Having originally premiered at FrightFest last year, this week sees Caveat land world-wide onto horror streaming giant Shudder. Wearing its psychological and mysterious thriller badges with honour, Caveat is a twisty-turny tale of broken minds, haunted houses, and the bizarre; it is guaranteed to keep you hooked. Jonathan French stars as Isaac, a troubled man recovering from an accident that has left him with partial memory loss. In dire need of money, he accepts a job as a caretaker on a secluded island. Once at the property he discovers that the job involves looking after a traumatised young woman, one who is so wary of strangers that he has to submit himself to being chained up in a harness in order to fulfil his duties. As he begins his work, he starts exploring the property and discovers that he may have a past connection to the place. Can he piece together the puzzle of his mind before it is too late?
Caveat is directed by Damian Mc Carthy, an electrician by trade, filmmaker by night. Since 2009 he has been steadily working in the short film arena, but Caveat marks his first foray into features. It’s a remarkable debut and one that points to a very promising future, and so we jumped at the opportunity to find out a little more about the journey from script to screen.
You’ve been making short films for the last decade, what was it about this story that made you decide to move into features?
It’s very hard to make a living off short films, so if filmmaking was going to become more than a hobby I had to make that leap into feature films, to start doing it professionally. I write all the time. I’ve plenty of scripts that I’d like to make, but looking at this one, it seemed to be the one that was the most achievable. A lot of the things around me that I knew that I either had access to, or I could build. It’s like that old Robert Rodriguez idea of “see what you have at your disposal and write a script around that”, and Caveat was pretty much that. We did have to build a lot of the stuff in it, I mean the drumming bunny and a lot of the sets. I think 80% of what you see on the screen is a set. I knew somebody who could build this creepy bunny and do a really good job. My best friend was a carpenter so I knew that he could help me with the sets. Even down to the harness…a friend of mine does work with leather and she was able to build it. Once all of this came together, it was just about crafting a script around that.
What I really enjoyed was the mystery elements. As a writer, how do you work on balancing out how much to give away and when?
It seemed to me that to put almost everything and the kitchen sink into the script. So I explained everything that’s happening. So if I look at the script, there’s so much more in the script than there is in the film in terms of Isaac’s backstory. Every single thing is explained. Then you get into the production and you start to say, “well, is this really needed because I feel like we’ve explained this already.” Then when you get into the edit I think that’s when you really start giving the audience all the credit. They don’t need this explained to them, that they’re going to be able to follow this. When you’re in the edit trying to find that balance of “are we giving stuff away too soon? Are we not explaining enough? Are we explaining too much?” That’s just a lot of going back to the edit time and again and again and I guess it ends up where it ends up. Some people will either go, “I have no idea what this film is about” and some people will be able to follow it without any problem.
The mystery elements are also peppered with these instances of strange – Isaac’s chain belt, the bunny, that nightmare fuel painting – that inject the horror. Was it fun coming up with these weird and wonderful moments?
I always had this thing that I didn’t know if I was ever going to get to make another film. So I said, if I only ever get to make one film, I’d love it to be a horror film, but I may as well put in all of these tropes that I really like, and just see if I can put my own take on it. You’ve got your creepy paintings, you’ve got your haunted toys, a spooky basement, and then it’s just going against that rule. Every time I watch a horror film and there’s a haunted house story, which I guess this is, that’s pretty much what Caveat is… I will always be like, “why don’t they just leave? Why don’t they just leave the house?” I found that locking Isaac into the harness, surrounded by all this stuff that people who like the genre are familiar with, I just thought it would be entertaining and that there would be a bit of suspense in that. No matter how bad things get, there is no way to beat this. He just has to put up with it.
The location is its own character, the look is so distinctive, it feels completely run down, and yet, almost everything was artificial. What tricks did you utilise to achieve such realism on what I imagine was a very modest budget?
I had only ever worked on one set before in terms of actually building something. It was a very short film I did called Hatch, and it was just one small bathroom scene. It didn’t seem to be that complicated. Once you get your four walls standing and get your wallpaper on to age something…you’d be surprised how quickly it can be achieved and for relatively low cost. I had a production designer and I had a set builder, and that was pretty much it. And after that, it was just a lot of asking people to come in and, you know, stain walls, put up wallpaper, paint floors. We really did try to get as much old material as we could to keep that feeling of decay in the house. It is supposed to be this house on the Southwest coast of Ireland. The house is going to be very damp and that’s what we were going for, and I think that it worked quite well.
Definitely – your colour palette as well was something that I really liked. It was all hues of autumnal oranges and browns, it really reinforces that decaying sensation.
I think that’s exactly how I described it to my production designer, and to my cinematographer Keiran Fitzgerald. I love Guillermo del Toro movies. His whole aesthetic has got this lovely ghost story quality, where everything is very lampless and very beautiful to look at. I really tried to avoid any deep reds or greens because I thought that if you were to ever see an image of the movie, and a guy walking around in a leather harness and chain, you’d think, “this guy’s going to be getting tortured and cut-up for the next hour and a half.” So it was really a conscious effort to try to make it very clear that this film is never going to get too violent, that it’s really going to be about psychological horror as opposed to any kind of physical threat to him.
There was a lot of circular imagery too, chalk drawings, peep holes, door ports etc. Can you discuss their importance?
I always think of it as serving two functions. Because you have just that classic horror, that real primal fear of there’s a hole in the wall. So we have characters who are putting their hands into the dark. They’re getting their faces right up, take a look at it, clearly it’s a bad idea, but that’s what I find entertaining in horror films, that the characters do make one bad decision after another. So from that it was just purely as a device to create suspense and tension. When you see the circles with Olga’s Mother, where she’s drawing in chalk in circles, originally it was just on the day with the actors. She was going to just be sitting at a table and it was trying to think of something, it was kind of dull visually. I had this black paper with chalk and I said, “well, that’s just start drawing circles.” In my head at the time it was just that I thought it would look interesting. Then there’s this whole thing where she dies, but her corpse or whatever is still roaming freely around the house. So I thought maybe there’s something in that, like eternity, she’s still going, or there’s some kind of Witchcraft to her. I honestly never actually linked that it was the same as our holes in the wall. Even in the edit I was, “oh that’s actually a really nice touch”. It would be very easy to say, “it’s all completely intentional”, but sometimes even when writing scripts you have an idea and you don’t realise then for a while that it does line up quite nicely. There must have been a subconscious reason for including something like that.
A lot of your work is told through minimal dialogue, does this make it easier or harder to cast?
I found when I sat down to edit this I was just trying to get rid of as much dialogue as possible. Not because the actors did a bad job, but just because it’s a horror film, like an action movie, I would just rather watch the story silently. Just tell it all in true visuals. Ben Kaplan, who played our villain, has a lot of experience. He’d just come off of doing a play and he’s worked with a lot of very successful talented directors, and there wasn’t much dialogue in this for him. The way I found it with him as a director, was that a lot of the scenes we shot with him first, were a lot of his silent stuff. It was just encouraging his odd behaviour. Like where he locks our protagonist up into the leather harness, it’s all done silently, and then after he takes the lamp shade off the lamp and puts it on this unconscious girl’s head and he’s kind of smiling at it. I found him just very interesting to watch. We had long stretches where there is no dialogue, it’s just the actor exploring the house. It was all played in their eyes and on their face and they seemed to enjoy it and they all did a great job of it too.
Caveat began filming years ago and yet in a strange way it feels oddly Covid safe, do you find yourself viewing it differently now?
I didn’t pick up on that, that’s very true, because Isaac always has to keep that distance because the chain only allows him to go so far. This was all shot before Covid-19, I guess if you had that script now it would be easy to get financing for it. “Look, the actors are barely ever in the same frame because we have to keep them apart because the story calls for it.”
Caveat will debut on the horror streaming giant that is Shudder, what do you hope Shudder viewers experience when they sit down with the film?
It’s a horror film, and I do love horror films. It’s ninety minutes and I would be perfectly happy to call it a good result if they found it entertaining, if it scared them. For me I’d be more than happy with that. Shudder has so many great unusual films up there and I think it fits in nicely. They have such a wide variety of horror and horror documentaries and thrillers, and I guess our film does blur some of those lines. Sometimes it’s a thriller, sometimes it’s a psychological horror; it turns into a bit of a cat and mouse chase movie in a way. I would hope that horror fans would like us.
Caveat arrives on Shudder on 3rd June 2021. Caveat arrives Digital, DVD and Blu-ray on 28th February 2022.
