written and directed by
WILL MAYO
starring
ANNIE WORDEN
IAN SCOTT MCGREGOR
SARA WHITE
narrated by
ELAINE RIVERS
Shot in Brooklyn, New York, USA Completed October 2014
16:9, color, digital.
Shot on a Sony F5
16:9, color, digital.
Shot on a Sony F5
Edited with Adobe Premiere In Stereo
SYNOPSES
An instructional guide through the afterlife.
In this slippery mind-bender, the afterlife is an instructional video, and you are a departed spirit being guided through the process of haunting a home by a faceless female Instructor. Promised with an unknown reward, you learn how to find the right human to haunt and the particulars of wearing them down into being possession-ready. Darkly comic, surreal, and tragic, this film has you watch the destruction of a real woman’s life at the hands of an entity that is indifferent to her suffering, and eventually your own sympathies. But who is really pulling the strings?
ABOUT THE FILM
This short is Will Mayo’s NYU undergraduate thesis film. It was produced in an Advanced Experimental Workshop for an estimated $3,000, and shot in a Brooklyn Heights apartment over the course of four days. It was cast through Will’s boyfriend, Ian Scott McGregor, who asked old theater companions Annie Worden, Sara White, and Elaine Rivers to star in it. Initially Sara White was cast as the Instructor and Broker, until Will realized that Elaine Rivers, a professional voiceover artist, would give the Instructor a much-needed gravitas.
The film was conceived as a narrative challenge to tell a genuinely frightening horror story through an instructional format, in addition to being a personal film that expresses the fears and vulnerabilities of a young artist in New York City.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
Most horror films play with the fear of the unknown, but this one is quite the opposite—what’s known is scarier than what isn’t. Nowadays, we’re so familiar with the tropes of horror, the genre has become more of an numbing, cynical comfort than an exhilarating slap to the face. This film turns that familiarity into a monster.
On another level, the film is a trip into the mind of despair and the dehumanization that results from it, in the way a despairing person often perceives their pain as meaningless.
I’ve always wanted to tell ghost stories, and with this film I used the genre to express something personal. The story came out of a period in my life when I was going through a strange depression, in which I was compulsively afraid for my mental health. Thinking I could get to the bottom of the depression's cause, I was constantly examining and dissecting my own personality, but it didn't help--it was an endless spiral, a puzzle that had no solution. Now that I'm in a far better place, I see the story as a fable about the way we curse ourselves.
REVIEWS
"Horrifying... Fabulously grim... a chilling short horror film... creepy."
- Lauren Davis, io9.com
"Fascinating!"
- Bloody-Disgusting.com
Around the web: Kotaku Japan, The Curious Brain, FilmShortage
LINKS
On Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/howyouhauntyourhouse
FAQ's
1. What was the origin of this concept?
For about half a year, I was toying around with a complicated concept for a ghost story, which had its origins in something personal I had experienced. Eventually I arrived at a much simpler idea of an instructional video. I was reading Kobo Abe’s ‘The Box Man’ when the format struck me as an interesting juxtaposition to the subject matter. The tension between the clinical, boring, and romantic aspects attracted me, as well as the challenge of how to make it scary, because naturally, when one hears the title ‘This Is How You Haunt Your House,’ it sounds like a joke. This is to the film’s advantage I think, because it surprises people that it's not.
2. Does The Living Female die in the end?
It’s whatever you think. The film exists in someone’s mind, but whose mind it is, you can’t really know.
3. Do you want to make it into a feature?
If I had an idea how to do it, I would. I like the idea of a feature-long instructional horror story, but unfortunately,
instructionals are very much bound to the short form. Maybe someday!
4. What are your influences?
For this film specifically, I studied classic Japanese ghost stories like Kwaidan, Kuroneko, and Ugetsu—I was inspired by their use of makeup and the way their stories flowed. The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Hill House were references from the beginning. I was also influenced visually by Michael Haneke’s Cache, as well as the films of Tsai Ming-Liang and Roy Andersson, for their use of long-takes and economical storytelling.
As an artist I’m inspired by the work of Ingmar Bergman, Apichatpong Weerasathakul, David Lynch, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Edvard Munch, Jacque Tati, Shirley Jackson, and Flannery O’Connor, to name a few.
5. What attracts you to dark subject matter?
I love fairy tales and anything that has to do with the unconscious. Ego, the soul, loneliness, obsession, self-doubt, and fear in general, are themes that consistently pop up in my work, as well as the idea that humans tend to not talk about what is most painful to them, even if it's right there in the room.
6. How did you arrive at the visual style of the film?
Andrew Daugherty, the DoP, and I used words like “clinical,” “observational,” and “detached” to describe the feeling of the shots on set. We didn’t want to employ the usual stylistic clichés of horror films, like extreme angles and distorted lenses. We wanted to make the "mundane-everyday" part of the horror, so that when the film begins to transform into something more visually Gothic, it sneaks up on you. The idea is that the Gothic surrounds us at all times, if you look at modern life a certain way.
7. How did sound play a role in the film?
It was probably half of it—I wanted the film to be like a transmission you’re tapping into, so static became the thing from which everything arose. The static sounds like a breath or scream, so it's its own character. Logan Miley’s score is meant to provide the film with a tenderness or hope, to combat the scarier aspects of the sound design—it’s the sad “human” element that arises from the coldness of static.
One of the biggest parts of the sound design was the voiceover. At first I had Sara White (who plays the Broker that takes them to the apartment) also do the Instructor’s voiceover, because I wanted there to be a possibility of those two characters being the same entity. But after rewriting the VO in post, I found that Sara was, unfortunately, not a voiceover artist, meaning that she didn’t have the presence of voice it needed. We got Elaine Rivers to do it, who recorded it all in 10 minutes by herself and sent it to us online—for free, and she nailed it! Her voice has the perfect quality, because it can be informative, seductive, sinister, and oddly familiar all at once.
8. How did you direct Annie Worden in the crazier scenes?
I hardly directed Annie at all. Sometimes I showed her how the movement should feel, the speed of things, and maybe some thoughts going through her head. Annie was wonderful to work with because she was tapped into the wavelength of the film from the very beginning.
1. What was the origin of this concept?
For about half a year, I was toying around with a complicated concept for a ghost story, which had its origins in something personal I had experienced. Eventually I arrived at a much simpler idea of an instructional video. I was reading Kobo Abe’s ‘The Box Man’ when the format struck me as an interesting juxtaposition to the subject matter. The tension between the clinical, boring, and romantic aspects attracted me, as well as the challenge of how to make it scary, because naturally, when one hears the title ‘This Is How You Haunt Your House,’ it sounds like a joke. This is to the film’s advantage I think, because it surprises people that it's not.
2. Does The Living Female die in the end?
It’s whatever you think. The film exists in someone’s mind, but whose mind it is, you can’t really know.
3. Do you want to make it into a feature?
If I had an idea how to do it, I would. I like the idea of a feature-long instructional horror story, but unfortunately,
instructionals are very much bound to the short form. Maybe someday!
4. What are your influences?
For this film specifically, I studied classic Japanese ghost stories like Kwaidan, Kuroneko, and Ugetsu—I was inspired by their use of makeup and the way their stories flowed. The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Hill House were references from the beginning. I was also influenced visually by Michael Haneke’s Cache, as well as the films of Tsai Ming-Liang and Roy Andersson, for their use of long-takes and economical storytelling.
As an artist I’m inspired by the work of Ingmar Bergman, Apichatpong Weerasathakul, David Lynch, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Edvard Munch, Jacque Tati, Shirley Jackson, and Flannery O’Connor, to name a few.
5. What attracts you to dark subject matter?
I love fairy tales and anything that has to do with the unconscious. Ego, the soul, loneliness, obsession, self-doubt, and fear in general, are themes that consistently pop up in my work, as well as the idea that humans tend to not talk about what is most painful to them, even if it's right there in the room.
6. How did you arrive at the visual style of the film?
Andrew Daugherty, the DoP, and I used words like “clinical,” “observational,” and “detached” to describe the feeling of the shots on set. We didn’t want to employ the usual stylistic clichés of horror films, like extreme angles and distorted lenses. We wanted to make the "mundane-everyday" part of the horror, so that when the film begins to transform into something more visually Gothic, it sneaks up on you. The idea is that the Gothic surrounds us at all times, if you look at modern life a certain way.
7. How did sound play a role in the film?
It was probably half of it—I wanted the film to be like a transmission you’re tapping into, so static became the thing from which everything arose. The static sounds like a breath or scream, so it's its own character. Logan Miley’s score is meant to provide the film with a tenderness or hope, to combat the scarier aspects of the sound design—it’s the sad “human” element that arises from the coldness of static.
One of the biggest parts of the sound design was the voiceover. At first I had Sara White (who plays the Broker that takes them to the apartment) also do the Instructor’s voiceover, because I wanted there to be a possibility of those two characters being the same entity. But after rewriting the VO in post, I found that Sara was, unfortunately, not a voiceover artist, meaning that she didn’t have the presence of voice it needed. We got Elaine Rivers to do it, who recorded it all in 10 minutes by herself and sent it to us online—for free, and she nailed it! Her voice has the perfect quality, because it can be informative, seductive, sinister, and oddly familiar all at once.
8. How did you direct Annie Worden in the crazier scenes?
I hardly directed Annie at all. Sometimes I showed her how the movement should feel, the speed of things, and maybe some thoughts going through her head. Annie was wonderful to work with because she was tapped into the wavelength of the film from the very beginning.
CREDITS
written and directed by WILL MAYO produced by T. ZHANG AND CASEY SINCIC casting by IAN SCOTT MCGREGOR
assistant director DANA BRAWER
director of photography ANDREW DAUGHERTY assistant camera JOEY WANG, ANTOINE COMBELLES
gaffers GABE SIEGAL, NICK WALKER
art director ALISON MACMILLAN makeup WILL MAYO
production assistants KEVIN RALSTON, ISAAC SUERO driver ALEXIS LIM
craft services SUZANNE MAYO
on-set sound technicians/boom operators YONI & MIKI BENYAMINI JONATHAN LAU
edited by WILL MAYO
original score by LOGAN MILEY sound design and mixing by WILL MAYO special video effects by RYAN THIBEAULT
special thanks ANDREW BANCROFT, LEA JACKSON, TONYA GLANZ, NICHOLAS GIURICICH, DARRELL WILSON, LOGAN MILEY, AIMEE JOLSON, SUZANNE AND FUZZY MAYO
