INTERVIEW: ‘The Boy’ creators head to Colombia to film new horror movie

The Boy, starring David Morse, Rainn Wilson and newcomer Jared Breeze, is a horror film from co-writers Craig William Macneill and Clay McLeod Chapman. Charting the mysterious events surrounding a father-son proprietor of a remote hotel in the American West, the film is an atmospheric character study in how subtle influences can change a child’s life drastically.

Morse is the father, John Henley, who is running the hotel straight into the ground. There are few guests at this roadside haunt, and the prospects of the place are grim. His son is Ted (Breeze), a child who spends his days in near solitude. He passes the time by cleaning the motel rooms, drawing animals to the nearby highway with the hope of some fresh roadkill and exploring the grounds of this tucked-away area. Wilson is William Colby, a man who arrives on the Henleys’ doorstep, and his strange story perks an interest in the young boy.

The movie, which opens in New York City Aug. 21 and is available on VOD Aug. 18, is based on a section of Chapman’s novel, Miss Corpus.

“I wrote a novel back in 2003 called Miss Corpus, and it’s kind of a novel almost from William Colby’s perspective,” Chapman said recently in a phone interview. “If there was a movie adaptation, it would be from his POV, and he crashes into the Henley Road Motel where he meets Ted Henley. But the book itself, it kind of hopped on the shelf and then disappeared. And luckily Craig read it before it vanished.”

The two resurrected one chapter of the book for a short film, which screened at the Sundance Film Festival. The team at Spectrevision were excited and wanted to make the short into a feature-length movie, and that’s how The Boy was born. This won’t be the only project exploring this central character.

“The trilogy is aimed at tracking the childhood of a future serial killer, depicting the character at the ages of 9, 14 and 18, ending with his transformation into a mass murderer,” Macneill said. “So The Boy is the first in that planned trilogy.”

Chapman said the film allows the team to tell a story that’s often a small part of a typical horror film. “Usually when you see a horror film, like a slasher film or something, you get that kind of five-minute coda at the beginning of the film, and this is how he became what he becomes,” Chapman said. “So we wanted to take that five-minute coda and kind of stretch it out into a trilogy and kind of watch … do a really kind of microcosm exploration of someone who kind of develops into something bigger and horrifying later on his life.”

The motel in the film is dilapidated and forgotten, a great find for the filmmakers. What’s most impressive is that this motel is not a real motel at all. They actually built it … in Colombia.

Macneill said: “We shot the short in this very lush Virginia landscape, but I always envisioned the feature taking place in a dry, desolate, western setting. So we looked into the possibility of filming in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, but … we couldn’t afford to build a motel first of all. We couldn’t find one that was in the right setting, that was in the middle of nowhere with this highway in front, so this is where the idea of filming in South America came up. There’s some great tax incentives. We discovered that we could afford to build a motel from scratch there, which was exciting to have the opportunity to build something.”

The central character is played Breeze, who turns in a scarily effective performance, especially for a newcomer to acting.

“Yeah, that was my biggest concern was finding the right 8-year-old lead,” Macneill said. “I knew I needed somebody with a very magnetic screen presence, someone who was engaging without even speaking a word. And I also wanted to find a kid with little to no narrative film acting experience because my hope was to try to capture that sort of real essence of childhood. We saw a lot of kids, but Jared, he really stood out. He was full of energy and sort of embodied that sense of childhood wonder. I knew it was going to be a challenge, but if we could get it right, I had the feeling that it would be like catching lightning in a bottle. I was really impressed with his performance.”

Morse, who recently starred in HBO’s True Detective, was a major find for the filmmakers as well. The father figure role is a tough, complicated one in The Boy.

“I always saw him as kind of the Atlas with the world on his shoulders,” Chapman said. “He had this hotel, this kind of massive property that’s kind of sinking into the ground, and you get the feeling that under any other circumstance he would just cut ties and run himself. He probably wants to leave, too, but it’s for the fact of the matter that he’s anchored to this hotel, this business, this property and his son that he kind of persevered. When we find him he’s almost given up or let go. The only thing that’s kind of keeping him alive and going I believe is Ted. … I actually think he’s as as good of a dad as the circumstances allow. The thing that Ted becomes by the end of the movie is kind of a perfect storm of events, one of which is his father. … I believe you have this tension throughout the film of like if only there was just a little bit of a nudge in this direction or maybe if that one thing didn’t happen, this would be a completely different story. But it’s through that domino effect of all these events that you see Ted becoming what he is by the end of the film.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

• The Boy opens this month and is soon available on VOD. Click here for more information