Interview w/Daniel Byers, writer/director of Dark Hollow

Nice.

Yeah, yeah.

I haven't heard that song.

I'm going to have to give it a listen because this is absolutely not a locale I would describe as paradise.

uh but i can understand how it's different for the folks who grew up there but the it's really interesting thinking about how the antagonists transform over the course of the movie and and i don't just mean like how the one starting antagonist is different at the end although he is and i'll touch on that in a bit um but rather how At the beginning, the antagonist is there's this out of state corporation that wants to come in and buy the property, as you were saying, to strip mine it.

And then partway through the film, the creature starts being the antagonist and the corporations really get sidelined by the much more immediate physical threat of the coal monster.

And I found that really interesting because it it works really well as sort of my favorite kind of metaphor that we see in horror or in science fiction where it is not just a direct one-to-one metaphor for a specific single thing in the real world instead it's something that exists in the fictional universe that you can draw parallels to to different things in the real world and I think that the most interesting aspect of it was the thing you mentioned earlier, the gross goo that the monster creates, which is this sort of corrupting influence on the people that are affected by it.

and how it turns them like it both transforms their bodies in really horrible ways similar to how coal mining transforms your body in pretty horrible ways and it also uh I don't want to get too much into the details of spoilers of it, but it makes people behave badly as well.

And you could read it as a metaphor for the corrupting influence of coal making people act selfishly because of the wealth that the coal represents as a possibility.

And so I'm curious.

What sort of aspects of that were deliberate things that you were specifically introducing on purpose? And what just sort of arose naturally by making this creature in this environment?

Well, I love, Thomas, a lot of what you're identifying there and these interpretations.

I think they're great interpretations.

I think I try to stay away from getting too explicit about the metaphors that might be at play in my movies.

And I think that that's true in my filmmaking as well as when I kind of talk about them afterwards, right? I think the movie kind of stands on its own in what it has to say.

And I think I want to let it kind of stand on its own and say what it has to say and let people take what they will from it.

Because there's nothing worse than somebody preaching to you.

You know, you don't want to sit there and get preached to about anything from the environment, human impacts, all these things that are very real and present.

And I think the film is grounded in all of them.

But I think I'm going to let people watch it and choose for themselves what it's about.

What I will say is that, you know, in terms of your first comment there about this not looking like paradise, the hope was, and I think that this was preserved in the film itself, it certainly was in the script, was that I wanted to show both.

I wanted to show that this place was under attack.

you know, that it was changing, that there was this, like you say, it was smeared in coal dust and there are a lot of impacts happening, but that it was also a beautiful place.

And so we have a lot of aerials in the film that we traveled across the state to shoot.

And some of the most striking ones to me are the ones where you can see this mountain landscape and these gorgeous Appalachian mountains.