Starring Schitt’s Creek’s Emily Hampshire and The Borgias François Arnaud, upcoming horror, Mom, follows a struggling mother who is abandoned by her family and partner after a horrific incident. As she falls further into isolation, she begins to be haunted by a sinister entity that is determined to make her relive her darkest moments.
The movie gets its world premiere at this year’s Glasgow Frightfest, and we sat down with Mom director Adam O’Brien to take a deep dive into horror…
How did everything start for you with Mom?
I had this idea of making a movie about an inner creature and your inner demons. When I went through this idea, in the end, I [realised] I was missing something. I was missing a depth of character. I talked with Philip Kalin-Hajdu, the writer, who was also producing with me, and he told me that his wife was a nurse and she was talking about postpartum psychosis.
Maybe we could collect stories from different women or other nurse psychologists and put them in one single character instead…?
So that’s what we did! The movie is not real obviously but we wanted to do something based on reality, have a grounded character who can live the real stuff, but in overdrive. Like what could happen if this was covered with a blanket of supernatural and some horror elements?
What stood out about Emily Hampshire taking on the central role in Mom?
We loved her obviously in Schitts Creek, but also in 12 Monkeys and a few other projects that I saw from her. Phil came up with the idea actually, when we were in the casting process. We looked it over and thought that could be interesting because it’s something that we knew she could play and how far she could go and how devoted she would be.
This is why she’s an executive producer on the project because she really did believe in the project and still does. She did research about the subject matter. She went through something.
To be truthful, she was the second choice [but when] she said yes we were like ‘oh, that’s fantastic’. We were very aware of her talent and how good she can be and she surprised us, honestly, on set. It was always a discovery.
She was amazing. She totally understood the character. She totally understood the story and she totally understood how to bring that to life for a character.
What kind of scares can audiences expect?
Strangely enough, the very first horror element you can feel is the real horror from the character. Because it is something that is based in reality, it’s grounded. You feel the anxiety and you feel on the edge of your seat.
After that what you can expect from the general horror side is small details that will make horror fans say ‘oh my god. Okay, that was scary. That was a scary moment’.
Just to give you an example. Something that we have is house centipedes everywhere. So it’s very gross when you see that but also that is a metaphor for her, for the character. That’s a metaphor for the fact that everything’s happening in the water because those creatures are found in places with water and so it’s part of the story. Every time you hear that sound of the house centipede or you see them, you know something’s going to happen.
So it’s all small details, like the fact that the character never gets out of the house. Whenever somebody comes in, you never hear a door. Nobody gets out, nobody gets in. I tried to give you enough little things that make this more creepy. We thought about that a lot!
Of course there are a few jump scares and we have the creature but it’s more something you can just feel and at the end, you can see how it completes. There are many many details in the movie. Your subconscious doesn’t catch up but you know that it’s right for the movie, you know it is right for the story.
You’ve worked on a number of horror projects, what is it about this space that appeals to you as a filmmaker?
I grew up with that genre. When I was a kid, that was cool to watch on a Saturday night. Having the fear and the special effects at the time. Like when you rewatch Evil Dead, oh my god, that’s amazing: More blood! That’s great and it’s always fascinated me.
At the same time, horror is a good reflection of society at the time when it happened. For me. when I watch horrors from the Eighties it means something. When I watch horrors from the Nineties, suddenly they’re all teen horror films – Final Destination or Scream. It’s all that era, and I love that time. I love the slasher aspect of it. One of the good slashers that we had in the cinema in the Eighties was the first Friday The 13th because it’s not about Jason. It’s about a mother and that imprinted on my childhood. I was like, ‘okay, horror, I want to do that’.
But there are different kinds of horror. So what kind of horror can you do? You can go bloody and very gory. You can go with ghosts, you can go with jumpscares, you can go with psychological. I love all those aspects.
When I did short films. I wanted to try something [different] all the time. I didn’t do ‘oh this is a story I want to tell’. No, I built a story just to try something. A Little Off The Top was a shot film where a hairdresser is talking to someone. That’s easy. It’s just a monologue of nine minutes. But it’s horror because we finish on a bang. I wanted to see how we could play psychologically with the audience.
But also at the same time I wanted to try a creature film. Banshee is a creature movie. I never did that before but in my past as a post-production and visual effects guy, I was like, ‘okay, how can I explore making a creature with visual effects and a puppeteer?’ That creature is a mix between a real person, a puppet and visual effects. That led to a very cool story with a little girl.
What do you want audiences to take away from the movie?
The whole point of this movie is to scare you, so you feel anxiety. But in the end, what I experienced with an audience was that it was provoking conversation. We watched it in front of more than 100 people and then an even smaller audience and at the end of the movie, while the end credit goes, nobody talks. It’s a big silence. We we’re like ‘oh, what the hell?!’ and they’re just trying to absorb what they saw because there’s a lot of information and emotion.
At the end of it, you can hear it and it’s very strange and it’s really fun because it’s rare to do ‘cinema’. One guy told me that I ‘did cinema’. I didn’t do just a movie like, no, I did cinema because at the end of it, everybody was not talking! Then suddenly one person started talking and then it was everywhere. I had a bunch of kids come up to me and say ‘hey, I have a theory about why she’s there, and what’s happening with the character’ and they started to tell me some stuff about why they think this is happening.
So I think that’s what I would like. For people to get the emotion, get the fear, get the intention, get the anxiety, but at the end of the day: talk. Fingers crossed that me and my team successfully did that.
Mom receives its world premiere at Glasgow FrightFest on 9 March 2024. Find the full line-up here.