Director Alexandre Aja has certainly made his mark on the horror genre over the past 20 years. After bursting onto the scene in 2003 with the controversial High Tension, he weaved his way through American genre films with the remake of Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, the remake of Into the Mirror, the remake of Joe Dante’s Piranha, the adaptation of Joe Hill’s Horns, and the creature feature Crawl. Now, he’s unleashing his latest film Never Let Go, a mature fairy tale that sends him back into a world similar to the one he built in Horns eleven years ago.
Never Let Go, in theaters on Friday, stars Halle Berry, Percy Daggs IV and Anthony B. Jenkins.
Berry plays June, “known simply as Momma to her fraternal twin sons, Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV). After an entity she calls ‘the Evil’ took over the world, Momma has kept her family safe for the past ten years by confining them to the cabin where she herself grew up. They forage and hunt in the surrounding woods, making sure to ‘never let go’ of the ropes tied to the foundation of their increasingly-dilapidated home, which they believe is the only place in the world safe from ‘the Evil.’ But as food runs low, the boys begin to wonder whether ‘the Evil’ is even real — or if Momma’s just really, really sick. With the ties that bind them severed, a terrifying fight for survival ensues.”
Having already tackled piranha and alligators in his previous films, it should come as no surprise that Aja was attracted to a story that featured snakes, though it wasn’t the serpentine figures that drew Aja to the project. It was the script, written by screenwriters KC Coughlin and Ryan Grassby (The King Tide).
“I’m always trying to find a new way of creating fear,” Aja tells Bloody Disgusting. “I want to create an immersive experience for the audience. Something that doesn’t feel like it’s a repetition, but instead feels new. [Never Let Go] was quite unique because the voice of the writers was so specific. There was some kind of really interesting fairy tale quality to what they developed.”
It is that fairy tale quality that’s most captivating in Never Let Go, and seeing as how many of them have their roots planted firmly in the horror genre, Aja found that they blended together perfectly.
“I feel that more and more genre movies are stepping beyond simple entertainment,” Aja explains. “They are operating similar to the way fairy tales used to in that they are becoming a psychological tool to confront our own darkness. That’s something that I think is very interesting, and the sci-fi genre did that for a long time as well, you know? It reflected society. But fear, the horror genre, is dipping more and more into that world as well.”
Halle Berry as Momma in Never Let Go. Photo Credit: Liane Hentscher
In the film, the cabin that the characters live in is surrounded by a vast forest, a setting that feels quite at home when looked at through a fairy tale lens. Yet rather than pull visual inspiration from existing stories, Aja set out to create his own.
“There was not a specific fairy tale that was in my mind,” Aja says, “but [the script] was definitely, on its own, a fairy tale. And that was something that I kind of touched on without really realizing it when I worked on Horns. With Never Let Go, the idea of the world that’s ended, the idea that there is no electricity threw me back into classical paintings and chiaroscuro where you have all the light coming from within.”
To give the film a larger visual scope that would be juxtaposed with the narrative’s smaller scope, Aja turned to Maxime Alexandre, his frequent director of photography, to capture the emptiness of the characters’ surroundings.
“For Maxime,” Aja tells us, “it was the opportunity to shoot on 65mm film. [This allowed us to] use a wider screen, to have more information. To have this forest that’s a character, being alive, being scary, being present.”
Despite operating as a fairy tale of sorts, Never Let Go is still very much an R-rated film, featuring brutal, if fleeting, moments of violence inflicted upon our main characters. Unlike many of Aja’s previous films, however, Never Let Go opts for suspense over blood and gore, which was something that was immediately appealing to him.
“It felt really different from the splatter bloody kind of thing that I know how to do,” Aja says of the script’s approach to violence. “But this movie somehow has a fear that will stay with you a little longer. It reminded me a lot of one of my favorite movies, Onibaba, the Japanese movie. But also, there was something about The Others and something about The Shining when I read the script. Something that was just haunting and staying with me.”
Despite Halle Berry’s presence, the two boys are the central focus of the film. In a film that deals with such heavy subject matter, Aja was all too aware that he’d have to take some time to prepare his young actors for the more intense scenes. Luckily, they were more than up to the challenge.
“I was really blessed to work with such amazing young actors,” Aja raves. “But sometimes we had to take a break because it was too intense. They were really feeling the horror growing around them so it was sometimes scary for them. In those cases, we would take a break and have a good moment before we stepped back in the scene. After all, you don’t want them to be traumatized by the experience of making this movie. But there is deep and dark stuff in this movie, and we had serious talks about the script with the kids when we were leading up to filming.”
Daggs has a similar recollection of the events, saying that “some of the things were hidden in some scenes, but a lot of the times it wasn’t actually super duper scary. Some of the things I saw were kind of scary at times, but not scary enough to where I didn’t want to see them. It was actually bearable and I had a great time filming it.”