‘Resolution’ Filmmakers Moorhead and Benson on Their Twisty Horror Movie
The directors reveal the secrets behind their critically acclaimed 2012 microbudget movie.
The $20,000 horror movie Resolution — the first film from directors Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson — wowed viewers and critics when it debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2012, drawing comparisons to much bigger films such as Cabin in the Woods and Sinister, as well as the works of literary horrormeister H.P. Lovecraft.
But Moorhead and Benson tell Outtake that they had no intention of invoking any such comparisons: They just wanted to make a movie that would scare the pants off you. “I didn’t know who H.P. Lovecraft was,” Benson, who wrote the script, admits now.
Whatever their intentions, the two filmmakers have earned a reputation for scary, smart horror with Resolution, its more-polished follow-up Spring and the upcoming The Endless, which just won a berth in the U.S. narrative competition of this year’s upcoming Tribeca Film Festival, which runs April 19–30.
Resolution tells the story of Michael (Peter Cilella), who travels to a remote cabin in the woods to force his paranoid, pistol-packing junkie friend Chris (Vinny Curran) to quit drugs cold turkey. Michael handcuffs Chris in the cabin, then spends his time trying to unravel the mystery of photos, films, a book of stories and odd videos that keep showing up. In the process, he encounters strange people in the woods: drug dealers, UFO cultists, a French archaeologist. Things get weirder and more dangerous the more Michael learns.
Critics showered Resolution with praise. Los Angeles Times critic Robert Abele said it offered up “a strangely tense and humorous meta-narrative”:
“Rare is the chiller that treats unknown phenomena as a gateway toward enlightened characterizations — think Michael Haneke’s Caché — but in its gently atmospheric camerawork and nicely underplayed moments between Mike and Chris, Resolution manages to keep its eerier moments surprising and its emotional life arresting.”
Village Voice critic Nick Schager called it “twisty meta-horror done right”:
“… ambiguity enlivens the smart, knotty Resolution, which routinely nods to its own artificiality while positing storytelling as a constantly evolving beast apt to save your life one moment and consume you the next.”
We spoke with Benson and Moorhead about the genesis of Resolution, about why horror is such a potent genre and about their favorite films. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Outtake: What were you setting out to do when you created this film?
Justin Benson: There’s so many different ways to answer that. … Aaron and I couldn’t get a movie made in the traditional way, with financing and stuff. We were just two kids trying to make our first movie. And so the script was written so that we could make it with the amount of money in our checking accounts. … That guided … the process.
But beyond that, you were saying, “Oh, it’s a scary movie.” I think when I sat down to write it, I wanted to write something that would actually scare Aaron and me. It’s interesting, because at the time, … I had no idea who some of [the] people [we’re compared with are]. People describe Resolution as, “Oh, it’s Lovecraftian.” I didn’t know who H.P. Lovecraft was. But I knew if you slowly realize that whatever this antagonist is, it’s something so old that it predates other mythologies of monsters, that idea got under my skin. The idea that you kind of feel like you’re sitting in the presence of some really ancient evil. That was a scary idea.
Talk about the approach of centering the film on these two characters.
Aaron Moorhead: … Resolution was a much more organic process than are many other movies that we made before, just because we had complete and total freedom. No one was telling us to make the movie or anything like that. And we hadn’t completely figured out our process between the two of us, with me and Justin yet. This is our first feature film. We just knew that we got along and had very similar taste. You know, we had worked on some short films together.
We found now in retrospect that having two central characters — and most of our movies have two central characters — it seems like spending more time with them on the screen, you just feel more emotion in general. You feel stronger for them. You feel like you understand them better. …
Because a feature film is only two hours long, you just have to pick your battles with how much you want people to be invested in people. If you’re trying to track seven or eight people in 90 minutes, you’re not going to completely fall in love with every single person that you come across.
And so we wanted to just ensure that you fall completely in love with just these two people with this one isolated conflict. … As long as you care really, really, really strongly about these two people, the scares and the situation they’re in land that much harder.
Critics see homages and draw parallels with other films in this movie as a meta-narrative about narratives. The characters are in a story, seeing that a story is dictating what’s happening to them, which is an interesting idea.
Justin Benson: I mean, it’s funny. I think that when you talk about things like Cabin in the Woods and Sinister and Resolution, the thing that links them probably is the description of the meta [approach]. … [But] I didn’t know what meta meant when we made the movie. So there’s that. Embarrassingly so. …
I’ve thought about this a little bit, and I may have come to the conclusion that if you’re intending to tell a meta-narrative, it’s not likely it will turn out so well. But if an audience watches your movie, and they feel a relationship with it that’s a little bit reflexive, I guess, then you’re probably onto something.
That probably works pretty well if the audience feels like you share a personal knowledge of something. But that said, no, it was never intended to be a “meta film.” And the other thing, too, is that, it’s just interesting that Cabin in the Woods, Resolution and Sinister are three very different movies on three very different scales. Sinister is probably closer in scale to Resolution. Resolution is a $20,000, micro-micro-budget movie made by a few people. And obviously Cabin in the Woods is a studio film … in that funhouse model. But the similarities are interesting, because they’re all made at kind of the same time, and yet totally independent of each other. Aaron and I are buddies with [C. Robert] Cargill, who wrote Sinister, and we’ll see him at Fantastic Fest in Austin sometimes. And we all get to talking about projects we’ve been working on and things we’re doing. And there’s always a really interesting similarity, just totally coincidentally.
You guys are huge film fans. Talk about the films that influenced you in making ‘Resolution,’ if any.
Aaron Moorhead: We really deliberately tried to steer the other direction from any kind of deliberate homage. We talked about what kind of movies we liked, but we were really talking about [films such as] Winter’s Bone at the time, or Funny Games or Caché. And it wasn’t all like, “Oh, this is a Haneke film.” …
And the comparisons … came later. … There’s this parade in the film of possible things that these strange occurrences that are happening to Michael and Chris could be, and that parade in some ways feels like we’re giving winks to indie horror tropes. … Is it wendigos? Is it UFOs? Is it … cult members? You know, that sort of thing. And that actually wasn’t intended to be a play on indie film tropes. We only found that out later. …
The idea of homage … didn’t really enter into the conversation until after we made the movie, and people were kind of finding ways to describe it.
What is it about horror that you think is so rich and gives you the opportunity to do things creatively that another genre might not?
Justin Benson: That’s a tough one. … Here’s the thing. On one hand, horror movies and genre films in general — horror, sci-fi, fantasy — at its worst, it’s sort of like exploitation movies. … At its best, it’s this opportunity to do something really left of center. To do something really punk rock and to do something really progressive and new and fresh and different. You don’t have the same constraints that a traditional drama might have. …
That said, when we sit down [and] start conceiving of a movie and start with ideas and making lists of stuff and all the things we want to do, we always talk about the characters and creating these people, telling the story and all those things that go into developing a movie and telling a story. We never discuss what genre we’re working in. …
If there is scary stuff, if there is dread, if there is an alien, if there is whatever genre component you have, at some level you know you’re making a science fiction movie or whatever it is. But that’s not something we try to discuss and aim for when we’re doing it. …
But I will also say very honestly there is a badge of pride attached to a movie called horror, too: that you’re part of a tradition of something that at its best is very rebellious and progressive. …
Aaron Moorhead: If you make a drama, then … there’s an inherent perception that you’re trying to tell something that’s important. … Once you press play, there is a slight air of pretension. And I don’t mean that every drama director is pretentious. That’s obviously not true. I just mean that, one way or another, we’re not here to entertain you. We’re here to change your life.
In horror, in genre films, the assumption is more just a straight entertainment film. But you can Trojan-horse great relationships and universal themes into them. So you can actually come out with a more populist view, while also making something substantive.
Talk about some of your favorite films?
Aaron Moorhead: A film I think has wonderfully received a bit of a renaissance recently that it didn’t really get in its time is Children of Men. I thought at the time: “Why is nobody talking about this movie?” And at the time, I think I was a little more obsessive about the technical accomplishments than the actual emotional accomplishment. But what’s actually really cool about it is it’s the only … dystopian movie that’s not heavy-handed. It paints this picture that’s very humanist and … grounded is a word that everyone would use for it. …
Adaptation. I remember I saw that … in high school. … I had never seen a meta-narrative before like that. You would think that a writer writing about how his own writing is solipsistic and meta is already like a recipe for disaster, but … it is like the sole example I can think of that goes against what Justin was saying, [that if] you set it up to do it, it’s going to be bad.
[It] works because it’s all about itself. That’s what the crazy thing is. It’s all about itself. And the idea that even in the third act, he almost deliberately tanks his third act just to be true to the actual idea of his shitty brother helping him on the script. … It’s a really good turn. … I remember that there’s this quote in there that doesn’t have to do with the meta-narrative part of it, but it actually has informed my life a lot: “You are what you love, not what loves you.” …
At that time I was just having some girl trouble, but even … now, it’s still something that I remember when it was like, “Wow, when you face rejection … in romantic love or any form of something you care about, … the thing that defines you is what you do rather than what they do.” And it kind of helps make the pain a little easier
Justin Benson: I would say Adaptation’s probably the one. Aaron already said everything I’d probably say, but … I recently rewatched it at a friend’s house a few months ago, and I realized, very sadly, that this relationship that the main character has with screenwriting, I don’t feel that way exactly, but do I see people who write scripts that just kind of embrace exploitation elements for it to do better financially? Absolutely. It’s a funny thing how my relationship’s changed with it as I’ve gotten older.
Also I love Chris Cooper. Chris Cooper should be in every movie, but for some reason he’s only in a few now. But he should be in everything. …
What are you working on now?
Aaron Moorhead: Our new project right now is called The Endless. … Justin came up with this bomb idea for this movie called The Endless, and the original plan was, we’ll just be in it, we’ll scrape some money together, and we’ll just go make a movie.
And then the script that came out was, like, “Oh, man, this isn’t just like a ‘Oh, hey, let’s go make a movie.’” This is like, “OK, I’m sorry. This is just awesome.” And so that completely consumed our lives for the last eight months or so, and we’re just now finishing up post-production, and … we’re actually in competition at Tribeca.
