Joseph Kahn’s sci-fi/horror satire “Ick” makes its world premiere at Toronto Intl. Midnight Madness Film Festival on Saturday. He previously directed “Bodied,” which premiered at the festival in 2017 and won the People’s Choice Award for Midnight Madness. Kahn talks to Variety about his love for creature features, taking comedy horrors seriously, and his respect for Steven Spielberg’s scary films.
Midnight Madness programmer Peter Kuplowsky summarizes the plot this way: “In the small American town of Eastbrook, almost twenty years after a viscous, vine-like growth – colloquially called ‘the Ick’ – began to burrow into every nook and cranny, a baffled populus have found their lives seemingly unaffected by the creeping anomaly. The exceptions to this unconscious conformity are Hank Wallace, a former high school football prospect turned down-on-his-luck science teacher, and his observant student Grace, both of whom regard the Ick with a suspicious inquiry that is soon violently validated. Outbursts of bloody chaos and blasé attitudes ensue, cleverly satirizing how a society can become accustomed to living in a perpetual state of emergency.
Joseph Kahn
Courtesy of Ick LLC
Kuplowsky adds: “Kahn enlivens the sharp irony of this pulp horror scenario with his signature breakneck abandon and pop aesthetic. Dizzying, grotesque and hysterical in both definitions of the word, ‘Ick’ points a cultural mirror to a contemporary ethos stoked since the turn of the century, a premise crystallized in the film’s use of millennial needle drops that are as nostalgic as they are because they are contagious.”
Kahn is a fan of Spielberg monster movies like ‘Jaws’ and ‘Jurassic Park,’ he says Variety. “The interesting thing is that I’ve been hearing this general statement for as long as I’ve been in Hollywood, which is that horror comedies don’t work and they don’t sell. [I am told] “People don’t know if they’re funny or scary.” But that’s only if you look at it from the perspective that the horror is funny.
“The horror in our film is not funny. It is taken very seriously. And what I would say about Spielberg is that when he does horror, if you look at “Jaws,” it’s actually a very funny movie. Richard Dreyfuss is very funny in that movie and there are a lot of funny jokes and interpersonal relationships.
“’Jurassic Park,’ as scary as that movie is, it’s actually a hilarious movie. Jeff Goldblum is funny. Everything he says is really funny. The interactions between the children and the main characters are very funny.
“There’s an element of humor that’s missing in horror because people want you to stay scared. But my goal here is not to scare you. My goal is to inspire you. And I love how Spielberg does that, and I love that that was really the attitude in the ’80s… At the end of the day, you wanted to get your money’s worth. You wanted to be scared, you wanted to cry, you wanted to laugh… give it your all.
“And when I talk about the creature feature, ‘Gremlins’ is a good example. A scary movie for kids, but there’s a lot of comedy in it. And that’s the kind of – for lack of a better word – wholesome human experience that I love when I watch movies, and I don’t feel like I get much of that. That’s why I made this film, because I wanted to have that experience again.”
In the past, monster movies have often been linked to societal fears – whether that be communism or nuclear annihilation –. So are there fears that ‘Ick’ feeds on?
“I find that when people analyze and watch movies, they get out of it what they want, and that’s all valid. I don’t necessarily build a system into a movie to tell you what to think. I’ll set up a series of questions, and then you get what you want out of it.
“So when it comes to fear in this movie, I think one of the biggest differences between this movie and the features of past creatures is that a lot of the features of past creatures had very specific questions, and it was always : what if the fear came? What happens when the monster attacks? What happens if the atomic bomb goes off? That would be ‘Godzilla’. What if, in a world of modern technology of the time, the past catches up with you, and the old things like storms and earthquakes still topple buildings – ‘King Kong’, right?
“What happens in a society where you think you’re safe in a community, and you close all your doors, and you close all your windows, and yet an exotic, unknown human being can come in and get you. It’s ‘Dracula.’
“So there are questions that people always had, like, what if the monster comes in? What if the monster gets you, right?
“I think the most interesting thing about modern society is that that question has actually been answered. We’ve seen 9/11, we’ve seen COVID, we’ve seen different political situations, and they’ve become real. Our worst nightmares have arrived. And you know what ends up happening to people when we actually see it? In the strangest way, we just live next door. We forget. You know, two years after 9/11, we’re all going back to normal life. COVID – at some point we were tired of wearing the mask and we were tired of staying inside. It wasn’t like they solved COVID. It was that people got tired and we just went back into society, and whatever was going to come was going to come.
“It doesn’t mean I’m passing judgment on things like this because at some point there’s an element of human survival that’s always there. We must survive, we must continue. It’s that strange conflict between human survival and human ignorance. Where is the border?
“So one of the great comedic, satirical aspects of ‘Ick’ is that they live with the Ick. It’s all around them, and at some level, when you look at that from the outside, you think, ‘That’s ridiculous.’ But is it real or is it the most truthful thing about the film?
Programmer Peter Kuplowsky of the Midnight Madness section is known as someone who sets the bar high. What is he looking for?
“I think, knowing Peter Kuplowsky, he’s looking for provocative work,” says Kahn. “Things that involve energy, to be honest. He’s very unpretentious on some level, which is what I like about him, and he watches a lot of movies. So essentially he’s the great firewall of TIFF Midnight Madness. So you gotta provoke a guy who’s seen all the damn weird movies in the world. You have to get past that level of taste.
So how did “Ick” get the nod? “I think we’re actually counter-programming not only Midnight Madness, but TIFF itself, in that this film was made independently, but I actually think it has a glorious Hollywood feel to it, in a very old-fashioned way. I know a lot of people have tried to make throwback films reminiscent of the 80s and 90s, but I think we really did it in a new way. Everything from the soundtrack, to the score, to the plot and the essence of it all, but done with a new spin on it and a new attitude. But the ultimate twist to the whole thing is that it’s actually a PG-13 movie – I call it PG-13+. It’s not really an R-rated movie because there’s no swearing, there’s no sex, I think the gore is more fantasy versions – there’s still something wholesome in there that appeals to the family. It really is a film you could watch with your teenager.”
Kahn assembled a top-notch cast led by Brandon Routh, whose credits include “Superman Returns” and Netflix’s “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off,” Mena Suvari, who starred in “American Pie” and “American Beauty,” and Malina Weissman, who in Netflix’s ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ and ‘Supergirl’. This was a statement of intent on the part of the director to underline that he was taking the horror-comedy genre seriously.
“One of the things that’s very specific about horror comedies is the tone of the acting, the intent of the acting,” he says.
Weissman was one of the first leading actors to be cast. “Her performance really stood out because she had the ability to be completely serious, but the lines were still funny,” Kahn says.
“Some people can say serious lines in a serious way, and there’s no humor in that, but she had a way of presenting her character in a way that was completely believable and completely authentic, and yet the humor still came through. And that’s a very, very difficult line to walk. When I saw her audition, I thought, that’s the prototype for the tone of the movie.
“Brandon Routh is also very adept at that. He is very deadpan when he needs to be, but he also has an emotional undercurrent that can just surface.”
The film was written by Kahn, Sam Laskey and Dan Koontz.
AGC Intl., the sales arm of Stuart Ford’s indie content studio AGC Studios, will handle international sales in Toronto for “Ick.” CAA Media Finance and Peter Trinh, a producer on the film, are leading North American sales in Toronto.
The film’s producers also include Steven Schneider (“Paranormal Activity,” “Insidious,” “Late Night With the Devil”). It was co-financed by a group of investors in partnership with Interstellar Entertainment and Image Nation Abu Dhabi.
