Stewart Thorndike made a strong debut with her first, feature-length film, “Lyle,” starring Gaby Hoffman. In her follow-up, released nearly a decade later, “Bad Things” continues on with the themes of motherhood and trauma, in a film being described as a queer retelling of “The Shining,” a comparison Thorndike owns, though calls it more of a “repurposing.”
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Drawing on inspiration from films such as “Alien” to “On the Waterfront,” “Bad Things” follows a group of friends as they go to a hotel for a weekend. As is to be expected, things begin to fall apart due to unexpected visitors, from a tagalong friend who adds tension to the dynamic to otherworldly visages that hints at the horror residing in this place. Gayle Rankin, Annabelle Dexter-Jones, Hari Neff, Rad Pereira, and Molly Ringwald star in the horror-thriller.
We spoke to Thorndike about her direction process, the ideas and images that inspired the film, and the differences — if any — in getting the film green-lit compared to her experience with “Lyle.”
Can you talk about the inspiration for the film? Was there an image that first struck you while envisioning it?
That’s so interesting. The film is a part of a trilogy about motherhood and this is something that I am compelled to make. It always starts from someplace personal and then you look at it and go “Oh, this is really about motherhood,” and then you hone it and the politics and art come after. But the image that I think I always thought of with “Bad Things” is of Fran walking strangely in and kind of being this interloper with the group. And how that little shift makes all the suspicions and mysteries and intoxications and spells percolate.
Fran also has a very distinctive look — always decked out in white while being the temptress character while Molly Ringwald comes in dressed in all red, more the stereotypical color for temptation — was that deliberate?
Every part of the film is a story, so costumes are stories and biographies. I think just as hard about them as directing and casting. And the cast really informed the costume design and worked with Nell Simon too, our casting director really telling and finding the story and the characters’ clothes. Fran is a femme fatale, a seductress, but she’s also the angel of the story, the person with answers even if she seems not to be trusted or has an inappropriate way about her. She slinks around with a lot of mystery.
She’s also the one who is most in touch with herself and not hiding. She’s the one who would be able to save them so she’s the opposite force of the mother figure who is this powerful, dark, presence who is ultimately going to infest Ruthie and not let her move into healthier relationships.
It’s interesting because, in another version of this film, I feel like Fran could’ve been the protagonist with Ruthie being the main antagonist — as the unreliable narrator. You start to get those perspective changes of understanding that not all is as it seems through Ruthie’s POV. Can you talk about how you visualize that?
It’s very visual the way that we constructed the film and directed this as we were all in pre-productions working together. We had to work out when what we were seeing was real and when it was supernatural. When is her psychology bending towards those things? So little things happen in the film like the color of the chairs changing and the lighting becomes almost the opposite of what you would do when it’s lit more like a Getty image, stock photo. Then we let the realism, more natural world kind of have more flamboyant camera work and more of a haze to it. The hallways and the bedrooms seem more stylized than the ghost world when she is tipping towards the supernatural.
Location is obviously important for most films but seems decidedly important for “Bad Things.” Was it always going to be set in a hotel?
Finding the location was key to this movie. For years I was going around knocking on hotel doors and checking them out, driving people crazy because I’d always want to be like “Pull over, there’s a hotel over there.” I was either finding these grand, decrepit, and cobwebby places that just weren’t the style I wanted — though they looked more like a gothic, horror film that people would’ve been drooling over. Or they were these beige, franchised, family-friendly spots. It was very hard to find something in the middle. Something that would allow a horror film to shoot there, something that was off-season or just willing but then COVID happened and shut everything down for a couple of years.
I was still looking at hotels and I was in Ithaca and I saw one and it didn’t look like much from the outside. I left a note on the door and about a month later I got a call and the moment I stepped in it was like this jewel box and I was like, “Oh this is what I’ve been looking for, hello Mother.” It just had to be there. It was very unusual but still modern. It felt like somebody had left it in the ’90s during a prom or something
Can you talk about deciding to shoot so much in the daytime and how it allows viewers to see everything, rather than hiding in darkness?
I think for me there’s this relationship between beauty and dread that I’ve always been interested in like the dark side of nostalgia. Daylight was scary to me because it feels like you shouldn’t have fear there so if you have fear there that’s not very good. But also I think as a kid I had this period I called my “bad thoughts” and got freaked out and it would just hit me and overcome me and it would always be during the day. It would always just be during a normal circumstance like I’d see sunlight on cement at two in the afternoon. There’s something very dreadful about the exposure to the sun and just also real, I think. A lot of terrible things happen right under our nose and I think it can be cheap to just hide a scare. When things are psychological there is no place to hide and I like seeing that turmoil happening in your most everyday moments when you should be comfortable and safe. What’s it like when you’re scared then, when you’re scared in your hotel room when you’re supposed to be cheery and with your family and everyone is getting along?
You asked about images earlier and another image that came to my mind clearly when I was making this movie was these portraits that you sometimes see in hotels where they’re generic families in stock photos, in all white, eating their Cheerios together and that would be terrifying, alien and foreign to me. Or like a Gap ad or something. Those kinds of things can be scary because they’re telling you what to be like and when you’re not like that and don’t want to be like that they’re alienating and when you then look at those pictures they take on a kind of a demonic, terrifying feeling. So that’s also why I like the daylight. It taps into the commercialized, indoctrination of happy family imagery that we are forced to see all the time and how phony it feels.
It’s been almost ten years since your first, feature film “Lyle.” I read that it took longer than you’d hoped due to the pushback of green-lighting films led by queer women, made by women, etc. Have you noticed any kind of shift since making your first film?
There’s a change. I feel like there are a lot more women and non-white, straight men making horror and embracing all the different things that horror can do and the important stories it can look at. All the voices you can bring to horror. Horror was always this voice of the marginalized, historically, and then they had this bump where slashers took over it and it got a bad name. But you can really see social justice messaging and different voices and perspectives in horror now.
I think that the problem is that the people who are in charge of making the decisions about what films get made are not that diverse. Maybe they’re listening to their gut and not relating to the stories and we need everybody’s stories. I feel like the shift is that people recognize there’s a problem and that we’re not getting stories from certain groups of people but it’s very hard to get the people in charge to stop listening to their own gut and until that becomes diversified too I don’t think there will be easy paths moving forward. Even though people have made gestures towards allowing for more voices, sometimes it feels like those gestures are just a percentage they want to meet to look good politically instead of coming from a shift in who is allowed to green-light a project or open doors for projects. This is what is so exciting about the strikes and labor movements and people coming together. Hopefully, we can dust things off, and once things settle and people feel their power that there’s a distribution of people from top to bottom who are allowed to make choices on what movies get made.
It’s not that there’s a lack of storytellers, obviously. It’s just how do you get through these impenetrable gates and speak to their gut if they’re not the same as you on some level.
“Bad Things” is available now on Shudder and AMC+.