'The Endless' Directors Justin Benson And Aaron Moorhead Talk DIY Filmmaking, Shared Universes, And Their Love Of 'Almost Famous'

The Endless,” directed by innovative, DIY directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, prides itself in breaking from the uniformity pack, defining itself by its black comedy wit. The film’s eerie, practical effect visuals, and a finely crafted tone, that is less scary than it is unsettling. Along with their two prior films, “Resolution” and “Spring,” Benson and Moorhead have carved out a niche corner of the independent horror genre by refusing to play by genre rules.  Their latest film sees two brothers (played by Benson and Moorhead) return to the cult that they grew up in once they realized the members are still alive, only to find much more nefarious happenings taking place.

Eerie and discomforting but also demonstrating keen eyes for substantial style, “The Endless” is one of the years most interesting and confident films so far. We spoke with the directors about how the project came to be and the shared universe between their films, along with the troubles of casting, the perfection of “Almost Famous” and more.

When did you first start thinking about this project and how did the concept come together?

Justin Benson: Well we made this really tiny movie that was able to luckily get a really tiny release and while it isn’t a prerequisite to see before “The Endless” but both exist in the same universe. But we made this movie, “Resolution,”seven years ago and a lot of the science fiction and fantasy elements of “The Endless” grew out of just talking about what happens to these characters from “Resolution.” We kept talking about it for seven years and didn’t realize we were developing another, do-it-yourself, micro-indie.

A lot of the ideas are things that were left inconspicuous in this other movie we’d made and we continue to be fascinated by some of the things we didn’t say in that film and we just kept talking about how we’d dramatize these things that didn’t come through in “Resolution.”

After our second movie “Spring,” we had some opportunities to do some bigger movies and shows, we’d had about three different films in development, and obviously everything takes a lot longer when you’re not just doing it yourself and finally we got the point where we knew we needed to go and just make a movie and not just take meetings. We’re filmmakers and we wanted to just go and be filmmakers again. We realized that all of these movies that we’d been working on that hadn’t come to fruition yet had similar themes of rebellions and conformity and that if we were to revisit any of our characters it would have to be the cult hunters.

Beyond the idea of conformity is there something about setting the film in a cult/commune that appealed to you and what research went into it ?

Aaron Moorhead: We didn’t have to do much research because we had the same amount of interest in cults as the general public does which is pretty interested. We’d watched all of the documentaries on Netflix. With cults in particular what we needed to, and what we wanted to, do with “The Endless” – since it isn’t truly a film about cults but instead more broadly about conformity and it stops being about cults about halfway through. So what we had to do was build a prototypical cult in our mind that people would recognize and then just find little way to subvert those hallmarks so that there was a reason for anyone to join a cult and so there was a reason Aaron and Justin might return to one. If we could create something that was sinister but at the same time warm and welcoming, then we’d succeed. The way that we did was we gave the cult a secret but that secret wasn’t malevolent, they weren’t trying to hurt anyone.

You feel malevolence because you see and hear the word cult and everyone’s smiling and they definitely have a secret. But beyond that, it’s kind of what people might say about a commune and communes aren’t sinister.

Did you always know you were going to include characters from “Resolution” in the film as well?

AM: We assumed we would but it didn’t really happen until the outlining process. We knew that we always wanted to have the brothers returning to the cult and finding out what’s been happening there. We didn’t know how much crossover would happen, if it would be insular and no one what was going on so we made sure that anyone who had read the script, who’d never heard of us or our films, and make sure that the script made sense to them.

That being said the characters from “Resolution” inserted themselves really quickly and we realized we just couldn’t stay away.