Return to Jonestown: Ti West on The Sacrament

Ti West has emerged over recent years as the most exciting new voice in horror. He freshened up the genre with two lo-fi knockouts – 80s slasher homage House of the Devil and goofy odd-couple ghost story The Innkeepers. A similar indie sensibility is brought to his latest film, The Sacrament, in which he uses the found footage mode to tell the story of two Vice journalists (AJ Bowen and Joe Swanberg) who take a camera into a remote jungle to investigate a community run by a charismatic leader known to his followers as ‘Father’ (Gene Jones). Initially the small township seems like a self-sustaining utopia, but not everything is as it seems. We caught up with West while he was in town for the Glasgow Film Festival to find out more about this unsettling new feature.

The Skinny: You spoke some time back about moving out of the horror genre – is this a step in that direction?

Ti West: I wanted to make a horror movie that had no supernatural elements, and so this doesn’t – maybe it’s not a horror movie then. It’s subjective, different people think of it differently. For me it’s very horrific so it’s still a horror movie. There are no ghosts, no supernatural beings or demons, none of that, it’s the real horror that people do. It’s more about the emotional weight of violence. The content of the movie is not fun, the violence is very confrontational and unpleasant because it’s about real life stuff and there are lots of social elements in the movie so I felt that the violence should be unpleasant to watch.

The next movie I’m doing isn’t a horror movie at all, so I think this might have been one foot in, one foot out. I think this is my sixth or seventh horror movie in a row – that’s a lot, you run out of things to say in horror movies. This is the most horrific movie I’ve made by far and that was a good stopping point to take a break from scary movies.

Is this a film containing strong social commentary?

It’s wearing it on its sleeve in this movie a little bit. There should always be two things going on: what the movie’s about and then what the movie’s about. In this movie the social elements are more apparent because it’s about a social, racial, economical, political group; a cult that exists in the middle of nowhere. So some of those themes are more apparent.

And do you feel horror is an apt genre to explore these types of things?

Personally I think it’s a great way – the stuff that’s happening in the movie, then what the movie’s actually about. With horror the stuff that’s happening can be very entertaining and visceral for the audience but then what the movie is actually about can be there on a subtextual level, which can be very interesting. I don’t think that happens often any more, but hopefully there’ll be more to come.

Horror works as a really fantastic metaphor for a lot of things. I just think that horror became very financially successful so the people who are making horror movies aren’t making movies about things. They’re just making cool shots and sequences and set pieces, so they’re just making these specifically to entertain the audience and not about much else, because they don’t have to and they’re doing very well without it. Sometimes when they are about something they don’t do so well because they make people uncomfortable. So, I think that it’s a road less travelled sometimes, but it’s better.

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"This is kind of like a horror Christopher Guest movie" - Ti West on The Sacrament

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You’ve adopted the found footage genre here quite late in its life cycle. What fresh elements did you feel you could bring to it?

There’s been a lot of debate about that, which I never thought would happen or would be so important. The weird thing is that it’s easy to call the movie found footage because people then go, ‘I know the kind of movie it is, I know that the camera will be subjective in the movie.’ But this is not really like found footage in the sense that it’s not about digging up this tape and this is what’s on it, you know? It’s in-camera editing, it’s a documentary made after the fact by people who would make a documentary. It’s very much like a Vice travel documentary and the characters are professional filmmakers. It’s more like a mockumentary, which sounds terrible, as it implies it should be a comedy.

And does it in any way hark back to Deodato and Cannibal Holocaust?

It does a little bit in the horrific nature of it all, and there are some set pieces in the movie that have this POV vibe, but there are titles on the screen, there’s music, it’s an after-the-fact made thing, it’s been produced. That’s because I’m tired of this ‘this tape was discovered – the real last day...’ No, we’re all hip to it now, we’re all bored of it. You wouldn’t call a Christopher Guest movie found footage. This is kind of like a horror Christopher Guest movie.

You're a huge admirer of 70s horror. What do you feel that era of horror had that made it so special and disturbing?

I think that it was a time when the film business, and certainly the studio film business, wasn’t doing well, so there was this big flux of independent filmmaking and independent voices doing things differently from the mainstream. The Vietnam War was going on and there was a lot of resistance to that and it was just culturally a pretty dark and revolutionary time, so I think you got really interesting artistic voices then. I don’t want to say that we don’t have interesting voices now, but the revolutionary attitude towards filmmaking has calmed down some.

Also there were outlets, there were hundreds of thousands of outlets for making movies. You could sell it to a drive-in, you could sell it to a small theatre chain. Certainly now in the States everything is just a few corporate chains and they only show studio movies, so the independent film world is shrinking. 

What was great about the 70s is there was this sort of confrontational, provocative, in-your-face artistic style to films. Even in the 90s independent films were something different from Hollywood. Now independent films are just a Hollywood movie made really cheap.

What was it like to work with Eli Roth (producer of The Sacrament) after the post production disaster surrounding Cabin Fever 2, your sequel to his original?*

He had nothing really to do with Cabin Fever 2. He said that they should hire me but he left us alone to do our thing. All the disasters that happened had nothing to do with Eli, he was off making Hostel then and wasn’t even aware of it. Afterwards I remember sitting down with him and being like, ‘dude it wasn’t my fault.’ He was cool about it and I was happy that we could make a movie down the road and have a totally phenomenal collaborative experience. He was very hands off, because he’s a filmmaker too. He was just like ‘go make your movie.’

* West attempted to replace his name on the credits of this film with the old Director’s Guild of America pseudonym Alan Smithee, after severe post-production disagreements

From the archives:

Ti West on The Innkeepers