Interview: Contracted Writer-Director Eric England

When doing film interviews, you talk to a lot of different folks involved in different parts of film making, and like anything, different interviews go well or not-so-well for different reasons.

Sometimes you get to talk to big-name actors or legendary directors where it’s a thrill just being in the same room with them. Sometimes you talk to lesser-known names, but get into really great, deep discussions about themes and issues, or gain insights into the film-making process.

But the kind of interview I’ve come to look forward most is with younger filmmakers who simply love to make films. Maybe the films aren’t huge, maybe you don’t know all the names involved, but while their films may be smaller in budget and scale, they’re rich with ideas–these passionate writers and directors are the ones creating the cinema of the future.

So last fall, during the Chicago International Film Festival, when I was asked if I wanted to talk to Eric England, the director of a new horror film called Contracted, I said, “Sure, why not?”

Born and raised in Arkansas, writer-director England’s previous features include the well-received Madison County (2011). His latest, Contracted, tells the creepily intimate story of a young woman (Najarra Townsend) with a sexually transmitted disease that is slowly doing… nasty things to her body. The film is a sharp, chilling, and deeply unsettling film about that most disturbing of human fears: our once-young bodies falling apart on us.

But even more than that, the 25-year-old England turned out to be enthusiastic and unbelievably friendly and forth-coming about not just his work, but the horror-film industry. As a result, this turned out to be one of my favorite interviews of the past year.

Contracted is currently available via Video On Demand.

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I was reading your terrific blog Southern Fried Stories, about your experiences as an independent horror filmmaker, and you wrote in the past about the pros and cons of the very passionate horror-film fan base and how they react to things.

Eric England: Yeah, Contracted came from a place of frustration for me as a filmmaker. When I set out to make Madison County I really wanted to make a movie like the original Halloween or Texas Chainsaw Massacre, that was more about atmosphere and tone than spectacle.

The marketing from the distributor for Madison County was very straight-to-DVD slasher film, but I’d set out to make a weird, dark story that had horrific elements in it, rather than a straight horror film. They wanted to market if around the pig head. Madison County is this weird, wonky movie that if you approach it in the context of the ‘70s, you’d appreciate it more in terms of pacing.

So I wanted to do something that felt different from what everyone else was doing, but when Madison County came out, it polarized audiences because of that. Some people loved it and got it as throwback to the ‘70s that had some unique twists. But some people said, “It’s the same old shit.” It was amazing and weird to me to see it from that perspective, who got it and who didn’t.

I made another film called Roadside that we haven’t gotten distribution for because it doesn’t have any “names” it it—it’s not a horror film; it’s a dramatic thriller, very Hitchcockian in its approach.

Distributors love it, critics have raved, and audiences have liked it, but when we go to sell the movie they say, “We don’t know what to put on the cover—there’s no face, no pig-headed killer.”

So when it came time for Contracted, I said, “You wanted more violence? You’re gonna get exploitable elements.” That’s where it came from.

I hate saying this, but I taught myself to not just make the movies that I wanted to see, but to find the stories I wanted to tell that would interest the audience I was making them for. It was about establishing that balance.

Right out of the gate, the horror fan inside of me wanted to make a movie for a younger me. As I’ve evolved, it’s more about trying to find the new ground. Honestly, as a filmmaker, that’s the curse of the first-time filmmaker. If you look at a lot of newer filmmakers, we tend to almost make homages to our favorite films right off the bat. I’d like to see that trend broken by filmmakers who want to make unique stuff right out of the gate.

Speaking of homages, I’m sure you’re hearing people compare Contracted to Cronenberg.

England: I didn’t grow up with the Evil Deads and David Cronenberg films right away, so Cronenberg’s films weren’t really in my library. I’d seen Videodrone and Scanners, but not many more. So going into Contracted, the idea for me was I wanted to make this type this film, and then everyone said, “Oh, it’s very Cronenberg.” So I started doing my research, but I didn’t start out thinking about Cronenberg.

Later, as I watched more of his films, I could see what he was doing and how I could approach things differently. But I never felt like, “Oh, I want to make a Cronenberg film.”

Still, Contracted touches on some of those themes film scholars like to find in horror films (and in Cronenberg’s films). Like women’s control over their bodies.

England: That wasn’t cognizant in my brain in a preachy sense, but it was definitely there. Men sell movies—that’s universal and well-known. Personally, I love horror films that play against the expectations of the woman’s role, so I wanted to make a film with a strong female protagonist, but also something that played with the sexuality and all these different tropes and clichés.

As we progressed, I definitely became more aware of what things meant from a female standpoint. Going into it, I wasn’t trying to make a statement on anything, but keeping the female perspective was absolutely on the agenda.

Your lead, Najarra Townsend, is terrific—she really carries the film and its premise while literally falling apart on screen.

England: We had the hardest time finding our lead. I didn’t want someone who was a “Scream Queen,” who people had seen a million times before. I wanted someone who felt new, fresh, and vulnerable. You have to fall in love with this girl right away, even though she’s a very flawed person, in order to feel sympathy or empathy for her as the film progresses. I wanted someone who when you meet them, it just “clicks.”

And when Najarra walked in the room, it just clicked for me.  Her personality, her presence, her aura—everything worked for me. And in camera for the audition it translated. Everything about her was so genuine, very heart-on-her-sleeve person.

She and I really bonded on the set. The movie is very personal, it has an intimate subject matter, and this is gonna sound douchey, but she and I got really deep into those themes and ideas behind the scenes and off-camera.

A lot of the secondary actors in the film are friends or people I’ve worked with before, so dealing with Najarra where we’re in a bathroom and she’s half naked and looking gruesome, you really have to get to know someone and be comfortable with them.

We both have this thing where we try to fall in love with some new thing every day—whether it’s a cup of coffee or whatever. So she and I clicked on that and would constantly fall in love with a scene or a shot or dialogue and find something to propel us along. She was open to that, and that’s the type of person I wanted to work with—for this film it was more important that I find someone I could click with off camera than on.

The film has a very definite, rich visual style—the bright, saturated colors really pop.

England: It was something new for me. I’m actually color-blind – I can speak about specific color tones, but I can’t see them myself. Madison County takes place almost entirely in the woods, so there was a lot of green with a washed-out Texas Chainsaw feeling. Roadside takes place at night, so it’s very dark with moonlight. So those films were outside.

But for this film, which was my first one in LA and with a lot of interiors, I wanted to do something very bright, like with the Christmas lights. Then as the film progresses, the color is slowly sucked out of the film right up to the end. So I wanted a lot of color and “pop” and vibrant energy at the beginning, so as she decomposes as a person both physically and mentally and the movie decomposes and everything spirals out of control, the color and the life is sucked out of everything.

Then it was fun towards the end of the film to put in these little visual pops, these flashbacks to earlier when the film was bright and colorful, to remind us of the transformation, of how far things have fallen apart.

There’s a nice mix between atmosphere and gore—in the context of this film, the blood feels even more powerful, more of a dark warning of something going wrong.

England: I don’t consider this film all that gory. We didn’t have a lot of money to make this movie, so our special effects budget was tiny. So I knew we weren’t going to have the money to put all the gore on screen, so it was really important to find ways to make the gore effective.

There are a lot of tricks in the movie that I tried to put in places where they were the most effective, where they really worked. I wanted to find a way to make people really react strongly to the gross stuff on screen. It was about taking the most simplistic ways of making bodily functions horrific and placing them strategically within the story to make them effective.

One of the things I love about your blog is it captures the day-to-day working life of an independent horror filmmaker. How you have to get up every day and keep working to make your films happen. Did you always want to make films in the horror genre?

England: Horror was always going to be my genre. I grew up on Beetlejuice and Army of Darkness and Tarantino films, and that segued into horror for me as I got into high school. I grew up in Arkansas where everything was taboo. Everything was considered “porn”—horror was considered “porn” because there was nudity and sex and drugs. But I was always that kid who wanted to see what everyone say I couldn’t.

My parents were both young; they were kids. So my dad would take me to a lot of R-rated films. But I think it helped me mature a lot faster than a lot of kids I knew. My friends were watching PG films while I was already on to Robocop and Total Recall.

It pushed me in a dark direction. I’ve always been interested in dark stories—even if I were to make a comedy, it’d probably be about people hiding a dead body. That’s not to say horror is exclusively my genre—I just finished shooting a short film in Oregon that’s a straight drama. I’m interested in exploring other genres, but there will probably always be elements of darkness in them.

People ask me if I’m worry about being pigeon-holed into horror, but in some ways I already am. I was 22 when I made Madison County, and after that everyone said, “Let’s make another slasher film, let’s make Madison County 2.” Part of me was thinking, “Great, let’s do another movie!” but part of me wondered if I really wanted to make another slasher film.

So the purpose of Roadside was to do something drastically different from Madison County, and Contracted was an effort to do something completely opposite from those two films. And I hope whatever I do next is completely different from Contracted. So if I’m going to stay in the horror genre, I hope to stretch those boundaries as much as possible and show as much versatility as I can.