Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on February 2, 2007, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
A family moving into a new home that proves to be haunted, a teenaged girl who sees the ghosts yet can’t convince her parents of the danger—it’s a horror concept as American as apple pie, especially given that the new home is situated on a sunflower farm. But in Columbia/Screen Gems’ new supernatural chiller The Messengers, the tale is told under the guidance of overseas talents: namely, Asian directors Danny and Oxide Pang, making their U.S. feature debuts. Considering that The Eye, the movie which first won them Stateside attention, also focuses on a young woman with a unique ability to spy the spirits of the dead lurking around her, the choice seems more than appropriate—and it’s one that the movie’s male lead agrees with.
“The horror market is so saturated; everyone’s looking for something fresh,” says Dylan McDermott, who stars as Roy Solomon in The Messengers alongside Panic Room’s Kristen Stewart (who plays his spooked daughter Jess) and The Relic’s Penelope Ann Miller (as his wife Denise). “I believe that Asian directors bring something to the genre that American audiences haven’t seen, so therefore it’s embraced. Certainly, the Pang Brothers are offering that. It’s just something different, you know? Next year maybe it’ll be Danish horror—whatever gets people into the theater.”
Though he wasn’t familiar with the Pangs’ work prior to The Messengers coming his way, he did get to look at their most celebrated film before signing on. “I saw The Eye; when I got the offer, they sent the movie over and I was really impressed by it. I love that psychological horror stuff, and I thought they could do a good job with this film.”
His hopes were borne out by the experience making The Messengers, despite the Pangs’ unorthodox working method: The brothers alternate days on set, with each heading into the editing room on his day off to whip the previous day’s footage into shape. McDermott insists he didn’t have trouble telling them apart: “They’re not identical; one wears glasses and the other doesn’t,” he smiles. “Though sometimes, one would take his glasses off and give them to the other. I believe I worked with Oxide maybe a little differently than with Danny; Oxide is a bit lighter in terms of his approach to directing, and Danny is a little darker. But they’re great together, and it’s an interesting mix. They have a good sense of humor, and while they did have a translator, they speak more English than they let on. We had fun, ultimately.”
While the Asian horror invasion has involved a number of its top terror talents making the jump to Hollywood, and to a string of remakes on the order of The Ring, The Grudge, their respective sequels, Dark Water and the upcoming One Missed Call, The Messengers marks the rare occurrence of genre filmmakers from the region helming a studio feature not directly based on a Far East fright film. It’s a distinction that pleases McDermott.
“So much of entertainment in general is derivative, and nobody has original ideas anymore,” he laments. “I mean, you still have the haunted house here, so everything’s derivative to a point, but it’s nice that it isn’t a remake.” When it’s pointed out that a key scene in which Roy is attacked by malevolent crows might potentially put viewers in mind of a certain Alfred Hitchcock classic, McDermott responds, “Unfortunately, there’s a whole new audience out there that doesn’t remember The Birds. It’s a beautiful movie, but nobody cares, you know? The trouble with making movies is that every 10 years, there’s a new generation, so that’s why there are all these remakes. The target audience for this movie is 13- to 18-year-olds; it’s all about getting the teenagers in there. 13-year-old girls run the world; that’s how it works!”
It’s also why a scene involving a nasty act of violence with Roy on the receiving end seems surprisingly grue-free on screen. “There’s no blood, because it’s PG-13; they knew that going in, so there could be no gore. It was always catering to a PG-13 audience. They know what they’re doing.”
“They” includes fright-film favorite Sam Raimi, who co-produced The Messengers with his Ghost House Pictures partner Rob Tapert and, according to McDermott, had a strong hand in shaping the movie once it wrapped. Although Raimi was busy during the summer 2005 shoot on other projects, the actor recalls, “I know that he dealt a lot with postproduction, in the editing room. Sam is all over this picture, all over it. The guy is just incredible, how he gets such excitement out of the process. It’s not like he just puts his name on it.”
At least one name involved with The Messengers didn’t wind up listed in the credits, however. Although former Fango scribe Mark Wheaton receives sole screenplay credit and Todd Farmer (Jason X) is cited for the story, at least one unbilled scribe (Collateral’s Stuart Beattie) reportedly worked on the movie, and McDermott says, “I don’t know how many drafts there were, but they brought in writer after writer to polish it up and make it better. Most horror movies don’t have much of a story—they usually just rely on the scares—and because this one does, that kind of separates it from other horror films. Everybody was pressing for the same thing, which was, how do we make the story better?”
The actor says that a similar motive was behind the reshoots that took place last year, under the direction of Eduardo (Curandero) Rodriguez. “I wasn’t involved with those, really,” McDermott notes. “The reshoots were basically for the scares; the whole mud pit scene [in which Jess is attacked by the spirits in the farmhouse’s basement] was probably the most elaborate. It was just about, how do we make the movie scarier?”
Best-known for his seven-season stint on the ABC legal drama The Practice, McDermott has a long résumé of film and TV credits, but little in the way of fear fare. That’s not a conscious choice for the actor, who claims to be “content-driven” in his choice of projects. “I like horror, myself,” he says. “You can’t deny that market, because it speaks, and people go. And at a time where movies are struggling to find an audience with huge stars, horror always wins. And you’re going to find more and more actors going into horror, because the audience shows up for it. Does it have the credibility of regular films? I guess that depends on how good the movie is. There are some really amazing ones; Rosemary’s Baby, to me, is the best horror movie ever made—one of the great films, I don’t even call it a horror movie. There is a chance to make great horror, absolutely.”
One film he wouldn’t put in that pantheon, however, is 1990’s Hardware, the futuristic killer-robot shocker that marks his only previous genre-feature lead. “A great horror movie? No, absolutely not,” he says of the directorial debut of Richard Stanley, who was famously later dismissed from the troubled shoot of the Island of Dr. Moreau remake. “Yeah, I got a preview of that,” says McDermott, who will only elaborate that “I remember making it, and it was like, ‘Oh my God’—it was so painful, that movie. Everything about it.”
He has fonder memories of working with his Messengers co-stars. “Kristen was great; she’s got real presence, and she’s going to be a big star,” he says. “Penny and I did Biloxi Blues together years ago on Broadway, so we have been friends for a long time, and it was nice to be reunited for this movie. We had a relationship already, so we didn’t have to get to know each other.” And he describes Evan and Theodore Turner, the twins who play his toddler son Ben, as “beautiful kids with great faces and expressions. You could watch them all day.”
Audiences may get a chance to watch them and the rest of McDermott’s “family” again should The Messengers strike a chord with the public. “I was told that at $35 million, there’s a sequel,” he reveals. “We move into another haunted house—‘Aw, don’t tell me we did it again!’ I’m assuming that would happen in the next one. The message continues!”
