Spooky Sets and Roald Dahl’s Influence on ‘The Cellar’ [Interview]

Hitting theaters and Shudder this Friday is Brendan Muldowney‘s The Cellar (review), an adaptation of his 2004 short film “The Ten Steps” (watch here).

We were able to speak to Muldowney and actor Eoin Macken, who plays Elisha Cuthbert’s husband in the film, about the film’s development and production.

After releasing “The Ten Steps”, Muldowney stepped away from the project to focus on other feature-length films like 2009’s crime drama Savage and 2017’s Tom Holland-starring Pilgrimage, but The Cellar brings him back to not only his short film, but the horror genre as well.

A common critique that accompanies feature films that have been adapted from short films is that they often, well, feel like a short film stretched to feature length. When asked if he kept that in mind when writing The Cellar, Muldowney replied that “there’s not enough substance to the characters or the plot [in “The Ten Steps”], so what I did was use the short as a prologue and set up the world. You have to make sure that there is enough character development and think about everything that would be potential flaws when extending a short film. You get to a point as a writer where you have to ask what the best hook is and with “The Ten Steps” it was simply that a child goes missing. The Cellar continues from there.“

As I noted in my review for the film, The Cellar operates as a sort of family-friendly horror that refuses to talk down its younger viewers. Muldowney noted that this was important to him when developing the film. In a frank response, Muldowney said “look, I’ll tell you what it is: Roald Dahl does not talk down to children. Terrible things happen to the parents of his child characters. He doesn’t talk down to them and he will make them dark and scary and I think that’s where I was coming from. Even knowing my own daughter: there’s no need to talk down to them or patronize them. If you’re going to make a horror film for kids, it can still be scary for them.“

Of course, it wouldn’t be a horror movie set if there weren’t spooky occurrences happening during filming. According to Macken, who does believe in ghosts and thus “hated being there,” there was a bit of a fly infestation on set. “We moved into these holiday cottages outside the house,” he said, “and they put the heat on for us, which caused all these flies to start hatching. They’d just be in your bedroom despite all the windows being closed. No maggots, though, thankfully.”

In the film, Cuthbert plays a mother whose daughter mysteriously vanishes in the cellar of their new house. She soon discovers there is an ancient and powerful entity controlling their home that she will have to face or risk losing her family’s souls forever.

Eoin Macken, Abby Fitz and Dylan Fitzmaurice-Brady also star.

The Cellar will be in theaters and will stream on Shudder April 15.

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