‘Wind and Bone’ Directors Michael Tuthill and Kevin Troy on Crafting a Stellar Creature Feature
Wind and Bone is a new feature film by Michael Tuthill and Kevin Troy. A cabin in the woods story with a wendigo as the villain, what I found most interesting about the film is that it’s firmly rooted in mystery. There’s no great exposition-type scene in which the background myth of the wendigo is explained. Instead, the audience learns what’s going on at the same time as the characters. We feel their fear and confusion, and as the body count rises, we feel the terror. A fun, gory flick, Wind and Bone is a fresh take on the cabin-in-the-woods monster story.
In their new film, “A woman on the run joins a group of college students in rural WV, where they come face to face with the Wendigo.“
We sat down with Tuthill and Troy to discuss their filmmaking journey, crafting their monster, and how getting lost in the woods inspired the script.
Dread Central: Tell me a little bit about your journey as filmmakers. What led up to Wind and Bone?
Kevin Troy: What led me to filmmaking? Controlled chaos. I started off as an actor, and was in a couple of projects like Body of Lies, State of the Union, Invasion, things of that nature. Then I started doing indie films. And then the writing pretty much stayed on the back of my mind, where I just pretty much came up with a script. When I was still working on other projects, indie-wise, I met Michael on the set of Reunion. That was written and directed by Connie Lamothe. And we kind of hit it off there. I kind of shared a concept with him, and had no clue about the filmmaking side. I knew about filmmaking as an actor: You show up on time, you deliver, boom, you punch the clock and go home.
Tuthill pretty much opened my eyes to that face that it’s not that easy when it comes to actually making a film. That was the kickoff right there, and that was for a project we did called Damned. It was downhill from there, working on projects, still doing some acting, working with Tuthill since then, over the past decade. Learning a lot about the filmmaking side, the directing side, the producing side, and always asking myself, “Why didn’t I just stick to acting?” [Laughs]
But, no, I love it, man. So that’s kind of how my journey flowed into the filmmaking side. And in combination with the writing side, because there have been other things that have been written. Wind and Bone was written primarily as a script called The Wendigo. Then Michael got a hold of it and said, “Hey, let’s take a stab at it this way.” And, of course, a lot of the things that Michael puts his hands on turn to gold. Next thing you know, you’re firing off the cameras and the lights, and boom, it’s happening in ten-degree weather somewhere. But that’s a whole different discussion.
Michael Tuthill: I imagine we’ll get to that. But I guess mine was more straightforward. I went to film school, graduated, and worked kind of tangentially in the industry for a while doing commercial videography. Then I moved to Maryland and just started doing indie productions like DP’ing, visual effects stuff, wherever I could get a job, and just making connections around the area. Kevin was my first big collaborator. We were going back and forth for ten years, doing stuff all the way to this short film that we did called The Inside. I think that was the first big thing that we got. It went out to Chicago International Horror and swept the awards there. So it sort of picked up steam from that.
Then it was like, “You know, we should maybe think about doing a feature.” And we kind of kicked it back and forth for a while until it was like, “Let’s come up with a very basic premise and try to do a monster movie. Let’s keep it in the woods. How can we come up with a traditional cabin in the woods movie with a creature and make a very straightforward horror movie and just lean into the atmosphere rather than anything else?” Because we just didn’t have the resources. One thing led to another, and here we are.
DC: So, who had the idea to make the monster a wendigo?
MT: It was Kevin.
KT: Yeah, it came from the original short version of the script, which was The Wendigo. Kind of the thing that Mike just said. You know, a creature in the woods type of movie. Definitely wanted it to be prevalent, but not as prevalent. A little mystery behind when you see it, and how you see it. That’s where Mike got hold of the script, did some revamping, some changes, and everything. It just came to life in a feature-length, and that’s why the creature pops up suddenly. Not too much, but just enough to creep you out. That was nice. I liked that.
MT: I really liked the Wendigo aspect because it seemed an underrepresented cryptid. At least in this space, it’s usually Bigfoot or werewolves. And I was just like, “How can we do something that maybe has a different spin on it?” And maybe let’s us focus on the psychological aspects, too. So I did a lot of research, learning about the Wendigo mythology.
DC: Kevin, what was the reason you were specifically interested in the wendigo?
KT: Native American culture is huge. I’m in Louisiana right now, and growing up in that atmosphere is where I learned about the wendigo creature. If you’re a Supernatural fan, you go back to season one, episode two, they touched on the wendigo, and I was like, “The wendigo! I heard it again!” I heard it during my childhood. So, I was always intrigued about how a warrior was cast out for eating the human flesh of his victims or those he had conquered. And that was very bad in the tribe, so you get banned. But you not only get banned; you also get cursed. Then you get released, stripped naked, into the woods. In time, the curse transitions your body into something that’s no longer human. I’ve always been intrigued by that.
But I’ve also been intrigued by angels, demons, weird stuff like that that most Black kids weren’t playing with or messing around with back in the day like I was. Yeah, so that’s pretty much how it came about. I wanted to do something that would be a little bit closer to, I don’t want to say reality, but if you go to the right part in northern America or Canada, there are tribes that do believe there are creatures like the wendigo.
The Algonquin Indians, for example, believe in the creature, and it’s true to them. That has a lot of power behind it, and a little bit of realism. It’s enough to make you scratch your head and wonder. So that’s where I went with it. And, again, the way the script was taken in a different direction with Tuthill getting involved. I saw it one way, and he took it in a different direction. So, I can’t speak on it without giving my man props here.
MT: No, that’s fine. I just thought that if we could ground this in a place where it would just make sense to do something that lent to the psychological unresolved trauma background side of it. So, it was unique in the cryptid world, and I loved that game, Until Dawn. That really helped a lot as I was going into this.
There’s a bunch of other stuff buried in Wind and Bone as far as Alien, and I loved the movie The Edge. Stuff like that was very close and intimate, and you’re trying to distill down a fear of being lost in the wilderness, and that, to me, was the most interesting aspect of The Wendigo. That feeling of isolation and not trusting the people you’re around, and whether or not they’re gonna eat you or turn on you.
I got lost in the woods when I was a kid, and that was also something that I was trying to draw on a lot for this. How can I bring this home and deliver that on the screen in a way that would make people feel that sense of angst and isolation that I remember as a kid, where it’s like around every tree you hear a noise and you don’t know where you are.
DC: Kevin, did you bring any crazy sort of woodland adventures into the writing and directing of Wind and Bone?
KT: I tried my best to focus on reference points. Again, I’m a huge Eric Kripke fan and Supernatural fan, so kind of reminiscing on what he did in season one, episode two with that wendigo episode. Definitely wanted to keep it to where they’re isolated, and keep it to where there’s the mystery of the creature. I tried my best to stay in that area, so when directing it, it was pretty easy. One, because most of the time I was in the costume for the wendigo, where I got to improv with other folks. I think even Amy [Tuthill] might have jumped into it at one time for something.
But during the process, I just wanted to focus on the concept that the script played out, the mystery behind when you see the creature, and then again tying it back to that Antlers thing. There was a mystery behind it. You never got a dead-on shot of the creature.
MT: Yeah, they used it as a metaphor for addiction, the opioid crisis, and I guess generational trauma. That was a really cool manifestation of the wendigo, I thought. In our film, I have this lead character, and she has all this unresolved trauma. You could take it two ways: either she’s the best equipped to handle it, or the wendigo just wants to save her for last because her trauma is the most delicious. I’ve heard it go both ways, and it’s deliberately left ambiguous, either because we’re not that clever or we’re just smelling our own farts, I guess.
DC: The mystery of the thing is really important. Why didn’t you want to do a lot of explaining?
MT: I’ll go first. The reason I wanted to avoid a lot of that, is because it’s a huge trope in a lot of horror movies. When you watch a movie like Sinister, they call up Vincent D’Onofrio and he’s like, “You’ve got a Bagul problem.” I wanted to approach it like, these are kids, they’re out of college, none of them have any clue what they’re up against, and why would they? They have no idea. Most people don’t know what a wendigo is or what it does, or anything like that. That was something, to me, that was equally terrifying—it’s all a mystery to them. They speculate about it very lightly. It’s just, “We don’t even know what it is out there. It’s hungry, it wants us, and we want to get away from it.” That’s all you know, and that’s all you need to know.
That’s why we brought Guy [Wellman] on, because he’s the Native American misdirect that you think might be able to answer all their questions and tell them. Like in Antlers, they trot out Graham Greene and he’s like, “You’ve got a wendigo problem!” and we’re like, “Oh god.” I was rolling my eyes so hard. But in Wind and Bone, he doesn’t know because he’s just a regular guy. Then he’s dead. Now they definitely have no hope of anything. It was just a way to get away from the trope and leave it open-ended. It’s just like the original Alien. The less you know, the creepier it is. It’s up to you, the audience, to determine whether you think that works or not.
KT: Doing the research for the film, initially we were looking at actual native or Indigenous people who were familiar with the creature, right? You get into the political minutia, which was also something we didn’t want to attract ourselves to. Because a lot of tribes will take it personally. They will want to get involved. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that, did we want to take it that far down the rabbit hole when trying to be creative?
So, we simplified the entire approach. We had one segment when we were in pre-production, and we were auditioning Indigenous folks who were familiar with the creature. We were going down that road. But then we took a step back and said, “You know, if we’re going to get this done, how can we do it without upsetting folks, but at the same time taking that step back and saying, ‘here’s how we’re going to shoot it,’ and try not to cross anyone in that process.” You can never please everyone.
MT: Yeah, it’s just a matter of you want to treat the material respectfully, and there’s a strong Native American history that you want to respect. We wanted to treat it well, and we got some folks to give us a little insight into it. And I felt like the best way to treat it was to leave the mystery. These are just stupid white people in the woods, and they don’t know. It was the best way not to portray it on the nose. So, to me, that was the best way to thread the needle.
DC: Most of Wind and Bone takes place outdoors. Were there any problems that arose from that?
MT: We still have PTSD from this movie, man!
KT: We’re out there day one, we’re getting ready to shoot, and the park police show up. The communication didn’t reach them that we had permission to film this movie. So, of course, being the producer, Mike was getting heated because he’s looking at the watch, saying, “We’ve gotta film this damn movie!”
MT: Right, we had a contract with West Virginia. The state gave us permission to film in their state park. I had a signed piece of paper that I’m waving in their face, and they’re telling us we can’t be there.
KT: And then it gets better, because then they tell us over the next few days, they had turkey shooting with muskets and stuff like that. We’re shooting a film where audio has to be crisp. You’ve got to stop if a plane is flying overhead. So imagine in the background you suddenly hear, “Pow!” and you’re trying to shoot. And you’re like, “Yeah, that’s not going to happen.” Or, you didn’t know which direction. So we had to change locations, and pretty much worked with what we had. That was day one of all of this.
Then we went back to get some more of those scenes because things were a bit off. So things were just starting off a little rocky. Of course, then you get into the temperatures, the weather. You get into still getting the cast to adjust to a rhythm, because we didn’t have that many readings and things of that nature. Then you have transitions on hills, then stabilizing stuff from the camera to the lighting. Everything you can think of, while just having a multitude of bodies just moving around. We had to get past that frustrating first day or two for us to find that rhythm.
Once we found that rhythm, any issues you have are typical set issues, or you have setbacks where it’s like okay, it’s frustrating as hell, something’s not downloading fast enough, or you have technical issues from another person whose equipment isn’t working. I could keep going, but those fall more under Michael’s swim lane as far as the problems that he had. And that’s not even talking about the cold, the temperatures of shooting at night that I don’t think we braced for.
MT: It wasn’t so bad from the get-go. The weather was actually unseasonably warm for the first half of the shoot. It was the tail end where temperatures plummeted. But it was the first week or so we had all these kids out by the trees, you’ll see them in the third act, and it’s like, “Okay, now be cold!” And you’ve got your long-sleeved shirts on while it’s like 75 degrees out and muggy. Everything that could go wrong on a movie set went wrong on that movie. It was like the weather was against us, the park staff was against us. Our schedule was blown up from day one because we were on our back foot.
We had a technical failure a couple of times, like we lost an entire day’s worth of footage. My card popped out mid-shoot, and it formatted it. So I lost all that footage. We were trying to chase our schedule. And we only had ten days up there in West Virginia, so we had to get the movie in the can. The problem was, as fast as we were shooting, as few takes as we were doing, as dirty as we were shooting, it was never enough to kind of catch up to where we needed to be.
So every morning I would take my black Sharpie and go, “Okay, we’re not going to film this part of the script anymore. Moving on.” The script was maybe five to six pages longer. We had more scenes and expository stuff in there, and I was just like, “Yeah, we don’t need it.” We were just like, “Let’s film as much as we can.” In December, we came back to Maryland to do some pickups and additional stuff. The process and the setbacks were enormous.
Wind and Bone is out now on VOD.
Categorized:Interviews
