textures of Recluse that make it feel like gothic horror, despite the modern-day setting and the midcentury retrotech. Aptly, for this film about a haunted and haunting artist, Chaisson and cinematographer Bryce Holden drew on “pre-electricity” oil paintings for Recluse’s visual identity. Chaisson mentioned Edward Hopper; his 1942 painting “Nighthawks,” which depicts a man sitting at an illuminated bar during nighttime, is instantly recognizable.
Likewise, Chaisson also mentioned Andrew Wyeth; his 1948 image “Christina’s World” had a viral moment among the spooky crowd recently, with goth Americana fans clocking similarities between “Christina’s World” and a picture of Ethel Cain. The Recluse director also talked about the light fixtures in the house, which also look archaic. “There’s definitely a goal of trying to recapture the gloomy, gothic, the New England vibe.”
Meanwhile, the actual art in the film was created by the father himself. While Dread Central readers may know Berkeley from the original Candyman or The Walking Dead, what you may not know is that Berkeley is also a painter, sculptor, and SFX artist. Chaisson told me he specifically wrote the role of the father with Berkeley in mind, because “he’s this rare triple threat,” Chaisson said.
Berkeley did his own burn makeup and made the inhuman gauze mask that his character wears throughout the film. “This character doesn’t do a ton physically in the film, but [Berkeley’s] presence is everywhere,” Chaisson said, adding that Berkeley was “very game to make new art, but also just draw from this back-catalog of amazing sculptures and paintings.” Frolova also wore multiple hats, drawing on her experience of renovating houses to help Chaisson build sets.
“There’s literally people’s fingerprints all over the movie,” he said. And even though Recluse is heavy on atmosphere and visually strong in such a thorough way, the actual meat of the plot draws you in as well.
There’s this underlying question of how Joan’s mother disappeared and whether the culpability for her brother’s death rests on Joan’s shoulders. Viewers are constantly wondering about the motivations of the surrounding characters as well. Chaisson’s mom gave him Agatha Christie books growing up, so “making sure there’s always a mystery at play” was a crucial part of his writing process.
Having watched and listened to Recluse, I still can’t shake the fear of looking at my own audio file from my own personal archive and seeing something strange there. I can’t say something unusual in this realm hasn’t happened to me before: Once, while editing bright, cheerful sponsored lifestyle content for social media, I realized my camera had picked up a gruff, disembodied man’s voice, warbling on in the background.
I remember I stood up with a start, my girlfriend and roommate rushing over to see what was wrong. I unplugged my headphones and ran my cursor over the audio track again. As the grunting and growling played, we looked at each other, brow furrowed in fear, not knowing what to do. That’s exactly the kind of ghostly terror Chaisson intentionally created in writing and directing Recluse.
Categorized:Festival Coverage Interviews