Infested is high on our list of most anticipated new horror movies for 2024. Sébastien Vaniček’s César-nominated spider horror crawls onto Shudder on Friday, April 26th. Vaniček and crew enjoyed a wildly successful festival run, including a Best Picture (Horror) and Best Director (Horror) win at 2023’s Fantastic Fest.
The director is slated to tackle an upcoming Evil Dead spinoff, which is sure to be mean as hell. After making our skin crawl with spiders overtaking an apartment building, Vaniček has plans to make us hurt when he unleashes his take on Deadites into the world. His take on making movies is best summed up as such: “I want them to hurt, to live the thing.”
Vaniček stopped in to discuss working with real spiders, French horror movies, and what we can expect from his upcoming Evil Dead movie.
This is your feature debut, and you bit off quite a lot here. Tons of action, effects, and very heavy emotional moments with these characters. What was the hardest part of this to pull off?
During the writing process, for me, it was characters because I’ve made 50 short movies over the past ten years, and I didn’t go to a cinema school or anything. I was just doing stuff in the street with my friends, showing things, and working on sound and image.
When I had the opportunity to do a feature film, I knew that I needed great characters in order for the audience to identify with and be close to. That was a really new thing for me during the writing process. And it was another when I had to direct the actors. You have to work with them and tell them what to do and this kind of stuff. That was new to me, so I needed to work with actors who would understand that we are from the same generation and doing something new.
In France, nobody has done a movie with spiders, so we have to make the best movie possible for people to live something really strong. I basically put everything into this movie, studied a lot, and learned a lot. And I will learn on the next one and the next one. It’s a learning process that will never end.
During the writing process, how do you know when you have created fully formed characters that we can connect to?
You never know when you are in the writing process, because it’s only words on a piece of paper. For example, there’s a scene that felt right written on the paper. I knew that the audience would feel this girl’s pain, but it’s only words on a piece of paper.
They start to live when you meet a good actor, and you give them freedom and tell them that it’s not about the words, it’s about what’s under the words. If they want to say it in another way, or just show it with their eyes or something like that, that’s when the character is starting to live.
That was really, really interesting with Kaleb (Théo Christine), because during the writing process we were a bit afraid that the audience wouldn’t identify with him because he’s in such a bad mood all the time and he talks badly to other characters, but he’s an orphan. He lost his mother, he’s afraid, he’s alone. Théo did a perfect job and made this character come to life because he became this child. When you see Théo, you see a child who is lost. The actors are really important. They did such a great job, and they made these characters live.
This movie is also very much about the people who nobody else is coming to help. They have to help themselves and help each other. What made you want to tell their story?
I come from the suburbs. In France, suburbs have such a bad reputation, and it was hard to grow up in an area where you find so many beautiful things, and when you go out of the area, you understand that people hate this area, this neighborhood. We have a bad reputation. I have a bad reputation. I don’t know why.
That’s why the parallel with spiders was really easy. Spiders are treated the same way. People hate their shape, so they kill them or put them out. It’s basically the same with suburbans in France, so it was pretty easy for me to talk about these difficulties we have. I wanted to show the beauty of the suburbs.
The beauty is that everybody knows each other. When you grow up in a building every woman is your mother, every man is your father or uncle. You can go to your friend’s house and everybody knows each other, all the mothers in the building know each other and can say, “Can you take care of my kid for about two hours because I have to go to the grocery store?”
That doesn’t happen in big cities. I discovered that when I moved closer to Paris, and I found it’s not the same. Suburbs can have a bad reputation, but they’re also the place where you have so many beautiful things. I wanted to show them and show people who have to survive with each other. They take care of each other, and you will see that problems don’t come from the inside; they come from the outside.
You absolutely captured the community of that. I kind of fell in love with everyone in the building, so I was upset for most of the movie. Are you an arachnophobe? Are you scared of spiders?
No, I’m in love with all living creatures. I wanted to film them really close so people could understand how complex and beautiful they are. I’m more of a lover of small things.
So you’re a Kaleb, then?
Yeah, but the problem with Kaleb is that he puts spiders and things that he loves in boxes. And when I love something, I want to see it free. I hate zoos. I hate to see animals in cages. Let it free if you love it. It’s beautiful when it’s wild, when it’s free.
What are some of your inspirations for confined horror, or even movies that take place in an apartment building and use that setting really well?
I tried to stay away from references and things like that because I wanted to build my own thing and have a new way of showing things. Obviously, I’m not far away from Alien because I’m a big fan of Ridley Scott and Alien. It’s people from the working class. They just want money and they’re trapped in a spaceship with a monster, so you can see parallels with my movie, obviously, but one of the movies that was really close to me during the writing process is not a horror movie. It’s Green Room, from Jeremy Saulnier.
It’s about punk bands in a concert room, trapped with Nazis and they have to survive. It’s just one hour and a half in a concert room, and they have to escape. It’s really, really intense, and the concept is really simple. That’s the movie that stayed with me during the writing process.
Does putting that boundary on yourself end up making you more creative? Limiting the action to one space while also expanding what you can do within that space?
Yeah, I’m a big fan of boundaries and limits. When you’re told “We don’t have enough money to do that,” you will have to have the best idea possible. For me, being a good director is facing problems. It’s not about having the best ideas or the best shots. It’s facing problems because you will have problems during the entire shoot.
The first problem is money. You will never have enough money to do what you have in mind, so you have to come up with better ideas. Steven Spielberg is the best master of it. In Jaws, he had a shark that didn’t work. With Saving Private Ryan, the sun wasn’t in the right place, but the set was already built, and he had to have the best idea, so he had this idea of the long shot scene with the sniper. It’s always about facing problems. I think when you have limits, boundaries, and things like that, it will improve your creativity.
Is there anything that you would have loved to include in this but weren’t able to, for whatever reason, you had to work around it?
Yeah, it’s an interesting question, but I think that I’ve done the best movie possible with what I had. And if I had more money or more things, it would have been, another movie. Maybe a worse movie with more money. When you have problems and no money, you are creative, so I’m happy with what I have.
So you’re not afraid of spiders or any living creatures. What are you afraid of?
I think, even as I’m getting older and starting to understand it, it’s time because it’s something that I don’t understand and I can’t. It’s something that humans invented to have references, but it’s such another thing in the universe. I don’t like it.
Tell me a little bit about creating the creatures, creating these spiders, because you had to have lots of them, and they’re interacting with your actors. What was that process like from start to finish?
We were lucky enough to work with real spiders. We had 200 real spiders on the set, so we were able to study them really closely. I draw a lot, so I drew a lot of different spiders and tried to show the VFX team how I wanted the spiders to behave and how they work. Because what’s frightening about the spiders is the fact that they have eight legs, and each leg acts differently. It moves really fast from this point to this point, where you never know what it’ll do. We had this hazardous side that we had to create, the fact that you never know what spiders will do, and we had to create this feeling for the audience.
It’s hard to create it because you have to master everything when you are in the CGI process, but how can you master hazardous? That was the thing. We were lucky enough to have a lot of shots with the real ones, and the CGI team was able to study them really, really closely, and we have the CGI spiders that are realistic, I think.
The tension in the bathroom scene is my favorite. That would be fun to watch with an audience.
Yeah, I think that’s what made me want to do this scene. It’s just the perfect scene for the audience because you can laugh, you can scream, and there is basically everything in five minutes. That was the main goal of this scene.
If this was a short film or you did a proof of concept, it would have been this scene. You also do a lot of fun things with light in this movie, you use interesting light sources, but you build the tension and suspense with your use of light. Was that always in the script or did that evolve as you were shooting?
When I’m writing a script, I’m always thinking about the image. Sometimes, I don’t have the scene, but I have the image. When I knew that the movie would be in the dark at some point, I was like, okay, how can I lighten the dark? I had to add the best ideas to put lights in the dark, and that’s how I came up with firecrackers and things like that. I thought that would be interesting and make the spiders really frightening because when the firecracker explodes, you see spiders fall, but only for half a second.
That’s an idea that came up quite early during the writing process. I was drawing things and images and colors. Even if the movie is in the dark, I wanted it to be colorful, I needed colors.
I want to see your drawings. I feel like you have some really cool stuff behind the scenes for this.
It’s like 150 pages. The artwork book is quite big because I had to convince a lot of people to do this movie, not just with a script. I had to convince them with this artwork book.
Would you personally have a higher chance of survival if you were trapped in an apartment building filled with giant spiders or filled with Deadites?
I think that’s my main thing is, I would not panic. That’s one of the things that I have is, I kind of never panic. I’m always processing what’s happening, and I react. But I think I would prefer to have big spiders in my room rather than Deadites because Deadites just want to hurt you. Spiders can stay on a wall. Even if the spider is really, really big, it can stay on a wall, and they don’t want to touch you. They will never eat you, so then, you don’t exist for them. Deadites are another story.
Speaking of Deadites, your next project is that Untitled Evil Dead spinoff. First, tell us, how the hell did this come to be?
I won some prizes in Fantastic Fest in Austin. I had Best Director and Best Movie. I think that’s when the phone started to ring, and the studios in the US were asking, “Oh, who’s this guy? What’s this movie about spiders and everything?” So my agent told me, “Okay, you have a lot of meetings,” and the meetings were with Warner Brothers, Fox, etc. And I was like, “What the… ? What’s happening?”
I had meetings with Ghost House Pictures, New Line, and Warner Brothers. One day I got an email asking if I would be interested in talking about Evil Dead. They told me, “We are interested in what your Evil Dead would be.” I think that’s the question that I like the most because it was not: “We have this character and this story and this script. Would you like to do it?”
It was: “What would your Evil Dead be? You have the franchise, you have the universe, you know the characters. What would you do with everything?” You basically have a box full of toys, and they ask you to use these toys and tell your story.
I loved the question so much that I wrote fifteen pages with Florent, my co-writer on Infested. They liked it, and now, we are writing it.
I love that they approached you and said, “What would you do in this space?” because that still allows you to be you.
Yeah, sure. That’s what I like because one of my main fears is not having creative freedom, especially in Hollywood. We have so many stories of European directors who went to the US and were destroyed by the studios, and I was afraid of that. I told my agents, “I think I will stay in France for a few years.” And when they came up with this idea, they were really protective of me.
Evil Dead gave Fede Álvarez and Lee Cronin a chance, and I had the opportunity to have a Zoom with Fede Álvarez to ask him a lot of questions about the creative process, the production and the post-production. He told me it was really, really nice to work with them. He did another movie with them, Don’t Breathe. I think that he loved working with them. I trust him and I trust these guys, and I’m glad.
I think you’re in good hands. Can you tell us anything at all about your Evil Dead?
Obviously not, because we are currently in the sandbox. We are gathering the sand. The only thing is that I’m aiming to do something mean. I want to do a movie that hurts the audience, because I think that’s the essence of Evil Dead. When you see an Evil Dead movie, you want to be hurt. You want to come out of this movie, like, “Ugh … ” And I want people to experience that. I tended to do it with Infested, to hurt the audience, to make them feel through their body. With Evil Dead, I will do it 150% more, because I want to have a mean and bad movie, something that’s really like a bad guy.
You’re coming for us.
I don’t want to meet him.
Do you have some French horror movies that you think deserve more love in the States?
I don’t know which movies are not famous in the States, but obviously, you know Alexandre Aja, who’s done The Hills Have Eyes, and a movie called High Tension. High Tension really stuck with me when I discovered it as a teenager. It’s really, really, really rough. It’s really intense. And it’s a movie that deserves to be seen in the US.
I just learned so much about you right now. You’re talking about wanting to make a mean movie, you want to hurt the audience, and there it is. High Tension and The Hills Have Eyes, I’m getting so much insight into you.
Yeah, you will feel things.
You like the brutality. You want to take the audience and just pummel them.
Yeah, I don’t want them to be in a comfortable situation in their living room or in their seats eating popcorn. I want them to hurt, to live the thing. When you pay 15 euros, you want to be on a roller coaster. You want them to take your body and yeah, I think you want to live things.
What are your five favorite horror movies of all time?
Of all time, it’s a hard question because one of my weaknesses is that I didn’t see enough movies. I’m working on it, but I was more in the street making my movies than watching movies. I’m working on it, but my favorite movie of all time, for example, is Gladiator. It’s not a horror movie at all. I’m really basic. But I would say the movies that stuck with me were Hereditary from Ari Aster, and the other is It Follows.
It Follows is not gory, you don’t have blood, but you feel unsafe all the time. You are in a position where you are afraid of all the extras behind the main character, and you are always looking at the background. It’s the type of movie I love, when you experience it and you aren’t just watching a story, you are experiencing the story.
It’s the same with Hereditary. You are in a bad mood, in bad shape, you feel things that you don’t want to feel, and you are glad when you go out. You’re like, “I can breathe.” Irréversible, from Gaspar Noe is a really hard movie to watch. It’s really horrific. And the last one is not a horror movie, but I think it’s kind of horrific. Requiem For A Dream really sticks with you, and you leave it like it’s a horror movie because you go down with the characters, and that’s the thing that a horror movie does to you, I think.
Based on the kind of movies you like, I’m very afraid for us and excited about your Evil Dead movie, because I think you’re not going to be very gentle with us.
Yeah, I hope so. We are writing the stuff, but yeah, I think that’s what you had in Evil Dead Rise. That’s what you had with Fede’s movie. You were hurt by these Deadites. You felt it. And it’s really camera work, and sound, and things like that. I think that’s what the crews and the team of Sam Raimi found, in Infested, this craft. And Sam is a guy who has invented crafts in cinema. I think that I cannot understand why they came to me.
I 100% understand why they came to you. Watching your movie, it’s clearly a perfect fit, and I’m so happy for you.
Yeah, I will try to do something good.
We have full faith that the latest Evil Dead entry is in good hands, Sébastien. Watch our full interview with Sébastien Vaniček below. Infested is streaming on Shudder on April 26th.
