By Eric Ortiz (@EricOrtizG)
Five long years have passed since the release of Summer of 84 (2018) but now the trio of Canadian directors known as RKSS – Yoann-Karl Whissell, Anouk Whissell and François Simard – are back with not one but two new features!
Both films were presented at this year’s Fantastic Fest. First we saw the zom-com We Are Zombies (2023), which presents a reality in which the living dead have become part of society. It follows the misadventures of three youngsters (Alexandre Nachi, Derek Johns and Megan Peta Hill) who steal zombies to sell them to an eccentric performance artist, posing as workers for a corporation that has capitalized on the equivalent of a dignified death for decrepit “living-impaired.” There’s also a female zombie who’s an impersonator of the living dead version of Vampirella and works as a “cam girl.” The movie is very funny and it worked perfectly as one of the festival’s midnight screenings.
Then we got to enjoy Wake Up (2023), a cat-and-mouse thriller set entirely in one location: a furniture store where a group of young activists (including the characters of Benny O. Arthur, Tom Gould and Jacqueline Moré) break in one night to protest deforestation and the harm it causes to animals. However, these social media-savvy kids don’t imagine that one of the security guards (Turlough Convery) is a guy who’s on the verge of losing his job, in addition to being a hunter who uses primitive techniques. Wake Up is violent and cruel but also a lot of fun, especially with an audience like the Fantastic Fest one.
After the presentation of their two new films, I had the opportunity to interview the RKSS directors. The conversation, which you can read below, focused mainly on Wake Up.
Eric Ortiz (EO): Both of your new movies, in their own ways, reflect the current times, when there’s division in society.
Yoann-Karl Whissell (YKW): We always want the movie to be entertaining, the movie to be good, and that people love the movie. And then we infuse our anger into the movie! We’re not angry people, but we’re angry at what we’re doing to ourselves. Every good horror movie has a message, we’re no different than other directors.
We’re going full speed into a wall and there’s so many people that don’t want the car to stop. We need to take care of each other, we should be a sisterhood and brotherhood and just love each other. We should take care of our planet.
Anouk Whissell (AW): What’s funny or sad about We Are Zombies is that we wrote the latest version of the script in 2016 or 2017, and it’s getting slowly worse.
For Wake Up, when they brought us the script, we liked that it was modern, it was about now. These movies have a very timely message.
François Simard (FS): We did two movies that are very inspired by the 1980s (Turbo Kid and Summer of 84) and we didn’t want to be “the 1980s people.” We wanted to at least change a little bit from that.
EO: In Wake Up the young activists are protesting deforestation and its impact on animals.
YKW: For at least 50 years, every generation goes “what are we leaving for the next generation?” and then nothing’s been done and gets worse. And then that next generation is like “oh my God! What are we leaving for this generation?” And then it gets worse! I have young kids, what are we leaving for my kids? What is going to be their world?
AW: Big companies that do fast everything for over consumption, like fast fashion and the furniture store as well. The furniture you buy and then you can’t keep.
YKW: Everything is disposable and everything needs to not last long because people need to buy again for the machine to work. Everything we buy lasts less and less so we need to re-buy things more and more. It’s a vicious cycle.
FS: I like the fact that it’s not just teenagers like in a classic slasher that just want to drink booze and get laid. They’re on a mission, they’re very active. I find it very refreshing.
EO: But there’s a bit of commentary about young people whose intentions also include becoming viral online. I know it’s not the point of the movie because, at the end of the day, you feel sorry for all of them.
YKW: Even though they’re activists, they’re still kids, they need to be kids. They’re still out to try and have fun and live in the reality of their world.
I don’t know where my mind sets completely on social media yet. There’s as much good as there’s bad to it. We’ll know years later if it helped progress things or if it stopped us from progressing.
FS: It feels more real that they’re not on the same level, some are hardcore on the mission, some of them just want to have fun, some of them are there for a girl, the other ones are there for clicks.
AW: One of the girls at some point uses the phone as a weapon, to defend herself. She feels like she’s invincible, like nothing can go wrong, because she’s filming it.
YKW: Your phone can be a protection, your phone can be a weapon, because we all have cameras on us now. Sadly, it can’t always save you.
EO: Now tell me more about the opposite side, represented by the hunter.
YKW: Kevin is not just a monster, he’s also a victim of circumstances. He’s afraid to lose his job.
FS: We didn’t want to go for the big, cold, silent type slasher character. We love the concept of him hunting the “animals,” the kids that want to save the animals. Just playing with the fact that those who wear masks are the victim and not the killer.
AW: It’s a nice representation of the society as well, like we don’t talk to each other.
YKW: If everybody just took a pause, started talking, everything could have been resolved.
We need to realize we’re all in this together, let’s work together to make the world a better place. Or at least talk, start by talking! If we could just start by talking, then it’ll work.
EO: Wake Up is a violent movie but it’s always fun, for example with all the hunting traps.
AW: It was a nice playground to be in that store, we built that universe. The traps were in the script but we had to make them real, to build them. There’s one specific tramp that’s built with furniture pieces and it was nice to develop that.
Because a primal hunter will use the things he finds in nature to build his weapons, that’s exactly what it is in the jungle of the store.
FS: Our producers knew how much we like gore and they were like “we’re going for PG13 so please don’t go too far on the gore.” In fact, the movie is not very bloody…
YKW: It’s just brutal.
FS: So brutal that, in the end, I think it’s worse!
YKW: But in a good way.
We wanted the kills to be impactful, we wanted the audience go “fuck! That was brutal, that was mean-spirited.”
FS: It’s not bloody but it’s nasty!
EO: Let’s talk about the sequence when everything goes dark as planned by the hunter. It’s both beautiful looking and brutal.
YKW: We were lucky to have an amazing DP. We really didn’t want the blacklight look, it would have made it fake. We wanted that contrast of darkness, like you don’t see their face. We found that paint. It was a big process because since we were going to shoot in close to pitch darkness, we wanted to make sure everything would be safe for the crew.
In light we rehearsed the dance of the camera and the crew. Then when we turned off the light, everybody was safe, everybody knew what they were supposed to do. We just had to either get off of the set or put back up the lights to recharge the paint.
AW: There’s no VFX on that scene at all.
FS: We wanted to do that scene because we never saw that kind of scene in a horror movie yet. We knew that if we did a good job, that will be the scene that people remember when they leave the theater.
EO: Wake Up is, like you said, nasty. But I remember Summer of 84, especially its ending, as something darker. Wake Up is a riot, even though a lot of people die in it.
FS: We didn’t plan to kill that many kids!
YKW: We never start anything saying “you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to kill fucking kids!”
FS: Our shorts and Turbo Kid (2015) is really what we are known for. We like doing fun stuff but I’m happy that we can do different movies, we don’t want to do just that. We want to show the world that, even though we like fun movies, we can go super serious and still make a good movie.
YKW: We want to tell tons of different kinds of stories. We want to keep challenging ourselves and try new styles.
FS: We’re very happy to have these two movies at Fantastic Fest. I think it shows two different sides of RKSS.