Exclusive Interview: Jeffrey A. Brown Talks Real-Life Inspirations for His Horror Hit THE BEACH HOUSE
Jerry Smith
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Giving fans a combination of cosmic horror and the deterioration of a relationship, Jeffrey A. Brown’s The Beach House (now available via Shudder) caught genre fans by storm, with its eerie take on everything from John Carpenter to Lovecraft (and even some Ballard for good measure). With The Beach House, the less you know, the better approach, but saying it’s imaginative (shot like a Shane Caruth film and offering horror fans something unique and appealing) would be an understatement.
Synopsis:
Escaping to his family’s beach house to reconnect, Emily and Randall find their off-season trip interrupted by Mitch and Jane Turner, an older couple acquainted with Randall’s estranged father. Unexpected bonds form as the couples let loose and enjoy the isolation, but it all takes an ominous turn as increasingly strange environmental phenomena begin to warp their peaceful evening. As the effects of an infection become evident, Emily struggles to make sense of the contagion before it’s too late.
The Beach House stars Liana Liberato, Noah Le Gros, and Jake Weber.
We thought we’d chat with Brown about The Beach House, the germs of what inspired the film, and much more. Read on!
Dread Central: Bypassing questions about how the production came to be, I’m curious how the story itself was born; the germ of an idea that would become The Beach House, because it’s such an interesting story.
Jeffrey A. Brown: The movie has a lot of filmic and literary references, but there are really two real-life events that inspired it. They always say “Write what you know, but lie” and I think the best stories come from that. My mother told me the story of her father and her two brothers, going fishing in Minnesota. They were staying in a cabin, in the 1950s and were playing cards and drinking beer. They went to sleep and her father woke up in the middle of the night and went outside to use the bathroom because he had been drinking. When he got outside, he became light-headed and I think physically ill. He then realized that there was a gas leak in the cabin, so he had to get his sons out, so they wouldn’t asphyxiate. I think that was the biggest germ of an idea for The Beach House, because *SPOILER ALERT*, there’s basically the worst gas leak in the history of the planet in the film. There’s a sequence in the movie, when the two couples have dinner and things start to get weird, and they go outside and it’s suddenly very foggy out. That’s really an interpretation of the story my mother told me.
On top of that, a few years ago, I had been dating a woman, and our relationship was at the end of its tether, so to speak. We went on a trip to Cape Cod with another couple and went to the drive and all of these romantic things in that setting. It just didn’t go well, and I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it was really the signpost that our relationship was on the way out. The irony of being in a beautiful setting like that, but having it rain the entire time or being sick or so on was an interesting one and it was easy to take that and make it into something. The idea of “What’s the worst that could happen HERE?” And it’s like, “Well, it’s the end of the world!” (Laughs).
DC: I’ve always felt that stories that take a couple on the verge of a break and injecting them into dangerous situations are always interesting to see. Films like The Strangers or Vacancy, where you’re already feeling the fracture.
JAB: I think the complexity of love is interesting. I think especially in American films, the romantic side of love is well captured, but it’s more complex than that. Love can last decades and be quite hard at times. When we were shooting it, we were laughing because when Randall and Emily say “I love you” to each other, it’s the least emphatic “I love you” EVER. It’s not that Emily doesn’t mean it, but it’s that even if this event hadn’t happened, I don’t see Emily going on her journey with Randall much longer; she would go to grad school instead of whatever it is Randall wants to do. He’s still grappling with what it is to become an adult.
DC: Emily has all of these questions about life and science and the future, but she isn’t able to have these deep conversations that she so desperately wants to have with him, I really appreciated that touch in the film.
JAB: Thank you! I tried to harness a little bit of the realities of what relationships can sometimes be. I came of age in the ‘90s, when horror was very self-referential and meta, and films from Scream all the way to when Cabin in the Woods came out, characters would identify the plot points and archetypes and cliches and it got to the point where the characters were basically explaining the films. There were exceptions; I mean I love In the Mouth of Madness and The Descent, but I didn’t want to play into the expectation of knowing every beat of where a film is going. I tried to make The Beach House a film where horror fans wouldn’t know exactly where it was heading.
DC: The idea of when something begins to crack, the characters begin to crumble was great. It reminded me of J.G. Ballard’s High Rise, not in a plot sense, but how the smallest little fracture can cause things to fall apart.
JAB: (Laughs) I’m going to be honest with you: J.G. Ballard was more of an influence than even Lovecraft was. There are definite Lovecraftian elements to the film, but I think that’s because Color Out of Space had just come out and that was in the forefront of a lot of people’s minds, which is funny because I think we shot The Beach House before that one was shot, but it’s been such a long process with post-production. J.G. Ballard is such a massive influence on me. I love the book of High Rise and even Cronenberg’s Shivers has a lot of parallels to High Rise and a lot of parallels to our movie too. I think Empire of the Sun was another really big one for me. I saw it in the theater when I was 9 or 10 and I think it’s such an interesting film for Steven Spielberg. Seeing that the film was Ballard’s story and how he saw the fragility of society first hand because his world literally crumbled in front of him. Ballard used this autobiographical part of himself even in his science fiction and his experimental fiction as well. His work was such a big influence on me and how I wanted to make something very personal but also very imaginative as well.
DC: There’s a tonal shift midway through the film and even a subtlety to the music in the first half, which really impressed the hell out of me. What inspired that shift? It feels like a rug is pulled from beneath you, in a really great way.
JAB: My composer, Roly Porter, is a great electronic musician who really helped me build a sonic palette for the film. In our first discussions, we said that as much as we love the synth-like music of John Carpenter or Stranger Things, those pulsing synth scores, we didn’t think that was right for this movie. We both agreed that sometimes horror films can be a bit over-scored. There’s too much going on at times. Also, music can help create a mood and serve as a guide for the audience and we really wanted to remove any trace of a guide for the audience (Laughs). In the first half, it’s kind of a pressure game to see how long we can stretch it out. His work also plays a big part in sound design, so he kind of drowned out his own sound design at times too. I don’t know if you have a good sound system, but I watched the film as kind of like a goodbye to it, because I’ve seen it SO much, but I wanted to watch it on Shudder. We have a good system and when the music DOES come in, that bass… Wow!
DC: the quickest way for films to lose me as a viewer is to over-explain everything. In fact, I prefer not the have all of the answers given to me. One of the things I really loved about The Beach House is how there’s a bit given, but for the most part, it allows its audience to fill in their own thoughts about what it is. Was that an intentional decision?
JAB: Yeah, very much. What’s funny is that I think there’s stuff in the film that we gave the audience that if I had to do it over, I’d have given even less. I love Stanley Kubrick’s films, because they’re very much conversations with the audience. The best films, to me, are like that. We purposely tried to plant little seeds in the audience’s heads, where things would happen later and those seeds would ruminate and there would be some thought going into what that all meant. I hope we accomplished that.
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