Heavy-metal horror flick summons power of fear

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This article was published 09/04/2020 (2371 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Before he came to Winnipeg in the late summer of 2018 to shoot the horror-comedy We Summon the Darkness, director Marc Meyers had skirted along the periphery of horror with his 2017 film My Friend Dahmer. Based on the graphic novel/memoir by Derf Backderf, the movie told the story of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in his high school years, immediately before he would embark on a secret murder spree of 17 men and boys from the late ’70s into the ‘90s.

We Summon the Darkness, by contrast, is an entirely fictional horror-comedy, set in the ’80s, about a trio of young women smack dab in the middle of murder and mayhem after attending a rock concert and hooking up with a trio of apparently innocuous male metalheads. The film is set amid the “satanic panic” of the ’80s that saw media-fuelled hysteria concerning satanic rituals, false accusations and the ominous rise of a certain kind of evangelical zealot who sees fear as a tool to gain power.

The film stars Alexandra Daddario, Maddie Hasson and Amy Forsyth as three young women, with an appearance by Johnny Knoxville as hellfire preacher Pastor John Henry Butler. Scripted by Alan Trezza (who also wrote the Daddario horror-comedy Burying the Ex), it took director Meyers even deeper into the realm of the horror genre, and he was happy to go on the gore-splattered road trip.

“My Friend Dahmer was my first foray into what would be identified as a film that appeals to that genre community. And I really fell in love with that community,” he says on the phone from his home in Brooklyn, where he is in a jubilant-sounding isolation with his wife and young daughter. (“They’re having a dance party in the next room,” he explains as he moves his phone to a quieter location.)

“I thought of (Dahmer) as a character-driven film that I knew to be provocative … that edged up against horror-thriller tropes,” he says. “It fortunately appealed to that community and appeared a lot of genre film festivals. It was my first experience in that world and in that space and I really fell in love with it.

“So when I was given the script for We Summon the Darkness, I immediately saw that as an opportunity to go further with my filmmaking and also return to that audience with another wilder, bloodier, crazier film.”

“It involves pyrotechnics and blood and violence and humour and three beautiful women as leads,” he says. “The whole thing just felt fun to me. It was fun to make. It was fun to share.”

Fun as it may have been, the film also has some interesting things to say about using fear as a tool. As one character says of the rampant occult paranoia afflicting the culture: “It doesn’t matter if it’s true. It only matters if people believe it.”

“The satanic panic was about the creation of fear — to have lots of people afraid of the same thing and motivated to believe in the same things,” Meyers says. “And it’s haunting to me that certain themes echo sentiments today.

“But otherwise, why tell the story?” he says. “I’m not interested in doing a film just for its own sake. I do want to feel that it has some sort of relevance to where we are as people now.”

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We Summon the Darkness was mostly shot around Selkirk in August and September of 2018 at a time when a few different film and TV projects converged on southern Manitoba, including A Dog’s Journey, the Christopher Walken movie Percy, and the final season of Channel Zero.

“Even though there was a bunch of larger movies, we were able to assemble a really passionate, diligent, skilled crew that we could work with up there,” Meyers says.

“There was a great stunt team that came out of Winnipeg (Rick and Sean Skene were stunt co-ordinators) and a great crew of grips and electrics, and we had the support of the camera department and the (production assistants) that allowed me and my (director of photography Tarin Anderson) and my actors to just keep working really really fast in the limited amount of time and resources that we had,” Meyers says. “So the production value of this film is right there in a way that we had hoped.

“The movie is better because of the crew that gathered in Canada to make it.”

It didn’t hurt that the star of the film had recently shot the thriller Night Hunter in the city and was familiar with the turf.

“Alexandra Daddario is a leading lady and she’s a natural leader, both on set and as someone who a lot of people follow,” Meyers says. “So it was natural that she also became a producer on this project, since she was the first actor to sign on.

“She really helped put a jet pack to the project so that we could make this movie.”

Read Randall King’s review of We Summon the Darkness in Saturday’s Weekend Review.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing