SEAN BYRNE

Home Grown Horror

Freshly-minted Aussie horror auteur Sean Byrne is making a big splash with his debut film The Loved Ones but, as he tells it, the film’s inception came not only from his love of the genre, but also from a hard-nosed pragmatism.

“It was born out of desperation,” he says. “I’d written a couple of other screenplays that I couldn’t get off the ground because they were perhaps a touch too idiosyncratic for a first time filmmaker, so I thought I’m gonna have to find something that has a spot already on the shelf. I’ve always been a big fan of horror. A lot of my favourite filmmakers got their start in horror, like Coppola and Raimi, Peter Jackson and Spielberg. It’s always seemed like a genre that directors can really put a stamp on without requiring a huge budget. And I was also excited by the fact that there’s so much mediocre horror out there.

“I thought if I could make something that had strong characterisation and some twists and turns that the audience wasn’t expecting, then I could stand out from the pack. Of course, then I had to come up with a horror film, and the concept is drawn from a fusion of De Palma’s Carrie and Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead. I thought, imagine if I took the prom and moved it inside the cabin in the woods, and made the rituals of the prom, like the dress up and the dancing, and the crowning of the king and queen, the very structure of the horror. And weirdly, I woke up the next morning with this image of a Kurt Cobain type, in a bloody tuxedo, tied to chair in the middle of a balloon-littered floor with a mirror ball above his head. I thought that was just a really great pop-horror image. How’d he get here? Who’s done this to him and how is he gonna get out. So I started there and worked backwards from that point.”

Although the central premise is certainly robust enough, the breakout element is doubtlessly Robin McLeavy’s psychotic teen stalker, Lola. Musing on her popularity, Byrne says: “Everyone wants to be loved, and everyone knows what it’s like to get your heart broken, so it’s accessible emotionally. It’s worked for Kathy Bates in Misery, and also for Glen Close in Fatal Attraction. So, in terms of female villains, it’s certainly something that’s hit the mark before, the horror and the heartbreak is very, very relatable.

“In terms of why she stands out, I think there are a couple of reasons. One is the warped fairytale aspect of it. It just goes back to our childhood where the cliché is that girls play with dolls and boys play with trucks. It’s like Snow White ‘someday my prince will come’ on acid. The other reason is that Robin McLeavy so beautifully fills the pink high heels. I did as much research as I could and handed it on to Robin as a starting point, but she really interpreted the character beautifully, really owned that character and elevated the material.”

_TRAVIS JOHNSON