There’s a scene that comes up 28 minutes into the movie where we get a look at the house Jessie is staying in, and it looks like it has Amityville Horror-like windows. Was that intentional?
Kevin Greutert: Well I didn’t necessarily want to emulate the Amityville films because I’m not really interested in homages per say. There are certain tropes that go through horror movies and it would be foolish to try and discard them all completely, but that’s just the way the house looked. It was three stories and it had some windows up on the third floor that look kind of like those amazing Amityville windows, and the shot that you’re probably thinking of where the camera is slowly tracking past those windows, I don’t even know if that was a real shot. I think we were moving the crane while the camera was turned on (laughs) and it looked cool so I used it in the movie, but it’s not trying to emulate the Amityville films.
What was it like shooting those voodoo sequences?
Kevin Greutert: All the voodoo stuff was really fun. The production designer, a woman named Jade Healy, was very inventive. She really made the most of the resources that were available. There were a lot of local artists in North Carolina that provided all sorts of different components to give the voodoo its look.
I was really nervous about how we were going to find the voodoo dancers for that voodoo ceremony, and I had people calling throughout New Orleans to try and find someone. Ultimately, we found a dance troupe in Raleigh that specializes in African dance, and I met with them and they were very excited about it. I was little bit culturally oversensitive when I met with them at first because I think voodoo as it is really practiced is kind of a celebratory fun religion.
The idea that there are voodoo dolls and curses and things like that is kind of a Hollywood re-conceptualizing of it, and in fact most of the music is pretty alive and playful and pretty percussive. So when I met with the dancers for the ceremony, I was sort of talking around the elephant in the room which was, “You guys willing to sacrifice a chicken?” It’s a strange thing to ask someone. They laughed and were like, “Of course!” They didn’t really kill a chicken naturally, but they were perfectly willing to do what was needed.
Was it tough to keep from revealing too much about the story before the movie’s conclusion?
Kevin Greutert: Yeah. Like any mystery you need to, as a storyteller, have options when you shoot the film. The first cut of the movie was quite a bit longer, maybe 25 minutes longer, and I knew that would never come out in theaters that way but I still needed to make that version, show it to test audiences and get a sense of what gave away too much, what version didn’t give the audience enough to understand and gradually craft it towards what it needed to be.
I can say that, in terms of what I would’ve liked to have been any different about it in the end, there were more scenes with Jessie alone at night in bed and in the house hearing and seeing strange things. There was one shot that I did where she looks into the oval mirror in her bedroom and sees the ghost in the mirror, and the ghost turns and looks at her and it’s such a terrifying image that everybody who saw it jumped. But the only place they really fit was at the beginning of the movie and it gave away too much too soon, so it’s not in the final film.
That’s kind of heartbreaking to me and to a lot of the people that were involved in the movie because when we shot it we were like, that’s the image, that’s the poster, that’s how you sell the movie, but it had to go. It’s personally very sad for me, but I’m trying not to think about it.
That concludes our interview, but we’d like to thank Kevin very much for his time. Be sure to check out Jessabelle as it’s now playing in theatres!