After siding with King Kong in this year’s Godzilla vs. Kong, actress Rebecca Hall now must contend with a spine-tingling haunting in David Brucker‘s The Night House. In the film, Hall plays Beth, a woman still reeling after the recent death of her husband. However, just four days later, Beth comes to believe that her husband might be reaching out from beyond the grave.
Worse, Beth realizes he may have harbored some disturbing secrets.
Much of Bruckner’s latest rests on Hall’s shoulders, with most of the movie spent solely with her character. And the filmmaker puts her through the emotional and physical wringer, especially when it comes to the scares. Bloody Disgusting learned how she prepared for the particular type of horror Bruckner had in mind in a press conference with the actress.
It turns out it involved watching a lot of horror classics. Hall revealed her favorites in drawing inspiration, “I don’t know that I had any specific influences for the character per se, but I’m certainly influenced and inspired by certain movies and the genre that I love. There’s a film called The Changeling. A man is the central character, he’s haunted, but I rewatched that. I also revisited some general favorites, like the 40s version of Cat People, which has nothing to do with anything, but it was fun to watch. Also, The Haunting, a 60s film by Robert Wise, I think is great. And then there’s The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby and all those classics. The theme of a central character spiraling and losing their mind is quite a prevalent theme in the horror genre, and I suppose I revisited the ones that I liked in that kind of arena.”
Bruckner crafts several intense, memorable moments of terror that get under your skin, and the actress revealed that it started with the script. “My thoughts when I first read this script were, this is scary. This is scary, and also, this is fun. I think there were some aspects of this script that I thought were very intelligent and sensitive in regards, a depiction of a woman dealing with grief and trying to rationalize, come to terms with a catastrophic event that’s happened four days before the movie starts.”
Filming the jump scares wasn’t as daunting as it sounds, with Hall peeling the curtain back a bit to explain. “The scary sort of stuff is fairly gut’s response. I would often ask David [Bruckner] to make a loud noise or slam something, so I could naturally react to something. The other stuff takes a little bit more thinking, but it’s emotionally intuitive.”
One of the most challenging scenes for Hall to film turned out to be a key physical encounter with the paranormal. “When it came to doing that scene, it wasn’t like there was someone choreographing it. As we got into it further, there were stunts and all these sorts of very practical, detailed work. But the initial idea of me having this interaction or romantic encounter with an invisible presence was essentially me improvising it, which was fairly embarrassing.
“I wasn’t embarrassed because I realized pretty quickly that I was going to look silly, and I just accepted that and knew that everyone would laugh at me and just got on with it. After a while, it became strangely liberating. It felt like doing some kind of intuitive dance or something, which was nothing like anything I’ve ever done before as an actor. And it was nice to use your physicality in that respect.”
You can see Hall’s riveting performance when The Night House (read my review) releases in theaters on August 20, 2021.
