With his new film Swallowed now streaming on VOD/digital platforms (see interview here), director Carter Smith already has his follow-up movie in the can and awaiting release. He gave Fango some words on The Passenger, his second project for Blumhouse Television.
“I had done Midnight Kiss with them,” Smith says, “which was one of their Into the Dark episodes—it was their New Year’s Eve film. We talked about finding something else to do together after that first experience, so it was a lot of the same execs and the same in-house producer that I worked with.”
He describes The Passenger as “a coming-of-age hostage road-trip thriller, which is a term I coined because it’s the only way I can figure out how to describe it! It stars Kyle Gallner and Johnny Berchtold, and it’s extremely fucked-up and bloody. It’s about these two guys who wind up on a road trip after a horrific incident, and things spiral out of control. They end up strangely becoming friends in a situation where friendship should not exist. I thought about this afterward; like Swallowed, it’s very much a two-hander, a couple of guys exploring the weird ins and outs of a very specific relationship.”
Both Swallowed and Midnight Kiss focus on queer characters, and Smith, an out filmmaker, says The Passenger also deals somewhat with that idea. “I think anything I do is probably going to have some gay undertones,” he notes. “That’s just me, and I believe my background as a photographer maybe means that I photograph things in a specific way that lends some sort of queerness to it. The Passenger was written by Jack Stanley, and early on I talked to him about the gay subtext, and he was like, ‘There’s no gay subtext.’ Then we went off to shoot, and the actors and I were like, ‘There’s some gay subtext! Maybe you don’t see it, but we all do, and we’re going to have fun with it.’”
His lead actor, Gallner, was all over the horror scene in the late 2000s (Red, The Haunting in Connecticut, Jennifer’s Body, and the Nightmare on Elm Street remake), and more recently returned to the genre in The Cleanse, The Cleansing Hour (coincidentally enough), Scream, and Smile. “Everyone who’s seen The Passenger is like, ‘Oh my God, that guy’s amazing!’” Smith says. “He can do more with a weird shrug of his shoulder than most actors can do with a monologue. And it’s funny, because he has a lot of genre experience and has been in so much, but this is a very human, intimate role. There’s none of the big moments; I mean, there’s a little bit, but it’s a very grounded performance, and it’s interesting to see him do something so intensely intimate and emotional.”
Produced by Blumhouse TV as part of their deal with MGM+ (formerly Epix), The Passenger will debut on the network on a date yet to be determined, and Smith would be happy to work with the horror production house again. “I love Blumhouse because they just make movies. That’s one of the great things about them; knowing how hard it is to make films in general, to have a company like Blumhouse that says, ‘Yes, we’re going to do this big a slate,’ is pretty cool.”
