Having the last laugh

>> Christopher Smith and Danny Dyer on
comedy, horror, the war on terror and the twists and turns of their hilarious new thriller Severance

by MARK SLUTSKY

Lots of scary movies go like this: a heedless group of people, looking for some R&R, head into a dark woods to an isolated cabin. Weird things start happening. They start getting picked off one by one, in increasingly gruesome ways, until the last couple of survivors figure out how to fight back.

That’s how Severance, a new horror-thriller-comedy from U.K. director Christopher Smith, lays it out. But a couple of things set it apart from the horror pack. For one, its protagonists are, let’s say, somewhat morally ambiguous: they’re a group of employees of the Palisades Defence corporation, the name of which might suggest the company’s business, arms manufacturing, and they’re on a corporate retreat in Hungary. What’s more, the baddies hunting them down might just have a legitimate grievance against the group’s employer.

But besides that, there are plenty of little things that make Severance different, and a crowd-pleaser to boot: it’s a weird but successful fusion of corporate parody, the slasher thriller genre, political satire and straight-up slapstick.

Severance takes unexpected turns for a horror movie (like a silent movie interlude) and above all—without blowing any punchlines—it’s obvious that Smith is uniquely interested in confounding genre fans’ expectations, taking pains to set up predictable thriller situations and putting his own, usually hilarious, spin on them.

FLIPPING THE SCRIPT
“I tried to find a way of doing kind of the opposite of what you’d expect at every beat,” Smith told the Mirror at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, the morning after a packed, uproarious screening at the fest’s Midnight Madness program. “We really sat down and said, ‘Well, okay, we’ve seen that before, so how do we do it differently?’ It’s not like we had to go with a complete blank canvas and think up a whole genre again. No, we’ll just use the genre, use all the conventions of the genre, and do it slightly differently.”

“What Chris wanted to do, which has not really been done before, or rather, hasn’t been done well, is fuse comedy and horror,” says Danny Dyer, who plays Steve, the film’s dissolute, magic-mushroom-popping anti-hero. “They’re two powerful genres, d’you know what I mean? To put them together in a movie is a very tricky thing to do. What we wanted to do is get the audience to laugh, and think, ‘Should we be laughing here? Is this meant to be funny, or is it just me?’ That was the vibe, and I think we pulled it off.”

Smith puts the distinction this way: “It’s very weird, the notion of what is a horror comedy. A lot of people, when they think of what a horror comedy is, they’re going to think Scary Movie, they’re going to think Shaun of the Dead, they’re going to think of these spoofs. And this is not a spoof. And so, what I think is strange about the film is that the characters are funny but they’re also real. So you enjoy hanging out with them because of how funny they are. And what that does is, when it becomes really scary and really violent, it’s partly because you’ve shared a good time with these people and you don’t want them to die.”

GENRE JUMPING
There’s the matter of the movie’s surprising genre-shifting interludes, in which the characters tell their versions of the movie’s backstory. In quick succession Smith introduces a Nosferatu/Caligari-esque silent movie, a faux-documentary with footage reminiscent of scenes from Kosovo and a ridiculous two-minute carnal romp with dozens of sexy nurses.

“I get really bored in horror movies when you find out what the backstory is,” he explains. “I always give the example of Jeepers Creepers, where a clairvoyant just turns up and tells you what it’s about! I didn’t want there to be too much of a backstory, but that does frustrate people. They wanna know! So I say, I’m going to give you three versions of the story, you can choose which bits you want to keep, but that’s how much I think backstories are pointless.

“It plays like Rashomon in a way, the three versions of the same story. And it also looks at what horror is. I think we live in a world where you can turn on your cable TV and flick from a horror movie to war crimes to sex, and then go get yourself a bacon sandwich and eat it up. We’re so desensitized that we can watch these three things together and they don’t feel totally weird. The second story is fucking hardcore, isn’t it? It goes from this black and white thing, to this war crimes shit, and it’s like fucking hell! And then it’s like... a sex clip! It shakes you, the three stories, and that’s the tone. It’s kind of odd. That’s how my brain works, anyway, but that’s where I think we’re at in the world.”

TARGETTING TERROR
Severance has something in common with the recent Korean monster movie hit The Host, in framing a pointed satire of the U.S. and the war on terror in a less-than-serious, genre-heavy romp. There’s more than a little irony in the film’s heroes being hunted down by war criminals they might have helped arm.

“The way the script was originally written, you only found out they were arms manufacturers when one of the characters stands on a land mine and he says, ‘It’s one of ours,’” Smith says. “But I bought into the office thing when I read it, I bought into them being geeks from some paper office or something, like the TV show The Office. We decided to really go for it, and to set up this idea that they really deserve it, that they’re getting a taste of their own medicine.

“If we can buy into this notion that they sell the weapons and the weapons come back and haunt them—that they deserve it—and then make you like the characters, make them fun characters that you don’t want to die. To try and tie into this idea of what is a legitimate target. How a terrorist can view you, if you’re from a certain country, as a legitimate target, if that country’s done something to you. It ties into all that. So that was part of the idea behind opening it up to make it a bit about the war on terror, make it a bit relevant.”

It certainly felt relevant when they were making it. “While we were shooting, it was the time of the London bombings,” Dyer says. “Which was pretty fucking heavy—I mean, I live in London, I’ve always lived in London, all my family live in London. We filmed it in Hungary, and when the news came through that there had been fucking bombs on trains, it really fucking upset me! I wanted to just go home, you know? I lost all hope for doing the film. But obviously I calmed down after a few hours. So that was pretty heavy.”

Smith: “I think we’re all seeing so much chaos in the world, and so much obscene shit going on, that shooting a plane out of the sky,”—as happens in Severance—“now seems funny in a movie. Somebody said to me ‘This is never going to work in a movie because of 9/11.’ And I asked why? And he said because it’s not been long enough. And I showed it in America and they loved it. Why? Because it shouldn’t have worked, it shouldn’t, but the way the world is being handled at the moment by our crazy leaders, six years is enough time now, because we’re so sick we can laugh at it. The fact that people laugh at it proves it works. You have to laugh because it’s so depressing!”

SEVERANCE OPENS FRIDAY, JUNE 1

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