In an anonymous suburban town, Sam experiences a pivotal moment in his young life. Eager to be like the majority of the other students at her school, the teenager now turns her back on the Indian culture in which she grew up, as well as on the Hindu religion, which her mother practices with fervor. For this same reason, she abandoned her best friend, Tamira. Although the latter displays behavior that is bizarre to say the least. Sam doesn’t know it yet, but the demon that torments Tamira is preparing to set his sights on her. In It Lives InsideBishal Dutta makes Indian culture an intrinsic component of horror.
“I always wanted my first film to be a horror film with teenagers, the kind that I gorged myself on as a teenager,” explains the young director we met this summer at Fantasia.
“But I also wanted to draw on Indian traditions, legends and ghost stories from my own past. »
When Bishal Dutta refers to the “ghosts of his past”, he is in this case almost literal.
“When I was little, my grandfather told me how, one day, when he was a very young man in India, he met a young girl who was talking to an empty glass jar that she was holding tightly against her. When he pointed out that the jar was empty, she removed the lid and threw the imaginary contents in my grandfather’s face. He ignored it and returned, but shortly after, he began to hear strange noises at night. His food started disappearing. It became so worrying that he left his house. »
Fascinated by this story, Bishal Dutta wondered for a long time what was at the origin of these phenomena. From research at the end of the scenario, he learned of the existence in the Hindu (and Buddhist) religion of a malevolent entity: Pishach. The filmmaker found that Pishach’s protests and misdeeds had a lot of cinematic and horrific potential.
“As for the creature, I always liked the method Jaws [Les dents de la mer] And Alien, where the monster is confined to darkness or off-camera for the majority of the film, and is only revealed in full towards the end. »
The look of the others
In this regard, Bishal Dutta established his approach to inducing shivers and startles early on.
“I am of the opinion that a good horror film must vary the pleasures. By that I mean that you have to alternate moments where the tension builds slowly with others where the pace is more lively and where the jolts are more numerous. There must be a balance. As a director, I try to put myself in the spectators’ place; I try to anticipate their reactions. I wonder where they will expect to be frightened, and I try to outsmart them, for example by pushing back and pushing back again, so that they eventually relax to — bam! — surprise them and make them get up from their seats. »
Bishal Dutta also wondered at length what type of horror film he wanted to make in order to generate more fear.
“I asked myself, ‘What’s the scariest thing about being a teenager?’ For my part, I believe that what terrifies us the most during this period is the gaze of others. We want to be accepted by others, so we become super-conscious of ourselves. The creature feeds on this insecurity, this anxiety and this loneliness. If I decided to base the story on a heroine and a majority of female characters, it is because I think that young women face these ordeals to a much more acute degree than young men. Or at the very least, in a really different way. »
In the film, Sam rejects his cultural heritage for all of these reasons. At the same time, she disapproves of her mother’s traditional behavior, which she considers clinging to the past.
“I wanted the characters of the daughter and the mother to be the antithesis of each other. Beyond the conflicting dynamic, it allowed me to bring them together in the middle, at the end, in a kind of alliance of their respective attitudes, an alliance in which they find strength. Neither is entirely right or entirely wrong. »
To clarify Bishal Dutta: “Even if I use these characters to express cultural points of view, I have not made an intellectual film. On the contrary, he is very emotional. »
Every story needs to be tied to something concrete, recognizable: something that everyone can relate to. This need to belong that grips us during adolescence, the generational conflict with a parent… It’s universal.
It is through its emotional component that the film, as anchored in Indian culture as it is, achieves a universal reach.
“Each story needs to be tied to something concrete, recognizable: something that everyone can identify with,” emphasizes the filmmaker. This need to belong that grips us during adolescence, the generational conflict with a parent… It’s universal. »
Draw within yourself
At this late stage of the interview, Bishal Dutta falls silent for a moment. After a hesitation, he continues: “In reality, I drew heavily on my own experiences to write the screenplay. Not for the story as such, but for a whole bunch of details. For example, Sam’s fear of smelling Indian food haunted me throughout high school. Now, I love the smell of Indian cuisine, especially my mother’s, but at the time, I saw it as an obstacle to my integration. Fortunately, from middle school onwards, the difference becomes somewhat the norm. In primary and secondary school, there is also enormous pressure placed on immigrants pushing them to tend towards an exacerbated “Americanness”. The temptation to renounce our culture stems in particular from this. It’s also for these reasons that I knew that my first film would have teenagers as the main characters. »
On a lighter note, another certainty that Bishal Dutta had about the film he wanted to make concerned Indian cuisine. Having treated her so cavalierly in the past, the director wanted to pay tribute to her. Hence this abundance of scenes that whet the appetite… between two sequences likely to cut this one off.
The film It Lives Inside will be released on September 22.