The Midnight strand at the Sundance Film Festival has come into its own in the last few years, showcasing films that push the increasingly conservative boundaries of genre. One of this year’s offerings — the U.K.-shot Rabbit Trap, written and directed by Bryn Chainey — did that a little too successfully for some. Drawing on ancient folklore, fables and myths, Chainey’s film was branded a ‘folk horror’, a promise the film could not live up to.
Though it is certainly disturbing at times, Rabbit Trap is hard to describe and even harder to put a category to, which is appropriate since the whole film is trying to talk about things that cannot be put into words. It stars Dev Patel as Darcy, who works as a sound engineer for his wife Daphne (Rosy McEwan), who makes experimental music at their home in a remote Welsh cottage. The year is 1976, and the couple have all the latest equipment, which somehow records a series of strange sounds emanating from the nearby woods. Almost immediately, a local child (Jade Groot) appears, which doesn’t seem so strange at all — until he grows petulant and sinister, making more and more demands on the couple.
Here, Chainey discusses the origins of this strange, beguiling film, where the psychological becomes psychedelic, and the elemental meets the electronic…
DEADLINE: Where did Rabbit Trap start?
BRYN CHAINEY: Probably my interest in Welsh folklore. Do you know Brian Froud, the illustrator from Cornwall? He worked with Jim Henson for a long time. He designed Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal, and he wrote a beautiful book called Faeries, which came out in the late ’70s. It’s full of really deep research, about goblins and folklore, but it’s presented as an encyclopedia. As a kid, I read that at a very pivotal age — I was just old enough to know it was fictitious, but young enough for half of me to not know it was fictitious. I love that place when you know something’s not true, but you also don’t. Like ghosts. I don’t believe in ghosts, but if I’m in a spooky house, I get freaked out, which tells me that, deep down, I do believe in ghosts.
So, I grew up with part of me, deep down, believing that it was just an expression of nature, that these things are just there. It’s just one of my special interests, I guess. So, on this film I really wanted to go deep down into it and figure out why it’s still interesting to me as an adult. And in the research I did into Welsh goblins and pixies and púcas, I found all these interesting inconsistencies. The names change a lot. There is no real name for the fairy folk. We call them the fairy folk as a euphemism, because we don’t want to offend them. We go, “Oh, the fairy folk, they’re fair.” But maybe they’re actually not fair. They’re totally… [Laughs] I don’t want to say anything bad, because it might upset them.
But I found that their names and their behavior were all over the place, which I found really interesting. Sometimes they come into the house at night, and they help you with things. They’ll cobble together shoes, or they’ll clean things up. And other times they’ll just come in and ransack the fridge and take all your cheese and your milk. Sometimes they give people gifts, and they give them access to the fairy realm, so that they’re full of wisdom and inspiration. But then if you tell anyone about it, you forget everything, or you crumble into ash. And the more I read this, I was like, “What is the throughline? What is it?”
And for me, the throughline I saw was neediness. I realized that [those stories about] goblins and pixies and fairies, the reason they hit me as a kid, was because these creatures in some ways are expressions of that little inner child that doesn’t ever go away. It’s been there since the beginning of mankind, and it’ll be there forever. It’s this inner child, which is conscious and really desperate for love, and to be seen, and to be held, and to have a home, and to be appreciated. And if it doesn’t get what it wants, it has a tantrum, it will blow up, like a child, it’s not just important for them to have attention, it’s life or death for kids. And I think we never lose that.
I think deep down we still remember that, as children, when we cry, if we’re not held, it feels like we’re going to die. Because we are going to die if we’re crying for help, and no one comes. Maybe it’s far-fetched, but that’s my take on goblins and fairies and pixies: they represent that forgotten child inside all of us. And that became the throughline. For the other parts of the film, I drew together lots of influences — music, cinema, my love for nature and landscape, and feeling displaced from Wales. Because I’m Welsh, but I’ve never lived there as an adult. That’s all in the film. But the throughline is this almost supernatural presence of the inner child that we’re all terrified of and that is actually the source of many of our communication problems and our fears.
Bryn Chainey
Adi Bulboaca/Sundance Institute
DEADLINE: This is your first film. What’s your background as a filmmaker, and how did you come to make this your debut?
CHAINEY: I went to film school in Australia, and I graduated in 2006. After that, I went over to Germany for the Berlinale Talent Campus, and I did my first funded short film there. I won a pitching competition and got to make the film. And then I ended up staying in Germany for the next seven years. And I did another short film that was like a state-funded short. And then I wrote a feature that I had some development money for, and then that did end up happening. So, basically, since film school I’ve been making shorts. It’s quite a slow process, particularly the kind of films I make. I’ve always wanted to do films with some scale, so I can’t just grab a camera and go out and do it.
DEADLINE: Do your shorts bear any resemblance to Rabbit Trap?
CHAINEY: Yeah, a lot. I did one in Australia, kind of a coming-of-age comedy, that’s more directly about my awkward teenage years. Apart from that, all the others are fables. My student film was about a boy who was born with a television set for a head. And pulling that off on a micro budget was really difficult, but that’s what actually drew everyone in to make it at film school. It was like, “Oh, this guy wants to do something that’s difficult and symbolic.” And it was just not like any of the other student films that were being made, which were all realism. I’m like, “No, no, no, let’s go fable.” And, actually, I found people gravitated towards that.
And then when I went to Germany, those two short films were both weird fictions. One was about a man who’s left his family without explaining why, and he cobbles together a boat from household appliances and then rows into space. The whole film is set in outer space, which was a really difficult thing to do. It was all green screens, but I wanted everything to be tactile. So, all the props were all handmade. It had a very Michel Gondry kind of inspiration. And then the next short was a direct contemporary fairytale where I used a nature spirit called the woodwoes to represent this boy’s fear of… [Laughs] I’ll give away spoilers if I explain it. So, yeah, they’re all in that vein. It’s just where I’m at as a writer and the kinds of things I want to see are live-action fables and folktales. And I don’t want them explained to me. I hate it in movies, particularly fantasy and horror, when they’ll be a character who’ll go, “Oh, there’s a book about fairies…” They’ll put off the shelf, they’ll open it, and then they’ll tell you, “Oh, this means….” And it just feels so condescending.
A lot of the folktales referenced in Rabbit Trap are drawn from this one text from 1880, called British Goblins, from an American anthropologist called Wirt Sikes, who traveled through Wales, collected stories and sightings of goblins and fairies. And a common thread through all those sightings was that people didn’t know what the f*ck was going on. They’d say, “I was led by strange music into the woods. I came back 20 years later the same age. I don’t know what happened.” And this is consistently the experience of people who have supernatural encounters: the other realm does not explain itself to you. Your job is to reckon with the other realm and what it’s asking from you.
Really that was really important through Rabbit Trap. I’m keen to see this film play in cultures that have more of a connection with their folktales or with their little folk. In Britain, we all grew up understanding a bit about fairies and goblins and pixies. And throughout Europe and over in Asia, they have the same. I don’t know, I think a film should be an experience not an explanation. It should be an encounter; it shouldn’t be a lesson. I feel so condescended when movies do that.
DEADLINE: So how did the film come together?
CHAINEY: When I wrote the film, I didn’t have any reps, and I didn’t have any contacts in the film industry. I came over to the U.K. to make it and didn’t know anyone. And then the pandemic hit the day I arrived, so I ended up moving to the countryside, because my ex got a job as a gardener. As I was writing the script, I knew I wanted SpectreVision to read it because I’d seen Mandy and a few of their other films. I thought, ‘These guys are taking risks, and they really believe in their audience, and they really believe in their filmmakers.’ So, they were the only producers I wanted to reach out to. A friend I made in Portugal put me in touch, and I sent them a pitch deck. They just loved it, and they came on really quickly once they read the script. So that was a dream come true because they were the only producers I went to, and they were my dream producers.
DEADLINE: Who came on board first, cast-wise?
CHAINEY: We got Dev first. We sent him the screenplay, and he was the first actor I wanted. He really responded to the screenplay. He really responded to the nature elements of it and the folklore elements. I brought him a copy of Faeries by Brian Froud, and he opened it and was like, “Yeah, I’m in. I love it.” So, he came on early, and then the other cast came together a bit later on. I think we had the financing before Dev came on. I do remember that the budget didn’t change once we had a movie star, which was a little tough. Having a movie star on really didn’t inflate the budget because the nature of the whole exercise was: “This is going to be niche and intimate, and not everyone is going to like this movie — but those that do will f*cking love it, and they’ll repeat-watch it, just like all of SpectreVision’s films.”
Everyone knew we couldn’t make this for a lot of money. And it was quite a long process then to actually make it, to find the locations that we could use with the money we had. We could only afford 20 days to shoot the whole film. So, we did it quickly and on remote locations. Location scouting was the hardest part of pre-production, because we needed to find out how to set this up in a way so that we could do it on time and on budget.
DEADLINE: Tell me about the musical component…
CHAINEY: Rosy McEwan’s character is called Daphne Davenport, and she was inspired by Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram, who were both BBC Radiophonic Workshop people. And [American composers] Suzanne Ciani and Laurie Spiegel. That’s the kind of world that this is quite inspired by. And it was because analog electronic music, for me, made the most sense as an elemental force. With that kind of electronic music, you’re not sampling things, it’s not digital. You’re plugging your machine into the wall and then it’s drawing electricity up from the earth wherever you live. And it’s directly going into the machine and then you twist it and manipulate it, you change its shape and out comes sound, which you then have to respond to in real time and wrestle into something musical.
My sister plays electronic music, and she explained that to me; how it works. And my first thought was, “OK, if you’re drawing up energy from the earth to make this music, what if the earth is conscious? Or what if the earth you’re using, what if your environment is actually haunted, or there are spirits in it, like ancient spirits? What if you go way out into the forest to make electronic music and the electricity you’re using is from the ancient soil?” I was like, “That’s cool, that’s spooky.”
So, I thought, Well, what if, with this kind of music, you drew out something that was longing to be heard? And what would that be? And it really just instantly tied in with what I was interested in about the inner child and the unhealed self. You’re making music and you’re drawing out nature, and nature is saying, “I’m not healed. You’re not healed. Deal with me. Make music with me, with this pain.” So, the elements came together.
DEADLINE: Who created those sounds for you?
CHAINEY: We had a musician called Lucrecia Dalt. She’s a Colombian artist. She’s like a sound artist and musician. She’s amazing. She composed a lot of the music before we shot. That was important. All using instruments up until 1976. She went to different museums and different studios to use their gear, and she composed pieces that Rosy, on set, could play along to, so we needed those things composed before the shoot. The sound design was by a guy called Graham Reznick, who’s based in LA. He’s also a filmmaker in his own right, just a multi-talented musician, writes video games, directs movies, does sound design. He’s a wizard. Dresses like a cowboy. He’s great. He’s one of my favorite people. So those two were really working in collaboration with each other, sending things back and forth.
Bryn Chainey on set.
Paul Stephenson
DEADLINE: Why is the film set in 1976? Was there a particular reason for that?
CHAINEY: I knew it couldn’t be modern because the characters needed to be pioneers. I wanted Daphne to be a pioneer, and I was really interested in these women who were the pioneers of electronic music, like Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire. They weren’t playing electronic instruments as a choice. It was all they had to work with, to create a new sound and to create a space for themselves, because, in the BBC, women weren’t allowed to be composers, and they weren’t allowed to write music. They said, “OK, f*ck it, we’ll make soundscapes.”
DEADLINE: Has Delia Derbyshire ever been given proper credit for the Doctor Who theme?
CHAINEY: She has now — like, 50 years later — but, no, she didn’t. Not when she was alive. And I really wanted Daphne to be a pioneer. She’s going into uncharted territory, which is, again, the theme of the film: going into places that are unknown, that people aren’t meant to go. Darcy goes deep into the woods where he is not supposed to go. He hears a sound that wasn’t meant for him. And Daphne is in uncharted territory creating new sounds that no one has heard before, and it’s actually stirring up unknown feelings in her and her husband. So, I had to set it back then so that they weren’t just retro futurists, they were actual futurists. And ’76 was the cutoff because I fell in love with this one piece of gear, the Nagra E, which is the reel-to-reel tape recorder that Darcy and Daphne use. It’s just the most beautiful piece of equipment ever made. And that was made in ’76. So, that was almost arbitrarily the cutoff point. Like, “Well, we want that, that’s the newest thing we want. Let’s cut it off there.” But the pioneers thing was obviously more important.
DEADLINE: So, then we have this strange child that comes down from the woods. What were you going for there?
CHAINEY: There are lots of stories already about a demon seed, a creepy child that shows up. And, personally, I enjoy those movies when they’re done really well. And I knew that audiences would clock it instantly: A child shows up, weird things are going to go down. Horror audiences, they’re smart, they know that. What I then needed was an actor and a character that could undo that feeling, so that you progressively start to feel for this child and… maybe not trust them but at least empathize with them, or get shaken by them, or sucked in by their vulnerability. That was the main thing I wanted from the child character was someone that was so desperate for attention and love — to be seen, to be heard, to be part of a family — that it feels almost elemental.
We auditioned boys, girls, non-binary kids, trans kids. For me, the gender wasn’t important as long as they had the emotional truth. But then we found Jade Croot. She’s a 25-year-old woman, and the character needs to present as a prepubescent boy. We thought, “Can she pull it off?” But then we just went with it. It was a bit a risk, but I think she does a beautiful job of the role and she’s so powerful. And also, in ’76, Daphne and Darcy would not have had the language for a non-binary kid. So, we shouldn’t either. The kid presents as a very comfortable, confident, in-the-land child, a country kid. They’re out by themselves playing all day. They know their way home. And that’s how the child presents itself. And that felt necessary, otherwise Daphne and Darcy would’ve had to be like, “Where are your parents?”
DEADLINE: Rabbit Trap premiered last week at Sundance. How did that make you feel, and how did the audience react?
CHAINEY: I was relieved. I mean, this film has been with me for six years, so I was relieved for it to be out there finally. The premiere itself was terrifying for me, but it’s interesting that you can hold two distinct feelings at once. I was so proud of the film, and also a little scared. What if people watch it and say, “It doesn’t make any sense,” or “You’re crazy,” or “The pain you’ve shared, yuck — we don’t want to hear it”? And reactions have been precisely what I expected. The people who get it, love it. I’ve had so many people come up to me in the street and just grab me and hug me and say, “I feel heard. I feel seen. Thank you.” And then the people who have found it impenetrable have been hostile against it. I think people find the vulnerability of it really scary and they just reject it. They were saying, “Well, it’s not scary.” Or “Oh, it’s confusing.”
DEADLINE: The term ‘folk horror’ isn’t especially helpful in that respect…
CHAINEY: I know, totally. We set out to make a movie that was more like a Tarkovsky film, or a Nic Roeg film, or an Apichatpong Weerasethakul movie, which is dealing with dreams, and it has a pace where you’re meant to sink into your seat rather than lean forward. And that’s why I’m so keen to get the movie out into Europe and Asia, because of its pace, its tone, and its energy, I can’t wait to get in front of people who enjoy that kind of pacing.
DEADLINE: Do you have any other projects lined up?
CHAINEY: Yeah, I’ve got a few. I’ve been writing. We finished the film in about July last year. Since then, I’ve been writing, I’ve got a few different projects that I like. We’ll see which one goes first.
DEADLINE: So nothing’s going yet?
CHAINEY: No, no. I also had to wait until Rabbit Trap was out. There are a lot of people who want to meet, but I can’t work with someone until they’ve seen what I do. Because not everyone’s going to like this film. So, now the movie’s out, I’m excited, because I can continue to find my people, people who get it. I can work with them on something new and I’m excited about that.