Interview: Honeymoon director Leigh Janiak on her terrifying horror debut

Independent horror has been thriving recently, with smart, terrifying films including The Babadook and It Follows generating substantial festival buzz and striking a chord with audiences. First-time director Leigh Janiak’s Honeymoon continues that trend, delivering an eerie, low-budget take on the horrific dissolution of a young newlyweds’ relationship within a secluded cabin in the woods.

Honeymoon stars Game of Thrones‘ Rose Leslie as Bea, and Harry Treadaway (Control) as Paul, a pair of young newlyweds off to celebrate their honeymoon in Bea’s rustic family cabin. They spend their initial marital time in the cabin in a loving haze, jumping each other in nearly every room, until a mysterious beam of light causes Bea to walk out into the woods alone at night, where something takes over her.

Bea begins acting erratically soon after, forgetting the words for everyday objects, and suddenly unwilling to sleep with her confused husband. He finds her notebook filled with repeated reminders of her name and other facts about her life, and catches her rehearsing excuses to avoid sleeping with him in the mirror. As Bae progressively becomes more unhinged, and eventually violent, Paul has to struggle to contain her within the cabin, while trying to understand what force has overtaken his wife.

Honeymoon takes its time getting under your skin, relying on the creepy stillness of the woods, and the utterly frightening notion that we never truly know anyone. Director Leigh Janiak expertly spins the mystery behind Bae’s disintegration by slowly dribbling out clues about her condition throughout the film, rather than relying on cheap jump scares, or other overdone horror tropes.

We caught up with Leigh Janiak by e-mail to discuss the inspirations behind the film, casting the couple, and the state of independent horror today. Read on for our Q&A, and be sure to catch Honeymoon on Blu Ray / DVD and VOD. We have 2 copies of the DVD up for grabs, courtesy of Video Services Corp! Simply e-mail us here to enter. We’ll pick the winners at random on January 10th. Good luck!

How did you develop the story for Honeymoon?

My writing partner Phil and I knew that we wanted to tell a grounded genre story. We were interested in identity and how well you can ever really know another person. We thought about the Invasion of the Body Snatchers and how it keeps getting retold generation after generation. It ended up being the perfect lens through which to explore our idea. We decided to tell a very intimate body snatcher story, where the person you think you know the best, in this case, a man’s new wife, turns into someone he no longer recognizes.

This is your first feature, when did you know that Honeymoon was the project you wanted to go ahead with?

Phil and I had been writing together for years here in LA, trying to break into the studio business and we kept on hitting a brick wall. Sometime in 2011, I saw Monsters. I was just so impressed and reinvigorated and inspired. I remember thinking – I just need to make a movie. That’s what I want to be doing, that’s what I love – movies, not screenplays. So Phil and I started thinking about a story that we could tell in a contained way, but in the genre universe that we loved.

Given the sporadic French in the film, was the film supposed to be set in Quebec? Was there ever a plan to shoot up here in Canada?

The film was supposed to be set in Ontario, but Will, Bea’s childhood “friend,” is Quebecois. He taught Bea French during the summers they spent together at the lake. As for production, my family has a cottage in Ontario (where my parents actually spent their honeymoon). When we wrote the script we had no idea what our final budget was going to be, so for a while we thought if we had to, we would shoot there. Ultimately that cottage would have been nearly impossible as our location; it was incredibly remote… We did want to shoot somewhere else in Canada though, but we ended up only have a little window with which to shoot (between Rose’s Game of Thrones seasons) and that window ended up being right at the tail-end of winter / the beginning of spring. Canada (and specifically the lakes) were still too cold, so we ended up shooting in North Carolina.

Were there any particular works that influenced the film? I definitely detect a strong Cronenberg influence, especially with the body horror elements.

I think the strongest influences outside of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers were Rosemary’s Baby and The Shining. That said, my original lookbook (which I made right after finishing the script, way before even pre-production) is full of images from The Fly. Cronenberg was a huge influence for all the body horror and Bea’s transformation in Honeymoon and my SFX make-up artist Christopher Nelson and I spent a lot of time talking about his practical effects and his great tactile quality that the audience can sense, if not really feel.

The film has a couple of pretty intense gore moments; was it always intentional to really push both the atmospheric and gore elements of the film?

Definitely! I figured this was an indie film without a nervous studio trying to please the widest audience. What better opportunity to push the envelope?

How did you come to decide upon Rose Leslie and Harry Treadaway as the couple?

I had seen Rose on Downton Abbey and she had just started on Game of Thrones when we were casting. I had read the Game of Thrones books and Ygritte was one of my favorite characters, so when Rose showed up playing her, I was really excited.  We didn’t have a casting director and Rose didn’t have a US agent yet or anything. I remember emailing my producer Patrick, pitching her and passing along her UK agent’s info that I had found on the Internet. He said “great idea” and that he’d call her agent in London the next day, but it all felt like a long shot. I was extremely happy when she responded to the script. I had seen Harry in a ton of indie films, Fish Tank, Control, and thought he was incredibly talented and so when he showed up on a list that one of the agencies had submitted I was really excited. As for them as a couple though, there was just a lot of finger crossing. I knew they were both great individually, but we didn’t have the resources for a chemistry read or anything. Luckily, they arrived on set and clicked perfectly, because the whole film rests on believing in their relationship.

The film’s stars have to go through a myriad of emotions throughout the film; how did you go about preparing them for their roles?

I spent a lot of time with Rose and Harry talking through each of their characters’ respective trajectories. Both Bea and Paul transform significantly over the course of the film, and while we tried to shoot as close to sequentially as possible, that turned out not being very close at all. We were jumping all over the place and it’s a testament to both of their talents that they were able to keep it all together and show their characters’ emotional and physical decay.

Did working in the woods at night ever affect you or the crew?

Ha! I’m not sure how it affected anyone else, but one night a few days out from production I had forgotten my script notebook on set. I drove back and it was the first time I had been out at the lake at the night. The blackness, the darkness was just unlike anything I had experienced in years. It was so isolated and just creepy. And then the security guard ended up scaring me because, naively, I didn’t even remember that we had a security guard…

The film manages to be incredibly disturbing without relying on things like jump cuts and obnoxiously loud sound cues – were there any horror tropes you purposely shied away from?

Jump scares and loud sound cues were exactly the horror tropes that I purposely shied away from! I think sometimes those tropes actually make things less scary. You expect them. They let you know and prepare you, “OK now it’s time for something scary to happen…” They completely work in certain films, but I just wanted Honeymoon to have a very grounded, relatable aesthetic on every level so we avoided them.

This seems like a really strong year for independent horror films, with films like The Babadook and It Follows (which seems to share some themes with Honeymoon) – what are your thoughts on the state of the genre right now?

The Babadook and It Follows were both two of my favourites last year, I’m so glad you mentioned them. I think that the indie genre film is incredibly exciting. There’s no other place where can you push limits and explore original ideas to the extent that you can with indie horror and sci-fi and there’s just this great, huge audience that not only wants, but embraces original, crazy ideas.

Without getting into spoiler-territory, some details are left unexplained in the film – was it important for you to leave some elements up to the audience’s imagination?

You know, for me the narrative is really about Paul and Bea’s relationship and how that falls apart. It was important for me to bring that story to an end and I didn’t want to overwhelm it with too many details about what caused it… I just thought that was a different movie. That said, I wish we had a few more resources to provide just a little more at the end… Something like that great last moment in Under the Skin.

Any future project plans you can let us know about?

Phil and I are working on a limited series TV show that we’re in the process of setting up in the cable space early this year. It’s very dark and grounded. More thriller than horror, but with a lot of genre elements. And we’re starting to work on a new feature idea. I’m excited for 2015!

Honeymoon is available now on Blu Ray / DVD and VOD.