‘Kryptic’ Director Kourtney Roy Talks Cryptids And High Strangeness
Cryptids are a fascinating topic. Sure, Mothman and Bigfoot may just be urban legends, but there’s something exciting about at least entertaining the idea that these creatures COULD be real. At least for this writer. If you’re a like-minded individual, then you’ll love Kourtney Roy’s directorial debut, Kryptic, which examines the stranger side of cryptids through mucus, bending time, and so much more.
In Kryptic, “A woman searches for a missing monster hunter amongst her growing realization that she is inescapably linked to the creature being pursued.”
We spoke with Roy about high strangeness, the horror of The Mothman Prophecies, and her film’s glorious goo.
Dread Central: Just so you know, I’m a cryptid freak, so I was very excited for Kryptic. Obviously it’s a little bit different than what we expect from a cryptid movie, but where did you start getting interested in cryptids? Where’d that come from?
Kourtney Roy: I’m not an expert on cryptids. But I mean, I’ve always had a fascination with Bigfoot, especially. And then the Mothman is a personal favorite of mine.
DC: Big Mothman fan over here.
KR: I love it. I started getting more fascinated by cryptids in probably my late teens, early twenties, I’m not sure why. There was the Ogopogo growing up, because I was in the Okanogan Valley.
Then in Northern Ontario, we have Old Yellow Top, and a lot of little spinoffs of the Bigfoot mythology. I love John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies, which is a great book. It’s so creepy. I’ve read it many times. I love it. It’s scary as hell.
DC: I have it on this bookshelf right now.
KR: Oh yeah. It’s so weird. The Eighth Tower is one of my favorite books [of John Keel’s]. He’s written a few books, one of which is sort of a big compendium of different stories and legends, and sightings of different types of cryptids. But he’s not necessarily a specialist in cryptids, is he? He’s more about supernatural, bizarre phenomena, which do involve cryptids sometimes.
The Eighth Tower is an amazing book about things like Mothman and other unexplained events, which he has this theory about. But I’m not really going to go into it because it’s very complex, but it’s very, very fascinating.
DC: I love that because I love cryptid movies, but so often it’s just about the monster as a monster. And I think that Kryptic really hits into the John Keel high strangeness of it all and how cryptids are maybe a little bit more complicated than just monsters in the woods. There’s something else going on in the world, and I really like how your movie hits that. It’s cool to see how you tap into the weirdness around them rather than the monster itself.
KR: That’s actually what interests me more. Unexplainable phenomenon and after effects or reverb that these sightings sometimes entail or that follow these entities as they traverse our world or our plane of existence, let’s say. I do like the Bigfoot theory that it might be an interdimensional being, which I think is pretty cool.
We obviously did that on purpose with the Sooka, which is a made-up monster. We didn’t want any monster with its own baggage and its own mythology and its own connotations. I mean, I love all the other cryptids, but might as well have your own, and then you can do whatever you want. Nobody’s like, “Hey, that doesn’t do that.” You can do whatever you want.
The writer [Paul Bromley] and I made up a whole rule book, let’s say, or a list of things that happened in this world of Kryptic that we shared with nobody. It was for us, obviously for coherence sake.
For example, the mucus is ectoplasm, which is from the early 20th century photography of the spiritualism movements where people had ectoplasm coming out of their mouth and talking to spirits. So, ectoplasm is kind of actually a mucus. All this stuff also comes with the sightings of supernatural beings or supernatural events, or witnessing or experiencing these things. So these things not just coming out of nowhere either. They come from [existing] lore, let’s say, that I’ve obviously adapted and manipulated to my own ends.
DC: How did you get involved with the script for Kryptic? I would love to hear just how you came into this project, especially with your own knowledge of cryptids and wanting to make something a little bit different.
KR: Paul’s a very good friend of mine. I’ve known him for over 10 years. He’s been a writer for a long time. One night, I was visiting and we were drinking a whole bunch of wine, a lot, a lot. And he was like, “I want to write a script for you. And I was like, “You want to write a script for me?” He’s like, “Yeah, we’ll work on this story together, but I’ll write it based on your photographic work, based on your world and things that you are interested in, basically, so that it’ll be made for this director. We’ll work together. I’ll write it and it’ll be for you.”
I had never done that before. I’d done some short little shorts in a very low-key way without scripts, more like little treatments and whatnot. So it was a very organic, easygoing sort of springboard from which we started.
He doesn’t have a special sort of love of cryptids or supernatural things quite like I do. But he has his own things that he brought. He wanted to do a road movie. I’m a photographer normally to make a living, and I’ve been doing it for 20 years. A lot of my work entails me going on the road and traveling for weeks on end, photographing. So I understand the road movie and the road trip is intrinsic to my work.
Anyway, [Paul] had the springboard of this idea for Kryptic based on a news article that he had read. I think it was based in Iceland, where this woman had gone on a bus tour with other tourists around Iceland. At one point, when they were visiting some sort of naturally beautiful location in Iceland, she had changed her appearance in the bathroom and put on a different jacket and put up her hair, or something had changed. So when she went back to join the group, somehow it became apparent that somebody was missing. And so everybody went off on a six-hour search for this missing woman, and she realized it was herself that she was searching for. Nobody recognized who she was, so they thought she was missing, and she didn’t recognize that it was herself that they were looking for
DC: Oh, that’s so bizarre.
KR: That’s the very tight kernel that Paul had wanted to start with. So it was quite a lot of stuff that he brought. And then for me, it was a supernatural element more, let’s say, the time-bending questions that might happen within Kryptic. I wanted to have a monster, but like you said, not like a blood and flesh monster in the forest, but something a bit more like a being or a creature that can fuck around with you.
DC: While there isn’t a lot of focus on a being, there is a being that we see glimpses of. How did you go about designing the Sooka?
KR: I had a mood board with general ideas. The mood board had a lot of general ideas based on a lot of the natural world, really uncanny things like giant moss that are really furry looking when you go up close, or underwater sea creatures with this strange, uncanny sort of kinetic motion, which I thought was very fascinating. So things like that. I did say in the description of the Sooka that it had two mouths, very furry body, bipedal, but that’s very generic sound, right? That’s not generic, but it’s very open-ended.
So Emerson, I’d given him all that and I said, “OK, go see what you want to do.” And he basically took that, and I didn’t see really what the monster looked like until a week before we actually started filming Kryptic. So it was a lot of uncertainty on my end. But also my first AD, Daniel [Redenbach], is very good friends with Emersen Ziffle, the guy who did all the in-camera special effects design monster.
[Daniel] said, “Just trust him, it’ll be fine. He’s really great. He’s amazing. I know you haven’t seen anything yet, but whatever you’re going to see, it’s going to be great.” Then, I think it was like four, five days before shooting Kryptic. He sent us an email, and he sent me all this stuff that he’d done in the monster outfit and what it looked like. That’s when I was like, “OK, OK, everything’s fine.”
DC: There are certain times when there is a very gooey place full of hands and bodies. How did you go about crafting those parts that were very slimy, to say the least?
KR: That was also because in the script sort of naively—because Paul and I had never done something like this before—there were certain moments in the film where we wanted to have these, I call them dream sequences, these flashes of, I guess I would call them representations maybe of a more material psychological landscape or maybe descriptive of what’s happening on more of a metaphysical level. We had sort of written in there certain descriptions but it was still very vague.
Then I had, again, a mood board of just strange hands and claws and lots of creepy imagery that I really liked. So it was quite open-ended in terms of what would be in the dream sequence. In the script, you have to be very specific, but at the same time we were just, “Hands and claws running up a face, covered mucus, dripping off hands,” very open-ended.
So, they came with what they called a giant cavity. It’s a big box they constructed full of basically strange fleshy parts that don’t actually correspond to anything in the human body, but have this very organic, disgusting feel to them. And the team covered them in mucus, and an actor could crawl into this latex hole, almost like birthing, and then they’d interact with these things. And of course, all the sides of the box were quite malleable. So even sometimes I would be there, pushing hands on so she can move the flesh and move stuff around and dropping in mucus. It was very, very hands-on.
And again, that was at Emerson and his team. They did that, and it was all a surprise. It was just so fun and it was such beautiful stuff, more than I imagined. It was actually kind of great because I didn’t give specific instructions in a way. They just came with tons of hands and weird body parts and things that kind of looked phallic, that move, and were covered in slime. I didn’t ask for any of that, but because I wasn’t so precious about it, they brought tons of stuff. It was amazing. Really amazing.
DC: I love those sequences. They add so much to Kryptic. It’s so gooey.
KR: Yeah, the mucus was amazing for sure.
DC: So Jeff Gladstone plays Morgan, who is Barbara’s husband, and boy oh boy, he is unhinged. The tone he strikes in this movie is absolutely nuts. I’m curious, how much did liberty did he take as an actor in terms of absolutely going wild? He’s a scary man!
KR: I mean, I don’t find him scary, I guess because Paul and I created him, so we have a certain affection for his shortcomings. He is not an evil guy, but he’s got control issues with his wife. But also, she keeps running away and she fucks off for weeks, years on end, obviously doing whatever she wants. And then he’s pushing his brain to where he’s become the person who doesn’t recognize himself anymore. He doesn’t even know who he is anymore. That’s how I always imagined him, that they must have fallen in love at one point. And things sometimes turn sour.
So Paul and I really liked the idea that these videos, which we thought were pretty hilarious to do even in writing the script, because who is this guy? He’s not necessarily a nerd, but he’s definitely dorky. He looks a bit uptight, like everything has to be perfect. His outfit looks like he’s from a bit of a different era. We wanted to set it up that he’s dorky, but he still loves his wife. It’s like he’s bait to get her to come home. So when Kay sees that’s almost that, he’s like, “Oh look, this man’s looking for you. Look at this safe, nice place. Look at these nice wedding photos. This is a great place to be. Come, lady, come.” And then when she gets there, the the trap is set.
DC: And Jeff Glassman’s performance is so unhinged.
KR: He did an amazing job. I was already sold on him when we got his casting tape. You just kind of let him go with what he wanted to do. It wasn’t that difficult, actually. It was more like he had done all his homework. He’d already developed what he wanted to do, and it was perfect.
DC: Then, of course, there’s Chloe Pirrie. She is astounding with her ability to tell a story with her eyes and the way she’s able to embody not feeling comfortable in your own skin. So what was that like working with her as an actor and guiding her through this wild story?
KR: Every scene in Kryptic is from her point of view, basically, right? There are no scenes that happen without her really. I think there’s only one in the beginning where she runs into the bathroom after her encounter, and you see the hiking group looking for her. It’s almost necessary to get a sense that something is happening.
Chloe jumped out right away during the casting on the tapes. I mean, it was evident right from the start it would be her, for me anyway, and to Paul. Then it was very easy to convince our producers, who obviously thought she was amazing as well. I was almost like, “Did she come to the wrong casting?” I thought she’s way too high-caliber an actress. So I was super excited to get her, and again, she already had done her work. We cast her three weeks before filming started. When she came to set, she had already gone through her process to bring these characters, Kay and Bard, to life.
It wasn’t like her and I chatting every day about background, about context, and blah, blah, blah. It was more she was in her bubble. She wasn’t a method actor, but she didn’t want to start discussing stuff. So anything I did want to change was a shift. It was just more, maybe something of intention, or just a little shaving off of a different emotion. So I would just go up to her and be like, “Could you be more tolerant here? Can you actually believe this person instead of being skeptical?” And then she would shift according to these small little details I would give her. So it was very, very simple.
I’m sure it wasn’t simple, obviously shooting, but it wasn’t based on huge discussions or anything like that. It was more like a little drop of ink in water, and then it would stain the water. Just a little drop that would shift the color of everything.
DC: Oh, I like that. That’s a cool way to think about it. So Kryptic is your first feature, and you’re a photographer by trade. Obviously, film and photography are similar, yet different. What was that like translating your experience into a feature?
KR: The parallels between photography and cinema, I think, are quite superficial. It’s just a technical thing that you’re working with images, light coming through a lens, and being recorded on a chip in modern day or a piece of film. Stuff to that. My strengths obviously on Kryptic was location scouting, any of the visual stuff. I didn’t work with the camera directly, but I did a lot of thinking about shot composition. Working with the DP, I’m very comfortable with that.
I have developed my own, let’s say, visual universe for a long time. So it was actually the DP, David Bird, looking at my work and figuring out how to translate that [aesthetic] onto cinema. I think he did quite well because you don’t use the same lighting for cinema and photography. Generally speaking, in photography, you tend to use a lot more flash and a lot more direct sunlight than flash. Not always, but me, I like direct sunlight and I’ll use a lot of flash, whereas obviously cinema, continuous lighting, a lot more working in shade, a lot less about direct strong light.
Also, as a photographer working on a lot of my own projects, I’ve dealt with a lot of situations in the past where you have this idea of what you want to do, but in the end, you learn to compromise. Sometimes things are even better because you don’t have exactly what you want. Sometimes what you want in your head is a cliche. What you get is actually something like when you realize, “Well, that’s kind of an approximation, but it’s actually even maybe better because what I was imagining my head, it’s always a cliche in a way.”
As a photographer, you’re dealing with real objects or things or situations. Even if you’re not doing a documentary, these things actually exist in front of the camera to be recorded. So there’s this spontaneity and this originality that real life offers that maybe you wouldn’t have if I were just dealing directly with my head and trying to transpose that onto something like drawing, where maybe everything would still turn out to be a cliche in a way.
Kryptic is available now on VOD.
Categorized:Interviews
