Folk horror always seems to be a particular please for horror fans and this time we're off to rural Ireland for some goblin mayhem in Unwelcome. FILMHOUNDS spoke to Unwelcome director Jon Wright about some of the themes and creatures in his long-delayed horror film starring Hannah John-Kamen and Douglas Booth. In Unwelcome a couple escape their urban nightmare to the tranquility of rural Ireland only to discover malevolent, murderous goblins lurking in the gnarled, ancient wood at the foot of their new garden.

The film's been delayed quite a bit now, I first saw the trailer in October 2021, what's this waiting process been like?

When you saw the trailer, it was finished and it was really just the studio, Warner Bros, waiting for the box office to recover from the big hit it took during the COVID pandemic and hoping that people would be coming back to cinemas.

There wasn't really any temptation to change anything. Once it's locked it goes through a big process of being spun out into hundreds of deliverables and different versions in different languages and different file types so to start reversing it at that point is a very expensive thing. When we got to the end of the process we were pretty happy with the work we'd done. The very final change was getting a 15 certificate from the BBFC.

It's a horror film and the climax in particular is very strong and gory, were you ever told by anyone that you had to turn it down a notch?

We had a very unusual experience on this film where there were quite a lot of big financiers involved but right from when we first started shooting it, all the feedback we got on the rushes was extremely positive and when we started showing cuts to people the feedback was extremely positive. Really and truly, this is completely my film, for better or for worse, it wasn't meddled with, or tampered with or changed and there was nothing forced on me. Weirdly this film is completely untampered with.

Towards the end it gets quite extreme, it's like the drop on the rollercoaster after you've been going up for quite a long time. I had really expected, particularly on that final scene…I'd expected almost a tug on my elbow from a producer wanting something different or wanting to change something. I was waiting for that tug on my elbow when I was shooting that final sequence because I just thought it was completely out there and a properly crazy sequence. It was pretty strong on the page but when we shot it, it was even stronger and more extreme.

Let's see how far we can go, and that's how far we went. I'm really pleased with that because those are the sorts of films that made me want to direct films and those are the films that made me love horror. Films by David Cronenberg, David Lynch and John Landis and those sorts of filmmakers.”

What inspired you to want to make this film and this story?

It started off when I was talking to the co-writer Mark Stay and we were taking the piss out of each other about really what cowards we were when it comes to physical violence. We were going through and recounting stories of fights that had broken out in pubs and how frightened we'd been and what we'd done to get out of them and how bad we were at fighting. And how we called ourselves pacificists but that was a polite way of saying coward.

We both come from working class families with some macho people in those families and we're a bit anachronistic in those families. But we were then saying that we both have kids…we were saying that if our kids were threatened, and they were going to be attacked, we probably would be violent and we'd probably pick up a weapon to try and get the fight to be over in five seconds.

Ironically, the pacifist would be extremely violent in that situation and we thought that's an interested paradox and an interesting dramatic question to pose to the characters so we asked that question of these two metropolitan liberal Londoners who are quite touchy-feely and would describe themselves as pacifists who are basically nice people and very modern. And we pushed them, and we said they're going to get in touch with their animal, violent side, you're going to find out what's down there and we put them in a situation where they can't not deal with it. And you have two people that cope with it in two very different ways. One who changes and one who can't cope.

What was that process like of developing the two very different responses from the two main characters?

We felt like there are a lot of movies recently where people are in a tricky situation and when they step up to the plate they literally step up to the camera and say a James Bond one liner about how they're gonna save the day and I felt that was probably not what happens in real life a lot of the time when people are in life or death situations. I'd imagine – I don't know this – that probably more often than not it ends in the kind of thing we have in the film and a display of cowardice and somebody basically panicking who can't control how scared they are and don't really know what to do.

When we went back through movies and looked for examples of that they're very few and far between. We went back to Gangster No. 1 and the guy in Miller's Crossing who is really frightened but there aren't that many scenes of proper displays of cowardice and we really wanted to put one on film. And I think I was very lucky with Douglas Booth because Doug has movie star looks but he's willing to be a character actor and he didn't bring any ego to this and he really wanted to play the truth of it.

I fully expected when I came to shoot them that the actor who played Jamie would say to me ‘maybe he should be a bit more heroic, maybe he should fight back a little bit, maybe he should throw a punch before he goes down, maybe he should say this or that' but Doug didn't want to do any of that, he just wanted to go there and that takes a lot of courage to play someone lacking in courage and to play it truthfully and I think there are a lot of people that are going to enjoy that and see a bit of themselves there – on a bad day.

What were some inspirations you had for the folklore side of things?

I really wanted to do something in Ireland because I just love shooting there and it's going back to my roots a little bit and I always have great fun when I make something in Ireland and so I was looking at myths and legends in Ireland. We had our theme, and I really didn't want to do a gritty realistic kitchen sink thing, I wanted to do something that was a bit more in the fairy tale place. And I really think of this film as a dark fairy tale for adults. It's not for children so it's not a fairy tale in the traditional sense of it but it has all of those characteristics so we were looking for something magical or fantastical that we could hang it on and we came across these goblins called Redcaps who like to dip their caps in the blood of their victims which is  where they get their names from and the description of that sounded quite macabre and it made them sound quite malicious and malevolent.

It's not something that people who feel guilty about what they've done do, it's something that someone who's very pleased with what they've done would do. So they seemed like a good analogy for what I was talking about before and representing that idea of inner violence.

What I really liked was Irish people really hate leprechauns and can't stand that image that you see on pubs all round Europe and the clichéd image of the cheerful gnome-like guy with his colourful hat and it felt like redcaps were the antithesis of the leprechaun and the anti-heroic version of it, the dark leprechaun. And I found that appealing as well.

You take what on the surface is an Irish stereotype and then you turn it upside down. We embodied that in the movie that they are ultraviolent, and they take a gleeful sadistic pleasure in what they do. It's quite distributing but also entertaining and fun. I think it'll be fun for the audience to explore that side of themselves a little bit

How did you go about creating them? Was it CGI? Practical?

We used a mashup of techniques. There was a movie called Cat's Eye which was a Stephen King adaptation. The thing that really stayed with me from Cat's Eye was the final story with Drew Barrymore where a goblin comes into her bedroom and tries to steal her breath, and it had a tiny guy in a costume on an oversized set… and so what we did for our movie was we built double height sets so when you see that first goblin come up, that's actually a full-sized person wearing a mask who reaches up to a double-sized French door. So that French door is 12 feet high and we built the entire corner of that room. And then we used motion control cameras to composite the double height sets with the normal height sets so it's quite a technological approach to it but what I think is great about that is that the goblins have weight and gravity and they look like they're really interacting with the world around them because they are actually are.

With CG, sometimes the gravity can look a bit strange and things can look a bit light or a bit heavy and they look like they're not really touching the things they're coming into contact with. But the drawback of that is that when it comes to a close up in movies like Gremlins or Cat's Eye, the animatronic masks are a bit clunky and don't look very real so when you're in close up and when they smile it takes you out of the moment a little as they're not terrible convincing.

So when we did that, we photographed the mask and we lit it as if it was talking and looking around and then we animated it in post-production. An actor friend of mine called Rick Warden played all of the goblins and we motion captured his face and we tracked it back to a variety of masks so whenever you see a goblin and it says anything or does anything facially that's actually Rick playing them and doing all the voices and he went very deep into it and he worked out a backstory for each goblin and worked out different personalities.

So if you're really paying attention you'll see that they all have very distinct and different personalities. We had a marriage of new school and old school, CG and physical and it helps fool your brain as your brain can't quite see where the trick is so I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out and I think they looked pretty cool in the end.

Unwelcome is released in cinemas January 27, 2023

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