Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Rabbit Trap’ Director on His Folk Horror Sundance Film and Casting a ‘Ripped’ Post-‘Monkey Man’ Dev Patel
Among another impressive stack of new horror titles looking to spook audiences at this year’s Sundance, “Rabbit Trap” joins a growing library of psychological folk horrors that have recently offered more (deeply) unsettling creeps than out-and-out scares.
Bowing in the Midnight slot in Park City on Friday and the feature debut of Brit director Bryn Chainey, the film doesn’t just boast an Oscar nominee in Dev Patel among its somewhat limited cast (there are only three characters in the entire feature), but comes with the backing of Elijah Wood’s SpectreVision (“Mandy,” “Color Out of Space”).
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Set in 1976 in rural Wales, “Rabbit Trap” centers on Daphne Davenport (“Blue Jean” breakout Rosy McEwen), an experimental electronic musician who, alongside her troubled husband and collaborator Darcy (Patel), has moved to a remote abandoned farmhouse in the countryside. It’s here where, equipped with a wild laboratory of analogue synthesizers, tape decks, theremins and very little else, they hope to finish Daphne’s new album while also finding space to heal after several failed attempts to have a baby.
As ever, things don’t quite pan out. In “Rabbit Trap,” it’s via ancient spirits, disturbed after Darcy inadvertently captures a forbidden mystical sound never before heard by human ears while out recording in the eerie woodlands. The sound — which renews Daphne’s creative energy — draws the attention of a strange nameless teenage boy (Jade Croot), who instantly attaches himself to the Davenports with an obsessive passion, attempting to drawing them into the natural world to which he’s connected but also apart as a couple.
For Chainey, “Rabbit Trap” came out of a long-standing love of Welsh folklore and all things fairies and goblins and analyzing the truth behind the stories. Speaking to Variety ahead of the Sundance premiere, he discusses managing to lure Patel (still ripped after recently shooting his bloody action thriller “Monkey Man”) into his creepy world, paying tribute to female electronic music pioneers such as Delia Derbyshire (who famously created the original “Doctor Who” theme) and why cigarettes prevented him from actually shooting in Wales.
The story of ‘Rabbit Trap’ feels pretty unique. Was there a particular inspiration?
In a way, it started out as a short film called “Moritz” I made in 2012 when I was living in Germany. It was a dark fairy tale and I dug a lot into Celtic mythology and became interested in a particular woodland spirit. But when I re-watched that short many years after making it, I realized that, actually, it was about me and, not wanting to get too personal, that I’d actually made a movie that was accidentally a bit of a cry for help or a confession about how I felt about the world. So I realized I needed to dig into that. So “Rabbit Trap” really grew out of the process of me trying to try to figure out what it is that I’m afraid of, what it is that I need to heal.
But despite the personal elements, ‘Rabbit Trap’ is still borne out of real folklore and legends? Or was that side made up?
A lot of it is drawn from Welsh superstition and folk tales. I’ve been really into that since I was a kid. My dad’s Welsh and among my happiest memories of him are going through Brian Froud’s books about fairies, goblins and trolls. That really imprinted in me as a kid that these aren’t just stories, but are actually expressions of what it means to live in a landscape or be part of the natural world. So I did a lot of research. I did years of digging into sightings of goblins and fairies and trying to analyze the psychological truth behind the stories.
So there are stories about fairy circles, which are rings of mushrooms that grow in the forest. Those are a real things and spawn all over Europe. But there are stories that you should never enter one, because you’ll be transported to Faerie, which is the realm of goblins, and when you come back, you’ll be slightly different. But there’s no consistency in how you changed. So I was analyzing, what does it mean? Why mushrooms? What happens to people when they encounter Faerie? Is it a psychedelic experience, or is it like an experience of reconnecting with nature and a humbling, sublime experience that changes the way you see the world?
Getting Dev Patel on board for your first feature is no small feat. How did that come about?
It was surprisingly easy. He was the first actor I wanted to go out to. When writing the film, I didn’t have anybody in mind, but there was a feeling of wanting someone that had an intense vulnerability, or someone who has this external strength and poise, but when you look in their eyes you see a boy that needs to be held. And after seeing “The Green Knight,” I thought: Dev can do this. But I thought it was a really long shot and we didn’t hear anything back for a while, but then I got a message and we met in London. He was quite nervous. I was quite nervous. And we just talked about the script and it turned out he loved it and really connected to the character of Darcy, what he was going through and connected with it in a personal way.
I noticed in the film that Dev’s quite ripped. Had he just done “Monkey Man”?
Yeah, he’d just done it and was in post. I think it’s a little distracting in places how ripped he is and doesn’t really suit the character. But what do you say, stop working out? He’s a kickboxing guy. He loves his self-defence. But also Jade, who plays the child in the film, is a karate champion.
Ha! Tell me about casting her. She’s such a crucial element of the film in terms of providing the creeps and chills
We had an excellent Welsh-based casting director attached specifically looking for the child. We really wanted a Welsh kid, who could speak Welsh. I looked at the tapes of at least 100 kids — we were auditioning boys, girls, non-binary kids, trans kids. I was after anyone who could believably be a kind of strange, ageless child. Jade came in right at the end. And her audition freaked me out. It was so vulnerable and it was haunting how much longing she tapped into. Because I didn’t want the character just to be the classic evil demon child. For me, longing and melancholy is way more unsettling and scary, and she tapped into that immediately. I realised she was going to go to all the places nobody else could. But it was quite a decision — you’re gonna cast a 25-year-old woman in a role that was written for a 14-year-old boy! But she just hit all notes I needed — she could go from Oliver Twist to Hannibal Lector.
Your lead characters are Darcy and Daphne Davenport and they make groundbreaking and experimental electronic music. I immediately assumed Daphne was a tribute to the pioneering electronic musician Delia Derbyshire?
Yeah, but more than just Delia. It was Delia and Suzanne Cianni and Laurie Spiegel. I’ve always been interested in electronic music and it struck me that in the early days it was really pioneered by women. My read into it was that they weren’t really given space to compose, even in the BBC where Delia tried to get jobs. There weren’t female composers. So they were like: fuck it, if we’re not allowed in these male-controlled spaces, we’ll just find our own sound and our own genre.
Also, with analog electronic music, they’re not sampling sounds, there’s actual electricity running directly through their oscillators and they’re changing the frequency and the current to make a sound. And I thought: that’s fertile ground for a cosmic horror, because you’re taking the energy from the earth and twisting it to create sound. So what if you did that in a landscape that was haunted and had spirits living under the earth? That was a big reason why I made the characters electronic musicians, because it linked them to the landscape and Welsh folklore. You cannot separate goblins from music. They’re always singing – you’re lured by their music!
Did you shoot in Wales?
Unfortunately not. I really wanted to, but there’s a funny reason why we couldn’t. Daphne’s character was always meant to be a chain smoker — that was important for me. Something about the vapor and smoke… and people were chain smokers back then. People with anxiety need to smoke! But there’s a rule in Wales where you’re not allowed to even have fake cigarettes on a film set. So we were told either we cut the smoking or use CGI smoke. And that’s really difficult for a low-budget movie. We begged for an exclusion. So instead we shot a lot in North Yorkshire, but in a lot of locations where nobody had shot before.
And was your all-important fairy circle of mushrooms real or one that had to be created by the production team?
There were made by my production designer Lucy, who’s the main hero. She did an amazing job. She designed those and had them printed — they had to withstand the elements a bit. They were all hand-painted afterwards. And they were all given out to the cast and crew as presents after the film – they are not mushrooms floating around the world.
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