By DEIRDRE CRIMMINS
Even in our era of seemingly rapid change, a few things will always stay the same. Benjamin Franklin would say those things are death and taxes. On the even darker end of that are the horrors wrought by humanity and the horrors of nature. Whether facing monstrous sea creatures or slashers with an ax to grind, it is easy to look at the world as a place without easily identifiable bastions of safety. As Bart Simpson would say, “You are damned if you do, and you are damned if you don’t.”
OUT OF DARKNESS takes this same concept, and brings us back into history – back 45,000 years to be exact. The film follows a small band of hunters as they make their way toward a fabled land of warm caves and plentiful food. As so often happens, not everything goes according to plan. The group finds themself fending off a strange creature (with an even stranger call) that hunts them at night when they are most vulnerable. With wide, harsh landscapes, intricate costumes and a bespoke language, this first feature from Andrew Cummings takes a big swing at our beloved genre. Recently. RUE MORGUE sat down with Cummings to talk about the Mesolithic mayhem of OUT OF DARKNESS.
Where did the idea for this film start?
When I was finishing film school, I saw a documentary on the BBC here in the UK. The first episode of it was about Homo sapiens, early modern humans in Western Europe. And I just thought, what a cool time period to tell a story – and didn’t know what the story would be. But I just thought that those early periods in our history just felt slightly underserved in cinema. I read William Golding’s follow-up to Lord of the Flies; It’s called The Inheritors, which is also set in that time period. I thought, “Oh, great. I’ll make this in 20 years time, if I ever get to a stage where the studios go, ‘So you’ve made us a bunch of money. What would you like to do?’ [Laughs] Well, there’s this book about the Homo sapiens.”
So that was the beginning of it. Then, I met Oliver Kassman, the film’s producer, and he had also been thinking about this time period completely independent of me and wanted to do something in the horror space there. That’s when I realized something about human brutality and inhumanity, and this was also a time in the U.K. with Brexit and issues of leaving the European Union were being raised, and there was a lot of really ugly rhetoric and xenophobia that was masked under … politics. It came out of that groundswell of rage – of politics that was happening at the time. Then, all these things came together, and just the love of the genre and certain horror films that had a big, big impact on me growing up. And just how can you get flavors of that into your first project.
Director Andrew Cumming
You mentioned Lord of the Flies and Brexit, and then there is this film. In all three, there are themes of presumed isolation, and when there’s a lack of isolation, the threat becomes real. Is that a theme that you wanted to carry over into the movie? Or was it just something that inspired you?
I loved Lord of the Flies as a kid. The Inheritors is about a group of younger adults who came to our Homo sapiens for the first time. It ends extremely – in a very powerful way that when I finished the book, I just had this new appreciation for the depths that our species can reach when we’re confronted with something or someone we don’t understand, something we perceive as different, therefore they’re a threat, therefore we have to exterminate them. You don’t have to be an avid historian to see patterns of that and in our behavior throughout time. So again, reaching back to this time period 45,000 years ago felt like a fresh way to talk about these themes. It also allowed me, as a director, a chance to swing big on my debut. Think about really building a world from the ground up. That’s always really tempting for a director, I think.
The value of storytelling as a way to understanding is something that specifically bookends the film.
Yeah. Well, the other book that myself, Oliver and the screenwriter Ruth [Greenberg] read was, Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, which is this fantastic book. It’s basically like a brief history of humankind. And he talks about our history in such an interesting and vivid way. His whole thesis is that humans have survived because of our ability to create myths. And not only to create myths but also to buy into them and have shared myths. You know? Because, in a way, he argues that everything from the flood story that inspired Noah’s Ark is a myth the same way that Coca-Cola is a myth. The only reason Coca-Cola exists is because we buy into it, right? … So it’s really interesting. And so, there was that aspect of how do we get that into the script, but it was also a necessity in a way because you’re asking the audience to come off the street, put away the smartphones, plug into this prehistoric horror movie. How do you get to know everybody quickly and in an effective and efficient manner?
The idea of the campfire was one of Ruth’s. It inputs early on just to have the elder tell a story. That story, obviously, has his attempt to embarrass or humiliate the leader of the group. So, you were already getting character dynamics and the hierarchy of the group in there. And then, to bookend it, we just felt it was a good way to have the eventual lead character. It was a good way for them to take stock of what happened. Again, just the idea that these stories are passed down, right? All myths and legends and monsters come from somewhere. They’re all rooted in either something from our past or some subconscious fear or mystery that needs to be made physically flesh so that we can process it and defeat it and move forward. The storytelling theme felt like a really smart way to investigate character and also to tap into that. But, the biggest thrill I’m gonna get when the film comes out is that it’s a group of people in a dark space around a flickering light telling stories, and that’s cinema. So in 45,000 years, nothing’s really changed. That’s kind of a nice meta-comment on the cinema experience and why it’s such a powerful medium.
I do want to talk a little bit about Tola, the language in the film. How important was it to you to not have a standard existing modern language?
It became important. I was worried about it. When we first pitched the film to people, the first question was, “Do they talk?” Yeah, they talk. They are not grunting. Then, of course, the second question is, “What are they saying?” For the longest time I thought we’ll do it in English, because I was worried about turning people off the film. I was worried about the impact that subtitles can have on your bottom line, you know? Because you want people to see your debut. You don’t just wanna make something and have your parents say, “Well done kid, you proved us wrong.” So, I resisted it for a while until I realized that when you decide you’re gonna make a prehistoric set film, you have to jump in with both feet. There are no half-measures.
I realized that I would be a lazy director if I did not commit fully. Once I made that decision and Oliver backed me and Ruth backed me as well, we engaged with Dr. Daniel Andersson, who’s an academic and linguist, and we sent him the challenge. Taking some Basque from the Spanish, Sanskrit, Arabic, and just trying to create a mother tongue that could have potentially given birth to all these languages. He disappeared with the script for three or four weeks and came back with this fully formed beautiful tongue. It takes a few times to be able to pronounce it, but once you’re there, we just realized this is gonna work. This feels like a real language. The cast agreed and committed to it fully. I think it makes the difference.
Did you have to go back to him ever to ask for additional words during rewrites?
Yeah. Some of it was a bit too complicated. There are times when the subtitle for the English translation might just be three words in, but the sentence in Tola was too long. So, it was a case of how can we strip this thing back and just make certain lines punchier – or as punchy as they were in the English version. Then, the story at the end was a kind of late edition in the edit that wasn’t in the script. We went back to him with what we wanted to do, and he went and translated that. He was on call, when he wasn’t doing all his academic stuff, to continue helping us narrow it in the edit.
It’s always good to have a linguist in your pocket with something like this.
Oh, for sure. Just generally. It’s great.
The film itself has several female body situations. There’s the first menstruation; There’s also a major theme of fear of menstruation as well as pregnancy. Where did the idea to include all of this come from? And how did it make it into the film?
Yeah, that’s all from Ruth, as a female writer. When Oliver and I pitched a project to her, apart from the idea of being able to tell a horror story in this period, she had things she wanted to say about violence perpetrated upon women and violence perpetrated by women and saw this period has been an ideal avenue to do that. Oliver and I agreed because horror is famed for the final girl. Personally, I got a real kick of the final girl being a genocidal maniac by the end – that she takes that journey from innocent to destroyer. But all the things you’re talking about, menstruation and especially that sort of almost super superstitious fear of menstruation and what it means, again, you don’t have to be an avid historian to see where those hotspots are within our shared history. But Ruth just brought all that stuff into the light. It’s just this extra layer of oppression that this young woman feels, and the older woman in the group, Ave (Iola Evans), who’s carrying the leader’s child, has clearly been brutalized just the same way. The partner’s behavior hasn’t really changed in 45,000 years, sadly. It’s gonna take a lot of diligence and vigilance to try and stop it – to try and break that cycle.
So much in the film is about how things have not changed.
There’s a subtitle that comes up at the start that tells you the time period. I would semi-joke that we can take that subtitle out, and this could be the distant future. Some apocalyptic Earth. Then, you’re in this cycle of fear and violence and survival and just going around in a circle that kind of just describes us perfectly. You look at Jonathan Glazer’s film Zone of Interest, and he’s talking about the same things but from a very different standpoint with a very different treatment. There’s obviously something in the water, and lots of horror films are discussing this stuff as well. That behavior – the way we treat each other – is not going away anytime soon, sadly. Just look at Kyiv and look at Gaza and Israel.
I always like to end with this question. What scares you?
Outliving my children. That scares me a lot.
That’s terrifying. Good answer.
You are the first person to ask me that for a long time, and I’ve become a father. That would suck.
OUT OF DARKNESS from Andrew Cumming and Bleeker Street is now playing in theaters.
