A DIFFERENT KIND OF WOMEN’S REVENGE PICTURE
Spectacular Optical interviews Nicholas McCarthy, director of Sundance hit THE PACT

Kier-La Janisse

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It’s not often we see a film’s traversal from short to feature within a year’s time, especially with both versions making their respective premieres at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival. But Nicholas McCarthy’s film The Pact did just that. Canadian genre fans first got to experience the short film preceding Filip Tegstedt’s ghostly feature Marianne at Fantasia 2011, where its understated canada cialis no prescription but effective approach to haunting took the audience by surprise. A moody piece starring Firefly’s Jewel Staite as a single mom summoned back to her family home as executor to her recently departed mother’s estate, the short film of The Pact made its mark with McCarthy’s confident stripping-away of everything except the sheer dread of a woman left alone in a house where unspeakable things happened to her in childhood. In both the short and the feature we are never privy to what viagra samples these things are, only that they happened behind a door leading to what we presume is a dark and cavernous basement. Both versions hook the audience with the great setpiece of a woman going from room to room in a dark house, trying to communicate via Skype with her young child on the other end as onscreen static coincides with the flickering of overhead lights. As an experienced horror audience we can see her walking into a price of propecia from canada trap, but the tension is no less palpable.

The feature takes the entirety of the short as its setup, which then launches into a more convoluted and grisly mystery with the trauma of several scarred women at its core. There are two sisters – the estranged daughters of the departed matriarch (each a hardened version of her counterpart in the short); a motherless child who stands as a reminder of their own abandonment; and a pallid seer who takes solace in company loud enough to obscure the supernatural sights and sounds that plague her. But all of them will be brought together by the horror in this one house, a horror that has outreach beyond its borders with a very real bodycount. But discount cialis without prescription while the feature necessarily has more intricate plotting than its shorter predecessor, the subtle pleasures of the short are preserved. McCarthy holds enough back to whet the morbid imagination. As with the short, it’s even ambiguous what The Pact of the title refers to. There are a lot of unspoken bonds happening throughout the film, all of them reluctant. The people in this film don’t want to bond. But trauma is a steadfast glue, and it holds these broken women together whether they like it or not.

Spectacular Optical spoke to Nicholas McCarthy about the transition from short to feature, the challenges and transformative characterizations of the longer running time, and the plausability of ghost photography.

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I heard that you hadn’t planned to make it into a feature until Content Media pitched the idea to you, and then, the transition from short to feature happened pretty quickly. So what was the process of scripting the feature? What were the key points you focused on in the short that gave you direction?

The short film had been modeled after the way a lot of short fiction I like is written – a sort of clipped style where the questions aren’t all answered.  After a feature was proposed, I beat my head against the wall for a couple of weeks, trying to imagine how there could be “more” of this story that was specifically designed to not have any more told.

The revelation I had was that since I had used this model of the short story for the first film, maybe I could use the model of a novel for a feature.  Most ghost stories are detective stories, and I like a lot of detective novels.  So I decided that the movie would be unfold as a mystery.

Ironically, what I decided on for The Pact feature was it be all about uncovering things, about revelations, about seeing — whereas the short was all about not seeing.  In the end I had two completely different movies, trying to achieve different things, with the same core material.

And you wrote the script in a public location, like a cafe or something? I personally can’t write with any distractions, I can’t even listen to music, so I don’t know how people do that. How does being in a space like that help you write?

I like to write in cafes because if I can buy myself treats.  And, I find there’s something about being alone in a crowd that is comforting.

Jewel Staite dans THE PACT (2011)

The brother in the short is replaced with a sister in the feature, and even the male protagonist, the Casper Van Dien character, is very worn-out and ineffectual. The women also seem very different types than Jewel Staite in the short. They’re harder and seem to have dealt with the problem of their mother differently. Even Stevie, who goes through these terrifying supernatural scenarios through her gift, is able to handle them much better than her boyfriend can. Why the switch to all women? Why was this important to the story you wanted to tell?

The short film is ultimately about Jewel’s character, so The Pact always felt like a woman’s story.  And, almost all of the great horror movies are about women. I suppose both the short and the feature are different takes on characters dealing with suppressed issues.  I think maybe there was just something more appropriate in the short film milieu to follow a character like Jewel, who has a confusion that’s more particular to someone who is a bit older, has had a child, etc.  In the next film I hope to make, the concentration will be more on a character like that, versus that kind of youthful rage that Annie in the feature of The Pact has.

Caity Lotz dans THE PACT (2012)

The skype setpiece in both films is so creepy – walking all over the house trying to get a signal – it’s such an interesting irony that she’s trying to communicate to her kid through the computer, while the entity is trying to communicate with her through the lights. So much of our experience now is filtered through technological mediums (and in this case even a physical medium, in the character Stevie). Direct communication is increasingly minimalized in our lives.  Am I reading too much into this??

You’re not reading too much into it, that’s precisely what I hoped to get at.

Actually come to think of it even ghost photography is a form of communicating through technology, that has been around since way before even the telephone, and there are elements of ghost photography in your film, often in the form of hands pointing at clues. What’s your take on the possibility of technology being able to capture spirits, or to be a conduit for them?

Everyone I know uses technology constantly to communicate and it would seem untrue to not portray that in a movie.  And I liked the idea, in both the short and feature, of having a character who uses skype, or a smartphone etc. in their everyday life, and juxtapose them in their mother’s house, a house that’s kind of stuck in a different time.  It’s an image of isolation of a child from their parent.  And it tied well into the phenomenon of ghost photography.  Ever since the invention of the camera, people have believed it was a tool that could capture spirits, or capture the attention of spirits.  These are all images of disconnection for me, and it fit the PACT movies since they were about these confused characters seeking the truth.

As far as the ability of technology to capture images of ghosts etc., I’ve always been a skeptic.  But when we made the short, there was a particular shot we were filming involving a light flickering, an effect portraying the story’s ghostly spirit invading an electrical socket.  We set up the shot and Jewel Staite was poised to begin her work.  A moment before I called action, the strangest thing happened: another light in the shot, one that we didn’t control, began to flicker on its own.

We were shooting in the house of a woman who had recently passed away.  Months later, after the film was done, I showed the movie to her son.  He pointed out that the very shot where the flickering light had occurred was compositionally a match for the very first digital photograph he had taken of his late mother, in that very spot, shortly before she died. When we did the feature, me and my production designer Walter Barnett wanted to pay tribute to this ghost.  So Walter’s crew got permission to borrow a bunch of key things from the late woman’s house and we carefully placed them in many shots in our movie.

Was it always planned to not show what happened to the two sisters as kids?

I never wanted to show or talk about what happened to them.  I spoke to each of the actresses about it – they had to know – but it wasn’t to be shown.  I imagine it is frustrating for some people, but it felt true to the world of these movies that people have these parts of their pasts they are keeping a secret.

Now that you’ve had a critically successful horror film, are you getting offers to do other genre projects?

Yes, I’ve been getting some offers.  What I really would like to do is to make another movie that’s my own.  I always think about Cronenberg, how true to himself he’s been, from those early films and even into his studio films.  I don’t want to have a fancy car, I just want to die knowing I made a movie that was special to someone.

Last question: Are you a fan of Bad Ronald?

I love Bad Ronald and there’s a shot that’s a direct reference to it in The Pact feature, where Caity Lotz first has the light from the peephole shine on her face.  I took that image from the climax of Bad Ronald.

The shot that directly follows it, when she looks through the peephole, is also a visual reference, to the famous eye close up from Psycho.  My movie doesn’t have a great deal of homages or shots that I stole, but those two shots together I’m proud of — that’s my taste right there, Bad Ronald and Psycho!

About the author:

Kier-La Janisse

Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, publisher, producer, acquisitions executive for Severin Films and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She is the author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024), House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022) and A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and has been an editor on numerous books including Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015). She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), and produced the acclaimed blu-ray box sets All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror (2021) and The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle (2023).