‘Marianne’ Update: New Trailer, Poster, Director Interview
by Marc Patterson
We’ve been tracking the progress of Filip Tegstedt’s psychological horror film Marianne for a full year now. That’s a long time to wait for a film that showed promise way back then. In the past week we saw the launch of an official trailer, which hints that we’re getting closer to seeing the final product. Awhile ago Filip talked to us about his influences in the film, and it seems like now is as good a time as any to delve into that discussion. Before we get into that it would be good to lay down an intro as to what the film is about. Here’s the synopsis as provided to us by Filip:
SYNOPSIS:Marianne is a psychological horror film about a broken family in the small isolated town of Östersund, located up in the Swedish northlands. Among the pine woods, the lakes, the snowy mountains and the midnight summer sun, the story takes place on the fuzzy border where fantasy and reality meet.
45 year old Krister’s wife Eva has just passed away in a car accident, and now he’s alone with the 18 year old daughter Sandra who hates his guts, and a 6 months old daughter who he doesn’t really know how to take care of. At night he’s haunted by bad nightmares about what happened the night Eva died, and guilt for the pain he’s caused Sandra over the years as an absent father. He experiences visits in his sleep from a woman dressed in green, looking for revenge. Someone who comes to him via his dreams. Someone he knows already is dead.
Sandra’s boyfriend, who’s interested in old Swedish folklore, soon realizes Krister is haunted by a Mare – a female creature of the night or a woman possessed. He tries to guide Krister by helping him get rid of her, while Krister tries to regain his family and reestablish some sort of order in his life. But having a bad reputation in a small town makes it hard to regain the trust of someone you’ve let down so many times before. Krister finds himself in a jungle of guilt and anxiety, superstition and nightmares, mental and physical illness, and has to find the best way out. Is the Mare real, or only in his mind?
So where did the idea for the film evolve from? Filip starts where the film truly began for him; “Back in 1985, on midsummer’s eve when I was about to turn seven, there was a horror film on TV at midnight, and mom had promised me and my older sister we could stay up and watch it with her. I was totally excited. I’m not even sure I’d watched a grown up horror film before. So we stayed up all three of us, the entire family, and watched this horror film about a haunted TV station where the ghost of an actress from the 40′s, all dressed in green and with red hair, was seen from time to time. That film scared the shit out of me, there was a scene where one of the main characters dresses up like the ghost, walks with high green heels up the stairs to a stopped elevator while swinging a huge sledge hammer. There’s another scene at the end where the ghost turns up at a bus stop and then later in a bus and reveals her face. After that, I spent like 14 years trying to find this film.“
This obscure film, called Draugasaga is actually a made for TV film from Iceland. Years later Tegstedt called up the station that showed the film and actually managed to procure a copy, to which he draws many parallels to the work of Hideo Nakata (The Ring). In fact, Filip cites Hideo Nakata as a huge influence into his filmmaking and explains, “Speaking of Hideo Nakata by the way, another one of my favorite films and a huge influence for Marianne is Nakata’s Dark Water. I love use of off screen horror moments in that film, like when Yoshimi is in the elevator and she knows Mitsuko is standing behind her. As she turns around slowly, hardly daring to look at what’s behind her and we only see her face. That is really scary images in conjunction with storytelling.“
Though Nakata plays as an influence Filip is clear to tell us that “What I’m trying to do with Marianne is to not copy any of this, but learn from these principles. Look, I’m a story geek. I studied screenwriting in film school because I wanted to become a director. There are so many directors out there who don’t understand the basic principals of storytelling, and are not interested in them either (or maybe because of it, I don’t know). Afterall, film is a visual media and that’s why a lot of people become directors. They think in images and want to show those images to other people. I think of myself as a storyteller first and foremost. The story is the most important thing to me as a writer and director, and everything else in the film is decided by that. Story brings an audience to a point, that’s what I’m aiming for here. There’ll be people dying along the way if I’m making a horror film, but that’s part of the fun and I’m trying to really get these deaths to mean something in the film and make them important to the story but most of all to the characters.“
One thing that always interests us is how a filmmaker plans to bring something new to the page in order to add that punch of originality. Filip tells us a bit about this as well. “I’ve had a lot of tragedy in my family through the years, and even though I grew up loving Star Wars as a kid, I’ve always wondered why Luke never stopped to mourn the loss of uncle Owen, aunt Beru or his best childhood friend Biggs. Same thing with almost any slasher film you see, the biggest flaw is almost always the lack of any emotional impact or feeling of loss when a character dies. That’s something I really want to do here. Since Marianne is very much a tragic family drama with a horror element (the monster, which in our case is a mare), the empathy for the main character when he loses someone is of huge importance to the story. It has to be, or the film won’t work.” He continues to tell us “I’ve described this film as being on the fuzzy border where reality and fantasy meet, and I will go into that more later on but not today. The point of that is that there really isn’t a clear border between what’s real and what isn’t, and I want to explore that with this film.
The most important thing though is that you don’t know the real truth behind it all, or at least the first time you view it. I want to do something like the 1963′s The Hauting, where the movie pretends to be about a haunted house, but really there’s no ghost in it at all and the house really isn’t alive, or Bladerunner (which is one of my top three favorite films btw) where you’re never really told Deckard is a replicant, it’s only hinted at. Once again, it’s important to point out I’m not comparing myself to these great directors. No way do I think I’m anywhere near their level but what these films do is something I really want to try going for as well. This is what interests me as a writer.“
Finally, we had to know about Filip’s approach to the horror. What is a horror film without that ever impending sense of dread, the gory violence? Filip tells us, “I’ve spent 2009 watching, I really don’t know how many, movies as preparation for Marianne. Most of them have been horror movies, and most of those have been oldies. To mention a few highlights, The Woman in Black, Black Sabbath, Don’t Look Now, Nosferatu, [which was a] big visual inspiration, Pet Semetery, The Changeling, and Phenomena. It’s been loads of others plus the ones I’ve already mentioned, but the point is I’m trying to keep a gourmet diet. I’m not setting out trying to make anything sub par. I have the deepest respect for horror as a genre, and the emotions those films evoke because what it all boils down to is fear, and fear is an emotion just like any other and so it needs to stretch its legs from time to time. There are so many horror films that don’t even try to be scary it’s a real shame. Jump moments, gore and torture is not scary. It won’t give you nightmares. It won’t make you turn the lights on in the basement. As fun as those movies might be from time to time, I’m not trying to make anyone laugh here.“
Filip continues, “That scene in Night of the Living Dead where the kid kills her parents after waking up dead, or where Barbara is dragged out by her undead brother are brutal. Or that scene in Assault on Precinct 13 when the girl is killed and the guy isn’t even looking at her for example, that’s a brutal fucking scene. Even though you can’t maybe do that sort of thing anymore in America (like the scene in Assault at least) because of escalated street violence and movies just have a different feel nowadays. They’re more cinematic and not really gritty like that in the states. I think you could still do stuff like that in Sweden. We have a tradition here of kitchensink realistic drama and if you add a monster in the mix but shoot it really genuinely and creepy, with all practical effects and making any death in the film matter to the characters and to the story by having an actual impact on them – I believe you can make a very real and scary film here like that. Something that doesn’t make you jump, but might make you uneasy at night. If I accomplish giving at least a few people nightmares, I’ll consider this mission a success.“
