In his feature film debut, The Undertone, writer and director Ian Tuason utilized a 360 soundscape to craft his horrors. Following a podcast host caring for her mother, Tuason makes the film’s single location feel epic with how sound is used to expand the film’s world outside of the house’s four walls. But underneath its sonic horrors lies an even more terrifying truth about what it means to care for a sick parent, especially when your relationship with them isn’t perfect.
We spoke with Tuason and The Undertone‘s star Nina Kiri at Fantasia (where the film had its world premiere) about playing with audio, caregiving, and the horrors of children’s nursery rhymes.
Dread Central: Congratulations on The Undertone. I watched it, as instructed, in a dark room with headphones, and it really messed me up. So thank you so much. Ian, what was so appealing to you about using audio as the source of the scares?
Ian Tuason: I first wrote this as a scripted podcast. It was going to be two hosts talking and listening to the audio files. I wrote it that way, and then my parents got sick. Then I was thinking, for the longest time, “Why does The Exorcist scare me?” And no other horror movies scare me, except for maybe two others. Both are found footage: The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity.
But with The Exorcist, the reason why I think it’s scary is, number one, I’m Catholic. So there’s that aspect where you’re supposed to feel safe within your religion, and that film took away that safety blanket. And then also it takes another thing that’s supposed to be safe, which is that a child is the source of your fear. And when I was caregiving my mom, I felt the same way. She was like a child. Then the wheels started turning, and I already had this script. So, in between the recordings of the session, she has this other life that she has to tend to, and then it kind of just spiraled upwards to hell from there.
DC: I think the audio has that found footage vibe in a way. Plus you’re not showing the horror, but really letting the audience fill in the gaps mentally, which I think is even scarier sometimes, especially with the way you use sound in The Undertone.
IT: Found footage is what inspired me to do the scripted podcast and I conceived of The Undertone as a lost episode. I was going to do what Blair Witch did, and I created a Facebook and a website. It was going to be something like, “Episode 92 was recorded but never released, but now they’ve found it…” Then, Justin, the host, or the person who runs the podcast, would be like, “I didn’t release that.”
I have a podcast channel, so I published episode 92 of The Undertone, and it’s just nine minutes of “London Bridge” backward.
DC: I hate that you really tapped into the really uncanny thing of kids’ songs backward and finding messages in kids’ songs. Was that something that you were interested in? How did that come into play?
IT: That was an accident. That was the universe at that point because when I was writing the scripted podcast, I had to think scary stuff. And I remember listening to or watching a YouTube video where they were listening to some rock songs backwards, and then you could hear stuff. I just remember being in my basement watching the video of the person listening to it backwards, and I just kept looking behind me.
So I wrote it into the script. And then the challenge was what song? Nursery rhymes weren’t the first thing that came to my mind. What I was doing was I was going on YouTube and I was just searching for any song that had hidden messages, and then I started thinking, “It’s going to be hard to license these songs.”
I found some that were really scary from Sesame Street songs, but I ended up searching for public domain nursery rhymes. But then later, as I was writing, I was saying, “Oh, wait a minute, this story is about something else now.” And then I wrote that she’s expecting.
DC: Oh, that’s so cool. Nina, what was your experience like playing, being in The Undertone? A lot of it is on you. So what was that experience like for you as an actor?
Nina Kiri: Well, at first it was very intimidating. There’s just a lot of dialogue during the podcast scenes, and I was like, “Oh God, I have to nail this. I really have to practice.” I was quite intimidated by that aspect. Then, when I got there and we all started working together, it was a relaxed atmosphere. I was like, “Oh, everyone’s here to help each other. It’s not going to be like, I have to do this perfectly.” And then it became a lot easier to, I guess, do everything that I was scared of doing, which is 15 pages of dialogue. That was the most challenging thing.
DC: That is intimidating. That’s a lot.
NK: It is. But because it was just me and not a lot of crew, it was very, I don’t know, it was just a very collaborative, relaxed atmosphere, honestly. So open. I was able to just experiment and do my own thing.
I could be like, “I was thinking this,” or I’d just do it. And you’d [gestures to Ian] be like, yes, “That’s what I was thinking, too.” It’s so freeing to work like that. So the movie is claustrophobic, but my experience playing Evy was so not that. It was very, very collaborative, stretching the boundaries of what I think I can do.
DC: That’s so cool. I feel like movies like this, when I say this single location kind of horror films, there’s so much creativity you don’t think about that gets to go into it. And that’s cool, getting to hear how you play with that and stretch those boundaries.
IT: Nina wrote the most important line in the movie, which was the confession. I didn’t write that originally, but it’s perfect.
DC: That’s so cool.
NK: Yeah, it was nice. In a relaxed atmosphere, you can really go places. And I think smaller sets or just situations like this location just give you the ability to actually really sit there, be a part of this, let it all sink in, and experiment. You don’t always have time to experiment.
DC: Well, and you talked about the claustrophobia of the film, and I love how you shoot things to break up the dialogue. How do you make it creepy? I heard you’ve worked in VR before, too. How did that influence how you shot the film?
IT: The VR influenced the audio because it became a 360 soundscape. But the visuals were pure traditional cinema language.
In the script, I didn’t write any of that [the ending]. I just blocked it. It was cool to watch them because we only had half an hour to set up and then they had all these ideas. I walked into the kitchen, I saw people drilling into my ceiling, and I was like, “This is going to be good.” It was just magic because a lot of things happened that I couldn’t have controlled. There was a shadow that just went right across the wall before we went into a POV in the hallway.
I was never really, I wasn’t really into sports in school. Some of my friends were, and they had this camaraderie, and then I’m a sports fan, so I always felt like I wished I could be part of that moment of victory. And I remember you were hyping yourself up for the very last one take.
And then when we nailed it, you just went, “Yeah!” And you high-fived me, and everyone was just cheering. I just felt like, “Whoa, this is it. This is that feeling of victory, I guess.”
DC: This is a really weird question, but it’s something I latched on to. You always say, Mama. Was that in the script? That word choice was so specific, and I really loved it because. I call my mom mama, too, and I think it feels so childlike.
NK: Well, there’s also a guilt, the caregiving guilt, which is really emotional. I think about guilt with my own parents, whom I’ve never cared for and who are alive. And I still feel emotional when I think about not being there for every second that they need me, or if I’m visiting them and I ditch them to go for dinner with someone.
As an adult, it almost gets stronger with how limited your time is with them. Then I think there’s a lot of that guilt in this story of what it’s like to care for someone, and be like, “I need a break. But when I take it, I feel guilty.” I once read, because I feel guilty a lot in my life, and I always have, that guilt is the denial of one’s own innocence. So it’s like you’re positioning yourself, but you are just as innocent.
IT: Yeah, you are.
NK: As a person, you’re just as in need of a break. But when you’re in a situation like that, it’s really easy to feel guilty all the time. [To Ian] I know with your spiritual upbringing, there is a lot of Catholic guilt, right?
DC: I grew up Catholic, too. So I understand that deep Catholic guilt, every single action is a sin, the usual.
IT: I don’t know if you noticed, but you probably feel anxious to go to Mass, right?
DC: I haven’t gone in a long time.
IT: I didn’t know why until after I made The Undertone. I went to Mass after filming because I was my nephew’s sponsor for his confirmation. The priest was saying something and was basically shaming the congregation in the name of God. And then I’m, “Oh, this is something that I just didn’t notice before.” I was just kind of accepting it.
And then I realized, as I got more spiritual, that that’s not what a creator would want for creations. So now I feel like that’s what the movie’s about. It’s about shedding light on everyone and saying, “Don’t feel guilty.” If you do blame yourself and hold onto that guilt, it can manifest in really harmful ways.
I have a feeling that the reason why The Undertone is going to do well is that a lot of people are going to be in a caregiving position. I read this somewhere that because of the boomer generation reaching their seventies, and there are so many of them, even more people, like you, are probably thinking about the future.
NK: If we’re talking about the millennial generation, we have such a different relationship with our parents than the previous generation. I hang out with my parents much more than they hung out with theirs. And I notice it in many people. In our generation, we live with our parents longer, and we spend more time with them. It’s more normalized. Whereas before, people at 22 were having families, so you were removed, you did your own thing, you started your own family. Whereas a lot of us either aren’t having kids or are having kids very late. So that’s still our primary family.
DC: That’s so interesting. I never thought about it like that, but that’s so true.
NK: If I think about my parents at my age, my God, they didn’t see their parents as much as I see them. They weren’t still their parents’ kids in the same way that I am their kid. Right. Because they had me at that time, they had my sister, they had their life, they had their jobs, it’s just a different time. And I think our generation has a completely different relationship with our parents than it’s ever had before. And it’s actually pretty nice. We’re so lucky to have that time and space, but it is a very different situation from what our parents had with their parents.
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