Andrew Cumming on stone age horror Out of Darkness

This interview was first published in early 2023, at a time when Out of Darkness was screening under the title The Origin.

The Highlands has become a playground for ruddy-cheeked tourists looking for beauty and adventure but can you imagine landing here 45,000 years ago by boat without many provisions and sans your North Face jacket? That’s the premise of Andrew Cumming’s gnarly debut feature Out of Darkness (formerly known as The Origin), which imagines the plight of a small band of people arriving in palaeolithic Scotland and finding a cold, desolate, near-primordial place with no shelter nor food, and something mysterious stalking them in the dark.

Early reviews from the London Film Festival, where The Origin had its world premiere, suggested the film was indebted to the work of Robert Eggers. While it does shares some superficial similarities to films like The Witch and The Northman, the comparison is a bit of a red herring. Cumming’s chief influence was a film he devoured as a teen: Ridley Scott’s Alien.

“I’ve always felt [Alien] was more than the sum of its parts,” says Cumming via zoom from his home in Kirkcaldy. “It is ‘Jaws in space’, but the attention to detail, the craft, the casting, the world-building, the suspense, the tension, the creature design... that was jaw-dropping at the time and is still really iconic.” Whenever Cumming would get tied up in knots while working on The Origin’s outline (with producer Oliver Kassman and writer Ruth Greenberg), or while working with Greenberg when she was writing the script, he’d refer back to that 1979 classic. ​​“Oliver and Ruth and I were constantly asking, what would Ridley do?” The result is a film that feels both otherworldly but familiar, and it’s the kind of muscular survivalist thriller that’s rarely made on these shores.

I’d plan to ask Cumming about other influences during our interview but as soon as our Zoom window opens, one of them is clear to see: a beautiful, framed poster for Katsuhiro Otomo’s anime masterpiece Akira is hanging over his left shoulder. “I convinced my dad to buy it on VHS for me because he thought it was a kids’ cartoon,” he recalls. “So while all my friends were watching Disney, I was watching cyberpunks and post-nuclear apocalypse Tokyo.”

As a 90s kid, Cumming also dug other teen-cinephile faves like Trainspotting and Se7en, but he didn’t initially have any ambitions to be the next Danny Boyle or David Fincher. “I wasn't one of these kids who got access to a camera at eight years old and knew filmmaking was for them,” he says. “I just thought it was so wildly impossible that you could make films growing up on the east coast of Scotland.” As an adolescent, though, he loved to draw and studied art throughout high school. Then, when touring Duncan of Jordanstone school of art at 18, he stumbled across their animation department. “That was the beginning of me making shorts and learning the basics of storytelling,” says Cumming. “But the emphasis was still on animation and keyframes. I quickly realised that that was a very laborious process that wasn’t for me. I felt like I was working in my own little cocoon, not really collaborating with anybody. So it was around that time I started mucking around with DV cameras with some of the guys in the animation course.

The Origin

These early dalliances with live-action filmmaking were a world away from the high-concept genre thrills of The Origin. “Oh, those films were very much about what's in front of me, what have I got access to,” he says. “So it was kids down on their luck in an ex-mining town on the east coast of Fife.” At the time he worked part-time in a supermarket, and talk his manager into letting him use the shop as a set. “I sort of loosely fit a story around a guy who worked in Sainsbury's. It was probably the most autobiographical film I've made. And that's probably why I haven’t made another one, because who needs to hear that story twice?”

Cumming applied to the National Film School with that scrappy odyssey about a Sainsbury’s employee. It didn’t get accepted, but he was encouraged. “Lynne Ramsay was on the panel that year and said some nice things about the film, so even though I got knocked back I felt this great legitimacy, like I’d been accepted into that world. So I just kept truckin’.”

He eventually made it to the National Film School, but after graduating in 2013 the graft continued, taking the unglamorous route to filmmaking with a stint on Glasgow soap River City. It proved a baptism of fire, and a great training ground. “The best way I can describe it is, being at film school is like learning to drive, you know, there's always somebody who's got the foot on the brake just in case, but then going and doing River City, where you're shooting anywhere between 11 and 18 pages a day, that's like being on the motorway for the first time.”

We’re so used to filmmakers bursting out of the gate in their early twenties, bankrolled by credit card debt or their famous parents. Cumming, by contrast, was 39 when The Origin began shooting. He’s happy with his circuitous path, however. “Some precocious talents do break out early, but you've also got the Michael Hanekes or the Ridley Scotts of the world, who did something else and got really good at that and just learned their craft quietly. And then when they got their first film, they were ready to go. I couldn't have made The Origin when I was 21. I couldn't have made it when I was 31. I had to go through the hard knocks of television, just to get better at my craft, in order to stand in front of all these people and say, 'Right, we're gonna make a Stone Age horror film.'”

Cumming returns to the small screen soon with Payback, a crime thriller starring Morven Christie and Peter Mullan and produced by Line of Duty’s Jed Mercurio. It sounds like he’s itching to get back to making movies though. “I just love the vastness of the cinema screen," he says, “putting characters in a world and then just trying to grab the audience and keep them in a chair for 90 minutes, not letting them move or breathe, and turning the screw to make them really viscerally feel something. That's what I get excited about. That's the dream: how can you torment people for 90 minutes and get away with it?”

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The Origin screened at Glasgow Film Theatre, 5 & 7 Mar, as part of Glasgow Film Festival