By Eric Ortiz (@EricOrtizG)
Out of Darkness (2022) is a survival movie, with thriller and horror elements, set 45,000 years ago. It was previously known as The Origin, when it played at Sitges and Fantastic Fest.
Seeking food and shelter, six people decided to separate from their tribe and embark on a journey to an unknown land. Adem (Chuku Modu), the leader of this group, is accompanied by his younger brother Geirr (Kit Young), his son Heron (Luna Mwezi) and his pregnant mate Avé (Iola Evans), as well as older advisor Odal (Arno Lüning) and Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green), a young woman who is considered a “stray.”
Although the protagonists overcame the challenge of crossing a sea, they didn’t find the “promised land,” that is, herds of animals to hunt, fertile terrain and warm caves. Presently, they continue their search out in the open, while concern for whatever inhabits the place is palpable. The threat materializes one night, when something or someone takes the boy Heron away to an area where there’s a forest and mountains. As a result, the rest of the group enters the forest, a place that their leader initially wanted to avoid.
On the occasion of the arrival of Out of Darkness in U.S. theaters, I interviewed Scottish director Andrew Cumming. The conversation, which you can read below, addresses topics such as the language that was created specifically for the film, the stunning locations, the sequence that involves cannibalism, and the unexpected direction that the plot ends up taking.
Eric Ortiz (EO): Why did you decide to make a film set in the prehistoric era?
Andrew Cumming (AC): I saw a documentary on the BBC about early modern humans and I just found it really fascinating. It unlocked a lot of questions for me, about us as a species and where we’ve come from.
Then I read William Golding’s follow-up to Lord of the Flies, a novel called The Inheritors, which is in a similar time period. When I finished the book, I had this epiphany about the inherent inhumanity in our species and what we’re capable of when we have our backs to the wall and when we are faced with something we don’t understand.
Then I met Oliver Kassman, the producer, and I said “maybe in 20 years somebody will let me make an adaptation of The Inheritors.” He said “I’ve got a horror movie I want to try and do in that time period, and this is the loose idea.” How many people do you meet that say they want to make a prehistoric horror movie? We got to work and wrote a very skeletal step outline.
Ruth Greenberg knew Oliver, she had this phenomenal spec script that I felt was the right tone of voice for what we wanted to do and that was it, the three of us went on this journey together.
EO: What type of research did you do to construct the characters?
AC: We read books, we visited museums and we also spoke to experts in their field. We were very lucky to have Dr. Rob Dinnis, who’s one of the foremost experts in early modern humans here in the UK.
So we had this really great base knowledge. We piled all these findings into a lookbook and then we circulated it amongst our heads of department. I said to them, “do your research, that’s fundamental, but also let’s do some blue-sky thinking, let’s look at the resources that our ancestors were using but let’s question how else they could be used, and let’s think about other ways to humanize these people beyond what you read in a book.” So it was about trying to channel the research, but also encourage innovation and imagination.
EO: Tell me about the creation of an entire language for the film.
AC: I didn’t plan it, it was always going to be in English to begin with because I feared that doing it with subtitles could limit the appeal of a film that was already such a high concept. But then the more we developed the project, I realized we needed to go this extra mile, just to create more of an authentic experience for the audience.
Game of Thrones was very big and it had Dothraki and various languages. Parasite (2019) won the Oscar and we all saw how great that film was received and how Bong Joon-ho spoke so eloquently about “don’t be afraid of the subtitles.” So it feels like my film’s come at the right time.
In terms of the challenge on set, it was actually really liberating, because none of us were focussing on or analyzing the minutiae of the language. We were just concentrating on the intent of the scene and the intent of the characters towards each other. I think the actors found it very freeing as well because once they understood how to pronounce it and get into the rhythm of it, it helped them to forget about themselves and just focus on the characters and the story.
EO: What about the locations?
AC: Before Ruth wrote a page of script, myself, Oliver and her went on a recon trip around northwest Scotland. I’ve been there a few times, both as a director but also just as a tourist, just to take in the amazing, quite primeval, ancient and foreboding landscapes that are up there. But there’s also really good infrastructure, so I knew we could park trucks and get honeywagons in for people. I felt confident we could find everything we needed there.
But what I wasn’t planning on was COVID happening. We had to create a bubble in a hotel and every location had to be within 45 minutes from the hotel, so I had to quickly delete a lot of images from my lookbook that I’d fallen in love with and had visualized as prime locations, and find new locations.
Scotland was always an inherent part of the creative process and of the storyworld, but we had to adjust just because of COVID, and then obviously the weather conditions would dictate how we shot and how we survived the day.
EO: One evident theme is the treatment of women within the group. For the leader, their role seems to be just sexual and reproductive. Then the elder blames the young “stray,” who’s on her period, for attracting the mysterious “creature.”
AC: Coming in as a female writer, there were certain things that Ruth Greenberg wanted to see. She was very interested, at that point in her creative journey, in telling a story about violence perpetrated on women and by women.
The overall umbrella is talking about inhumanity and how our inhumanity actually allowed us to survive, because it allows us to make the tough choices to help our species keep going.
Within inhumanity, there are patriarchal structures. They can be damaging, especially to the vulnerable, which can be children and are predominantly women.
But also the old mystic Odal’s spiritual dogma, which is like a very early form of organized religion that can be dangerous in the wrong hands.
So those things together, as well as the overriding sense of being afraid of things you don’t understand, feed into the broader topic of inhumanity.
From the very early genesis of the project, Oliver and I spoke about an Ellen Ripley character. There’d be a character who rises up and eventually discovers in herself that she has this killer instinct to survive. Ruth was really engaged by that because we all love Alien (1979). So that encapsulates the journey of the lead character Beyah (the “stray”).
EO: How did you approach the rough material? For example, there’s cannibalism out of necessity for survival.
AC: So the cannibalism part, the “meal” during that scene is the reason they’re all in this situation. In a way they sort of consume the worst parts of that person that they are eating, so after that point they become far more fearful and forceful in their behavior.
So that felt quite rich thematically, to see how the essence of our oppressors and these people in positions of power can permeate society and eventually make people become like miniature versions of them.
EO: As an audience member, I thought that Out of Darkness was going to be a fantasy/monster film, in the vein of something like Prey (2022). But it takes a completely different route.
AC: That was always intrinsic in the design of the film. It was always a case of taking the audience on this journey with a reasonably familiar structure, like we all know what happens to a bunch of good-looking people that go into the forest. We said “we are going to take you two thirds of the way through and it’s a monster movie, and then at the end of the second act we are going to take a left turn.”
The best way to describe it is, if you watch Alien or Aliens (1986) from the Xenomorph’s point of view, Ripley isn’t the hero, Ripley is a genocidal maniac, because these creatures are just living their life, are doing what they were bred to do.
The third act hopefully makes you question your part in watching this journey and perhaps cheering her (Beyah) on. It hopefully takes you somewhere quite uncomfortable where you have to see our species through fresh eyes.