Screamfest LA 2016 Exclusive: Filmmaker Reinhert Kiil Talks US Premiere of The House; See the Trailer and Stills
Sean Decker
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\With Norwegian filmmaker Reinhert Kiil’s supernatural horror feature The House set for its US premiere Sunday, October 23, 2016 at 6:00pm at Screamfest LA, read on for our exclusive chat with the director, and then have a look at the trailer and stills!
Produced by Kiil Produksjon from a script written by Kiil, The House stars Mats Reinhardt, Frederik Von Luttichau and Espen Edvartsen, and tells the story of (according to the official synopsis), “Two German soldiers escorting a Norwegian soldier and prisoner of the WWII. The Scandinavian winter takes quite a toll on them, but at one point they discover a house where they finally can get some rest. However, this turns out to be anything but a warm and welcome shelter.”
Filmed in Norway over the course of twelve days on the RED Scarlet in January of 2014, The House according to Kiil was inspired by the idea of, “Following men that have experienced hell before, when they find themselves in a totally new kind of hell.”
“And the idea was more or less using persons that actually have done a hell a lot of shit before,” he extrapolated, “and that being the focus for the audience: to find a way to care about bad guys in a normal setting. It’s just normal human beings that believed in something terrible. And were affected by it so they started doing bad stuff. Now they get to experience their (karmic) sentence.”
“I always wanted to work on a WWII 2 movie, with German soldiers,” Kiil, who previous feature directorial efforts include the exploitation flicks Hora and Inside the Whore, revealed of the world in which The House resides, “and I’ve always been fond of horror films from the 60’s and 70’s. Movies that are a slow burn. Not ones with jump scares. Ones that go to a different place, and I wanted to create that type of feeling but set in a new environment, and really I was shocked when Screamfest took the movie, because I always thought it was too “Art House” for the American audience. It has a little Hammer horror in it, and it also was inspired by The Hidden, but we mixed it with the look of The Others and The Conjuring.”
As we’re fans of the war/horror films Dead Snow and Dog Soldiers here at Dread, we asked Kiil if that sub-genre had influenced The House in any way, to which he responded, “Well, Dead Snow and Dog Soldiers and movies like that are mostly about the humor and dumb soldiers doing dumb stuff. I wanted to make Fleiss and Kreiner, the characters in the film, serious. Not to make them stupid. Again, this is a slow burn. So it’s not for everyone. But after maybe two-hundred screenings now in cinemas and in festivals in Scandinavia, I feel that it hits some of the audience perfectly. Many film reviewers have said it is the scariest movie since The Exorcist or The Omen. And I believe that is because if you not are totally broken by mainstream horror, that The House will hit your nerves in a way you haven’t felt since the 1970’s.”
As for the supernatural and Nazi tropes, undeniably a staple of 70’s genre cinema, “They are also a new aspect, but it was never planned to be a marketing thing,” said the filmmaker. “We were just lucky I bet. Today I can make fun of saying, “Nazism and exorcism in a horror house.” What is better than that? But for real I never thought that would be a sales point for the film. My focus was and always has been on the three characters in the film.”
In realizing those characters, as well as needed attention to period detail, Kiil, whose background lies in production design, stated, “We had a specialist, Bjørn Kleven, who helped us a lot with costumes and weapons. For the production design, we did two months of prep work on a school that is famous in Norway for actually being a haunted, and which had not been used in thirty years. So the walls, paint, props, etc., everything had to be brought in and dressed.”
Regarding Screamfest’s selection of the film and Screamfest itself, Kill effused, “It’s really nice, and I’m looking forward to seeing many of the films playing, and hopefully I’ll get to see some surprises. I’m really looking forward to (Mike Mendez’s) Dolph Lundgren movie (Don’t Kill It). Lundgren in a horror sounds cool. Well, Schwarzenegger did it three years ago. So let’s see what the Swedish kickboxer can bring to the table.”
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