Bishal Dutta is an Indian-American directing slowly rising to the great heights of horror cinema. The director/writer has made a series of shorts in the horror genre, and his feature film, It Lives Inside, shows that Dutta has a promising future in Hollywood. The film features Megan Suri, a high schooler dealing with the demon known as a Pishacha. What makes this movie more interesting is the characteristics of a coming-of-age used as a backdrop for this tale.
Dutta has been a horror fan since his early years, but the man is more than that. The director has a vast knowledge of all types of cinema worldwide that helped create his latest project. Contributing writer Kelsey Loiselle and I got a chance to speak with Dutta about his movie produced by Neon and QC Entertainment at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. We also got to talk to him about his inspiration for It Live Inside, German expressionism film, which horror franchise he would tackle, and his passion for film theory.
Bishal Dutta: Have you guys seen the film?
I’ve never actually like seen a movie like It Lives Inside and how it uses Indian lore in this way to tell a story.
Bishal Dutta: That’s great.
So since it’s based on this creature called, Pishacha, what was it about the creature that had you thinking, “I gotta make It Lives Inside?”
Bishal Dutta: One of the stories I grew up hearing from my grandfather was, supposedly, when he was in his twenties, a young man in India, he went to a family friend’s place, and the friend’s daughter had this jar she was carrying around. She was talking to it, and it was empty. And my grandfather says, “Hey, you know there’s nothing in there, right?”
And so she angrily opens the lid and throws something at him, and it’s, you know, nothing comes out. But after that, he starts hearing noises in the middle of the night. He hears horses galloping around him.
Oh, wow.
Bishal Dutta: Then the big one, one day, he leaves out a pack of peanuts, and he hears chewing when he is turned around, and he turns around, and they’re gone. So my grandfather has to leave. So this was a lovely ghost story that I grew up hearing. When I was thinking about making my first feature film, I knew it would be a horror film. I had this thought, “Well, there’s something very interesting about telling it from an Indian-American point of view about an Indian-American family.
So, I thought a lot about that story, and I was thinking, “What could this thing be?” Ultimately, this demon that I landed on, the Pishacha, is really the embodiment of hatred and loneliness, and anger within our culture — preys on these things. I knew it would be a teenage sort of coming-of-age drama.
Okay. That makes a lot of sense.
Bishal Dutta: And so I thought, “What better monster for teenagers than something that feeds on insecurity and loneliness?” So that’s where the movie kind of came from.
I’ve seen different variations of the creature online. Why did you decide to settle on how the creature looked at the end of It Lives Inside, or were there any other variations you wanted to try?
Bishal Dutta: I looked at a lot of the cultural art that has been done in our religious texts. The idea was when you look at Greek art, or you look at real art from any of those cultures, there’s a cultural bias. There’s the artistic style of the time. I was thinking, “What if we took these concepts and applied them to a real animal today?”
What if we tried to make this as physically realistic as possible and still try to keep the idea that this is hatred and anger incarnate? I mean, there was one version of the creature that felt too much like an animal, for example. We wanted to bring its features forward so that it felt more humanly malicious, if you will. So, I got to work with the incredible creature designer, Todd Masters, on this film who did the Borg Queen in Star Trek [First Contact].
I thought the style from It Lives Inside looked familiar.
Bishal Dutta: So, we had an initial brief, and then we just kept working on iterations. I think the creature we found at the end is truthful to the ideas of the cultural art but feels very much of the moment and physically possible.
Were there any horror sub-genres or films that inspired you for It Lives Inside?
Bishal Dutta: I think that ‘It Lives Inside’ really is a love letter to so many different kinds of films. I imagine most horror fans will see references to all kinds of things – the eighties slasher films and J Horror. But I mainly thought a lot about movies like ‘Poltergeist’ and ‘Nightmare on Elm Street.’ Which I think feels very adjacent. They feel about a certain kind of suburban experience. I grew up in the suburbs, so when I moved to this country and was growing up in the suburbs, I looked at many of these films to help me understand what it meant to be American.
They became very important films to me, culturally. Then later, I thought, “Well, what happens to a family like mine in ‘Poltergeist’ or ‘Nightmare on Elm Street?'” Those films and then films that are interesting subversions, like ‘Ginger Snaps’ is, a great film. I think ‘Nightmare Elm Street 2’ is a very interesting film—John Carpenter’s ‘Christine.’
I thought a lot about the experience I had as a teenager watching big, big horror films like ‘The Conjuring’ or ‘Paranormal Activity,’ or Insidious. I loved the experience I had sitting in a theater and screaming with people, and I wanted to do one of those kinds of films and really commit to that audience experience.
Do you want to stay within the horror genre, or do you want to make other genre movies?
Bishal Dutta: I love the horror genre, and I certainly wanna make more films within the horror genre. I wanna do all kinds of movies, but the thing is, no matter what the genre is, the thing I can’t leave behind, I feel like, is suspense. In ‘It Lives Inside,’ it’s less about wall-to-wall, visceral, gory action. It’s more about suspense and drawing out tension. That part of the filmmaking process is in so many other kinds of film. I think about the opening of Inglorious Bastards or the entirety of Uncut Gems. I think those are great horror films in that sense.
Yeah, unintentional horror films. We saw Uncut Gems in theaters, and it was white-knuckling.
Bishal Dutta: It was so stressful, right? It was scarier than a lot of horror films, and that’s just a very brilliant understanding of suspense. Suspense goes back to films that are not horror films. You’ve watched ‘The Wages of Fear,’ Clouzot’s film from 1953. I mean, that’s a real suspense film. So, going back to the Hitchcock tradition, those are the kinds of movies that are very exciting to me. But of course, in a horror film, it really is a playground for suspense.
So you’re going to stay in horror for the time being. Is there a horror franchise that you want to tackle?
Bishal Dutta: I think really the pinnacle would be Nightmare on Elm Street. I think Nightmare on Elm Street is a rich franchise with creative possibilities. You see it in those sequels, especially, you see it in part three, part four – the Renny Harlin one, I think, is brilliant. I feel very lucky that I got to do an original horror film on this movie.
A lot of that comes down to the support of my partners at QC [Entertainment] and Neon. That feels like a privilege today to get to do original high-concept thrillers. In a way that’s the most exciting thing for me is to be able to continue doing original high-concept thrillers. But hey, if Freddie Krueger comes along, I’m certainly not gonna say no.
So, Jordan Peele, I think, is one of the most recognizable people of color or of a different culture that gets the most notice for doing horror films or suspense. Do you draw any lessons or support from that type of directing and maybe even how he builds his fan base?
Bishal Dutta:
Absolutely. None of us that are getting to make interesting cultural horror films right now; none of us get to do it without Jordan Peele and his incredible work on ‘Get Out.’ I mean, that is a film that completely changed the zeitgeist. I mean, obviously, there had been films that had touched on these issues for forever. Horror is one of the most socially conscious genres in movie history. But the commercial success of ‘Get Out’ and the way that it connected with a massive audience, I think, really gave the industry this feeling that “Oh, this is a viable thing.”
So many more of us have gotten to do these movies because of Jordan and his work. In a sense, what is so incredible about ‘Get Out’ and Jordan’s subsequent films is that they aren’t about a monolithic form of racism.
And the subtlety is so brilliant.
Bishal Dutta: Yeah, they’re about the nuances of what it’s like to live here. They’re not movies that admonish anybody. They’re not simple morality tales. They’re about interesting people dealing with race in America in complex ways. So, in making this film, I think a huge part of it was that this isn’t necessarily about outward racism.
This is a film about how we feel about ourselves and how there is insecurity and a desire to fit in how those things fester within us. I think that what Jordan Peele has done is to make very commercially accessible horror films, but very deeply, very intuitively, and very thematically richly, right? I think very much that’s what I would like to do with my career.
So we found some information about you: you’re also a UCLA or UC Berkeley teacher?
Bishal Dutta: UC Berkeley.
UC Berkeley, okay.
Bishal Dutta: Only a couple of times. *laugh*
So was there a desire to teach on the side? I know Spike Lee does classes at NYU. So, I guess you can say this is a two-part question. Which came first: the filmmaker or the teacher? And if it is a teacher, do you see yourself teaching as part of your experience and life?
Bishal Dutta: Filmmaking definitely came first. I think the teaching of it all, which I only did as a student for one semester, speaks to one of my big passions, which is film theory and film history. I don’t think that we, as a generation of filmmakers, I say this with too generally, of course, but I think the literacy of film needs to be higher. I think we all need to understand film history better.
I think we need to discuss where these films are coming from. I mean, nothing we’re doing is new. Understanding the history of cinema and how the culture has gone forward and backward helps us understand what we can do with the medium that hasn’t been done before. What kind of variations can we make? I was just talking to someone about how the horror we’re making right now is directly conversing with German expressionism.
Oh yeah. I didn’t see that at first.
Bishal Dutta: ‘The Caligari’ and [F. W] Murnau. Those German filmmakers came to America, and we got our universal monsters in a way that was the beginning of what is now American horror. So, understanding German expressionism was really about bringing internal points of view out into an external world that helps us understand what can be accomplished with horror cinema today. I think my passion is in trying to get more people to learn the history of cinema and try to understand what we’re doing in the tradition of cinema as an art form.