Getting in Your Head

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Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

Getting in Your Head

Matt Patches: Now you mentioned that one of them might be "the Devil," but is the movie a monster movie or more of a psychological horror?

John Dowdle: It's more psychological. Think of it more like a throwback a Hitchcock film, almost like a Hitchcock film with a supernatural edge. We tried to infuse it with a 70's horror film feel to it. We have a score that has a very Bernard Herrmann-esque score, you know, we went with a lot of wide lenses and shutter punching, like they do in The Shining. I would put it more in that kind of world.

Matt Patches: Any use of the signature dolly zoom?

John Dowdle: On various cuts...[laughs] we did that four builds ago and said, 'You know what? Let's never do those again.'

Drew Dowdle: I got to say, just to give a little more color to it, a lot of the characters in the elevator, and the scripts, even on their chairs on set, their monikers weren't who they were - it was the mechanic, and the salesman, and the woman, and the old woman. They really have that five. They're five strangers, we don't know anything about them when they enter this building...a lot of the fun of the movie is during the course of it is starting to discover details about these people that could shift this suspicion around the room in very deliberate ways. People that you think you could trust, and your really attached to this person, then suddenly you're like, 'maybe I don't trust them so much.'

Matt Patches: Are there specific movies that you guys went to for reference or that M. Night brought to you, something that inspired him.

John Dowdle: We went to The Shining. The Shining I would say is first and foremost. It's a psychological film in a building. It had the right kind of feel to it for us. We really reference that a lot. We watched tons of stuff from The Omen, The Exorcist, to take a little piece of everything.

Drew Dowdle: The idea of strangers is a really powerful one to us. In the Hitchcock world some inspirations were Lifeboat, Strangers on a Train, you know films with the idea of you don't know these people they are complete strangers, what is kind of the worst case scenario for one of these strangers.