Having made the jump from award-winning music videos to narrative features, LA-based filmmaker Colin Tilley discusses his debut feature film Night Terror. Adapted from the graphic novel Mr. Sandman (and released in the US under the title Eye for an Eye), it follows Anna (Whitney Peak), who moves to Florida to live with her grandmother. Here, after becoming complicit in a horrible act of violence, she becomes ensnared by the sinister Mr. Sandman, an entity which haunts the dreams of bullies.
STARBURST: Congratulations on the film – we think it’s a refreshing horror film that sends an interesting message and has something to say, so big congrats on that. And it’s your feature debut, which is brilliant.
Colin Tilley: Thank you so much, I really appreciate it. Glad you enjoyed the film!
Before we talk about the film, what inspirations led you to get into directing?
That’s a great question. There’s a lot that inspired me to become a director, but the first thing is, I picked up a camera when I was 18 or 19 years old. I grew up in Berkley, California and a lot of my friends were making music, and I just wanted to be a part of that collaboration process. And that’s how I started. I picked up a camera when I started shooting music videos for some of my best friends. And next thing I knew, I was like, “Wow, this is actually a profession, and I can get paid for this? This is cool.” And I kept riding that passion of learning how to be a filmmaker in every aspect. Music videos were my main film school. That’s how I learned every single day. And I got to experiment with different techniques, tools and aesthetics, and really learn my voice as a filmmaker. And then, once I reached a certain point in music videos and commercials, I wanted to try making my first film. And so I started working with a lot of talented writers. This was one of the projects I was circling, because the company, Ley Line Entertainment, reached out with a really cool, odd graphic novel written by Elisa Victoria. I was really drawn to the imagery and the message behind this very grim fairy tale of a graphic novel. It felt like the perfect opportunity for me to inject my style as a filmmaker and bring it to life.
The cinematography in the film is sublime – it gave us vibes of Texas Chain Saw in places, along with a bit of It Follows. How important was the look and feel of the locations to you and your cinematographer?
Yeah, so being from Berkeley, I don’t really get to be in a lot of swamps. That was really appealing for me, being in an environment like that, that’s so kind of lucky and filled with bugs and swamps and alligators. Man, the first time I saw an alligator when I was out there scouting, I was so excited. As far as figuring out this visual identity, world-building around this location was super vital. The first time I read the script, I was like, “Man, these dream sequences can go anywhere. Do they take place in a black void? Where do they take place?” I wasn’t sure, but once I started to get on location and immerse myself in this new atmosphere, I was looking at it with foreign eyes, and my cinematographer and I were working together closely putting all these things together. I’m so into blocking, and I’m so into just painting these pictures. That’s a big part of my background. And so, I really wanted to make sure I was able to get that imprint on this film. So, it was really interesting the way that the process came together in such a natural way. Whenever I have scouted locations, I also get a lot of ideas when I’m actually there.
You made many famous and iconic music videos before making the jump to narrative features – what were some of the biggest challenges for you as a creative in that shift in approach?
The biggest challenge is fitting the whole movie into a logistically friendly place that you can do with your budget. When you’re dealing with a 20-day shoot, you know that you can’t do a lot of location moves. And so it was about finding a central location where we could avoid any unnecessary pull-downs and set-ups that took too much time. So, we were able to find May’s house, where a lot of scenes took place. But then on May’s property, it was this massive, I want to say hunting grounds; there were all these different styles of trees and swamps and everything. And so we were able to build all of our other set pieces for these nightmare sequences into this actual space. That informed a lot and allowed us to go “We can do this from a practical standpoint. Now let’s take what we’ve got here and create within these boundaries and make something really cool.” And that’s always a great challenge because, when you have so many great creative minds – my keys were incredible; my production designer Mary and my cinematographer Robert – we were able to really put our heads together, find ways to amplify these sequences, and make them work within the constraints.
We love the design of Mr. Sandman and all of the practical effects – how important was it to you to have strong creature design and practical effects?
I’m the same way. When you watch a film like this, you want to feel something tangible. For me, it was so important to be able to do pretty much everything practical. The design process of Sandman was something that we did even before the script was finished, just to start working on what he would look like. He went through so many different iterations. Then of course, once you cast your character to who’s going to play Sandman and put the prosthetics on top of them, it turns into something totally different. And in post, we did some slight enhancements to clean things up. But I really felt like that contributed to our filmmaking style and ambitions altogether.
The film centres around an urban legend and has a strong social message – what was it about the original story that brought you on board with the project, and what about the story most stands out to you?
Yeah, there were several elements that got me really excited about doing this film. And I would say the first one was that I was always drawn to this graphic novel. I thought the whole concept behind this monster in the tree that eats bullies’ eyeballs was a really interesting and abstract idea to me, and felt like it would be a lot of fun. Once I read the script and saw how interesting of a character Anna was and how this was not about her being the bully, but being passive within a bully situation, I thought that was a really interesting concept to play with. And I think we’ve all been in scenarios where we’ve either been bullied or seen bullying happen in front of our eyes and we didn’t do anything. There’s something to be said about that. It really makes you think a little bit about that concept. And did Anna really deserve to be haunted the way that she was? It’s a really cool message to play with.
The performances are also brilliant, especially from lead Whitney Peak – what was it about her that helped you as director to get the best performance to tell this story?
Whitney Peak was amazing. My casting director, Jenny Zhu, really did a great job of finding Whitney, Finn Bennett and Laken Giles really early on before they blew up. Whitney is about to star in the new Hunger Games, Finn just filmed the new Game of Thrones. It’s really cool to find actors right on the forefront of blowing up. It was so nice to have them on board my first film, find the nuances within their characters, and see how they were able to bring them alive on screen. Now, Whitney, she’s such a star. From the moment that we did our first Zoom, I knew she was Anna. She had this effortlessness to her that was so great. I knew she would be able to deliver that kind of emotion because she had that physicality to her where she could emote on screen without having to say too much. And those are always my favourite type of movies. She delivered 1000% on being able to keep that consistency throughout the whole film, even in some of the more difficult sections of the script to get through.
What are you working on next? Because we can’t wait to see what you’ve got cooking!
For sure. Well, I’ve been in development on a film called Canyon starring Don Cheadle and written by Derek Kolstad, produced by Alcon, for the last couple of years. We’re still in pre-production right now and are hopefully going to be doing this next summer. It’s an action film, and I’ve been obsessed with Derek Kolstad’s work for so long. He did the first three John Wick films and Nobody – so many great actions films. And then, I’m just finishing up the next horror script. So, getting ready to gear up to keep pushing myself in the horror genre, because I truly love it. I’d love to do a couple more horror films. I feel like I just started scratching the surface with this one, and I’m super excited to keep going.
Night Terror is available now on VOD in the UK.
