Writer and director Chad Archibald has been making genre films for decades, particularly under his production company Black Fawn Films. He’s produced over 35 films and directed nine features, including his most recent, It Feeds, which has been making a splash this year in the indie genre scene. Between a star-studded cast, stellar practical effects, and a twisty story, It Feeds is an incredibly entertaining and unique ghost story.
We spoke with Archibald about horror couture, crafting his menacing monster, and the catharsis that can be found in making horror movies.
Dread Central: Where did you start the writing process for It Feeds?
Chad Archibald: I had struggled for a couple of years to figure out what I wanted to do next after my last film, I’ll Take Your Dead. And I had gone through a lot of life changes. I had lost both my parents to cancer and dealt with it myself, as well. So I was just really struggling. I lived with them, too, through the whole time that they were sick. It was just a lot of heavy stuff and I really had a hard time being like, “What’s a movie that would matter to me?” And I had a bunch of ideas, but I couldn’t figure out something that just mattered to me enough, I guess.
One day I was lying in bed and thinking about this idea that I had that originally sparked from a dream that was just about a girl coming in and telling me that she’s seeing something and it’s bothering her. It kind of reminded me of Stir of Echoes.
DC: Underrated Kevin Bacon classic. I love that movie.
CA: I love those hypnotism scenes and I’ve always loved things like that. One day it kind of clicked to me. [At Black Fawn] we write a ton of treatments and stories and whatever, and it’s always hard in horror to have some sort of entity or a ghost. Yo have to think, “Well, what is it? Is it a book? Is it artifact? Or is it some sort of mythology from a different culture?” It’s so hard to come up with something that’s original and hasn’t been done before and something that you also connect to.
So it wasn’t until one day when I was like, “What if it isn’t any of those? And it’s just something for me?” And I started being like, “What if this thing was cancer?” Because it affected me so much. So I started creating this entity that just feeds on people and no one can’t see it and nobody really knows how to deal with it still. Then I was like, “OK, now I want to create some characters and some different families that have been devastated by it, and I want to create some characters that can go kick its ass.” Then boom, I had a script in seven days.
It sounds like a cliche, but people always say write what inspires you and write for yourself. That I feel like rings true. Saying that once, “I’m just going to write what I want,” and then it comes out of you.
Really, for whatever reason, the stars aligned and I was able to write in a ton of things that really inspired me. And I had been thinking about movies for so long at that point, trying to write stuff that I was like, “Man, these elements are coming in and they’re feeling really good.” Nothing was forced in there. There are elements of The Ring here, and The Cell has always been a huge inspiration.
DC: I was thinking about The Cell watching It Feeds, especially I love how you have Ashley Greene’s character’s outfits change [in the other world] and it gets super stylized. I love that you take on that stylized aspect.
CA: And it was such an important part of It Feeds. I also love making movies, so I wanted to make something that I was really excited to make. Set design and art direction are things that I’ve always been so passionate about. And even with this being able to dive into wardrobe exactly like The Cell or The Fall, any of Tarsem Singh’s movies. [For It Feeds], it was a very Steve McQueen-inspired wardrobe. Our wardrobe person loved it and she was made all the wardrobe herself from scratch.
DC: Wait, no way. Are you serious?
CA: Yeah. Aside from the first look that she has in the school, and the black outfit at the end, it was all custom made for her.
DC: Horror couture!
CA: It’s so awesome being able to dive in and do all those things that I’ve always really wanted to do, like burying someone alive, which is always terrifying for me and anyone, I think.
Also, I’ve always loved A Nightmare on Elm Street, so being able to go into someone’s dreams and the things that scare them in there and trying to help deal with it excited me. I was finally like, holy crap, not only am I happy that story’s coming together well and I feel passionate about it, but I get to do all this fun shit that I’ve always wanted to do.
DC: That sounds like so creatively inspiring, especially to get you out of a mental rut after dealing with so much.
CA: I’ve been developing scripts for so long and there’s a bunch of great stuff that we have that we’re still actually getting ready to produce. But for whatever reason we got this one done and it was a bigger budget than anything that we’ve had access to in the past.
And it was still a small budget for us. I think it was like $1.2 million.
DC: That was it?
CA: That was it for It Feeds.
DC: Indie horror filmmakers rule, man.
CA: And every film just as hard. You’ve got a finite amount of time to get whatever you can on screen, and it just takes over your life. You’re like, “How can I push harder and push harder and push harder and push harder?” Because once you wrap on production, that’s now going to be all you ever get for the rest of time in this film.
It’s lot of pressure, especially when you find something that you’re really excited about. So I mean, I lived It Feeds night and day and slept very little.
DC: Appropriate, I guess.
CA: Luckily it was the first people that we went to with the script financed it, which is always rare as well. So I mean, things just kept rolling so well with this project.
DC: Was it cathartic at all dealing with the emotional stuff? Is cathartic the right word even?
CA: I mean on set was, again, it was stuff that was more for me than the audience. But I shared a ton of it with the cast. And there are moments in the movie that are very personal to me. There’s a moment where Cynthia goes into Randall’s mind. The mother had just passed away and he was watching through the window.
When I was in the hospital with my mom, I was by her bed and I remember my dad was always outside looking through the window because he just couldn’t get inside. It was too hard for him. So me and Shawn [Ashmore], it’s like 9:00 AM, we’re hugging in a corner crying about this, and then we’re like, alright, roll cameras. So I talked to the cast a lot about what I had kind of gone through in those little elements that I had put into the movie that were again, just for me.
DC: I love that you could do that
CA: It was therapy for me for sure.
DC: Really quick, I just want to talk a little bit about your monster. I wanted to hear about how you designed your main monster.
CA: I wanted the design to kind of reflect what its main motives were, which were very, very simple and primal. So I wanted the creature to look starving. I wanted sunken eyes. I wanted all that stuff so that you’d look at this creature and be like, “Man, I believe this creature is always hungry. It’s never satiated.”
Then there’s a place in Hawaii that I’ve always loved that makes these contact lenses, that are so big, you could take a shot out of them. They cover your whole eye. They’re amazing and I love ’em. So we got some of those in and then, I had kind of created what looked like a ransom note kind of. I’d had taken different eyes from real photos that I had seen and just different inspirations and different mouths and teeth and whatever, pasted them all together and then kind of drawn over them. I was like, “This is what I want.”
We had gone through a couple different designs, they had done whole molds, we had done Brooklyn up, and it was just like wasn’t quite hitting the way I wanted it to until the last time. It was like I really kind of create this map and sent it in. And then when we did our first test with this new look, it was the first day of shooting. Brooklyn got there before anyone else, and she was in this room and because it’s full body makeup, it’s like she’s just locked in there with the makeup team. And it wasn’t until an hour before we were shooting that they called me up and I finally got to go in and be like, “Oh, alright, awesome. This looks fucking badass.”
DC: Brooklyn told me about every vein getting individually placed on her body and there was one person dedicated to putting veins on her.
CA: Exactly. It’s like when you take all the fat off someone’s arms, you can start seeing the veins and what’s underneath. And I still wanted It Feeds to be dark because I knew that in the script eventually we will see this creature, we’ll see it full on, we’ll see everything, we’ll see all the goods. But until then, I wanted to keep it dark enough that we could still have it hide and not give away all the goods. Especially because there are scenes that are fully lit.
Then I also wanted to keep it so that in the dark, you could also see these dots, almost like its eyes are reflecting the light. So we had to put these kind of dots or try to have a pin light or whatever to make them hop. At least that was the goal with it.
It Feeds is out now on VOD.
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