After earning a swarm of likes from SXSW audiences earlier in the year and from the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA), where it earned nominations for Best Film, Best Direction, and Best Lead Actress (for Aisha Dee’s committed performance), the social media slasher Sissy is ready for local audiences to like and subscribe.
Ahead of its national release on November 3rd (you can read our review here) Peter Gray spoke with writing/directing duo Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes about the film, what they hope audiences will take away from it, the personal space it originated from, and leaning into both comedy and horror to bring their vision to life.
I wanted to ask you about the inspirations for the film. Obviously it’s a horror film with dark comedic elements, but, and I made be weird for thinking as such, I saw this as almost if Muriel from Muriel’s Wedding went absolutely batshit crazy…
Kane Senes: That’s exactly what we were going for!
Hannah Barlow: Yeah, I mean Muriel’s Wedding was pitched to all of us as this broad comedy. It played every Friday night on whatever channel, and it’s really fucked up. It’s so dark.
Kane Senes: Obviously something like Carrie is kind of the comparison we more expect, but if Muriel did that we would have the Aussie version of Carrie, right? That kind of what we wanted to do in some small way.
Did you find balancing the horror and the comedy difficult? As you were writing was one genre becoming more prominent in telling the story?
Hannah Barlow: We were definitely going for horror/comedy, and on the page I think the screenplay is funnier than what we ended up with. On screen Aisha (Dee) brought all this texture and this nuance to the character. She elevated the material in a different way. She’s far more of a creep in the script, so we were definitely aiming for horror/comedy, but there’s something more to it now.
Kane Senes: As soon as we had a meeting with Aisha, she was like “Hey, I don’t like how you said that”, and how she didn’t like that she was a creep. “This is my homegirl”… she was ride or die with (the character) Cecilia, so from the beginning she was really defensive of (her) and I think that’s why she was right. We knew the character was safe with her. She wouldn’t just play what was on the page. We knew she could bring empathy to that role.
Hannah Barlow: And then combining her performance with our Giallo-type, gleefully cracked score is where the tone sits.
I just think she’s misunderstood…
Kane Senes: Exactly! And that’s what we realised in the script, and we started to lean more into that. It’s challenging because there’s not a lot of references outside of something like American Psycho, where you’ve essentially got a horror satire, where you’re in the shoes of something that does pretty atrocious things. Whether it be Halloween or Freddy Krueger, it’s easy to keep the villain at an arm’s length and root for the final girl to get away. Or, in a lot of cases, you’re rooting for them all to get killed because you love that kind of franchise killer so much! For us, it was not exactly what we were making. We’d like Sissy at the hero, so it complicated things a bit.
Was writing this film something of a cathartic experience? Was it rooted in something personal?
Hannah Barlow: Yeah, it’s coming from something deeply personal. When I was 10 I was bullied, and the way I reacted to that bullying, and I didn’t do anything violent – and I had been bullied from different circles, and I think by 10 I had had enough – it ostracised me further from my peer group. The way my 10-year-old brain kind of got through that was to become a perfectionist, and to make sure that everyone around me liked me. And that had long lasting consequences on my mental health growing into an adult. I had to undo a lot of that work, and as I was undoing that work and becoming more self-actualised and accepting who I was, social media was on the rise.
We’re looking at our generation behaving in a way that is really toxic for us, like presenting the best versions of ourselves online, reading in scientific papers about our dopamine addictions, and how our relationship with social media has gotten worse. (So) it comes from a very deep, personal space.
Kane Senes: And just very general things too, like we all kind of have had that friendship that fell apart for whatever reason, or, you know, being ghosted by friends, or people that you thought were friends, or you just felt like you didn’t fit in…
All of that and just general anxiety. I’m in therapy, and that’s something that I’m proud of, and that I can’t wait to learn more about, but it seems like it’s hard to not be in this day and age. No one teaches us how to live in this anxiety-induced age. I very much relate to the pressures that Cecilia is under, and at the end of the day I think we’re all just one bad day away from cracking.
I’ve certainly had experiences in the last year or so that made me take a step back to reflect on relationships, and though I wouldn’t react in the same way Sissy does, it’s easy to want to. I definitely viewed this as more than just a horror film, and I hope the social media generation see this film and pause for reflection.
Hannah Barlow: Thank you for seeing all of that and seeing it that way, because that’s the goal. If artists can have the opportunity to have a film receive any type of public attention, you hope the message is there for people to see that.
Kane Senes: And I think especially if you can look at the violence in the film (as) just a metaphor, a kind of hyper-reality for what is the pain of shedding toxic people from your life.
On the violence side of things, I do have to ask you about the gore in this film. My God, the practical effects in this! Without giving anything away, but the car scene? Insane! Can you talk about the effects implemented here?
Kane Senes: Evil Dead. Scary. Evil Dead 2. Maybe the greatest horror comedy of all time. Always, always, always in the back of my mind when we were writing we wanted to shoot it as practically as possible. We just wanted some really cool practical effects (and) we worked with Larry Van Duynhoven from Scarecrow Studios, whose done stuff like Upgrade and Mortal Kombat…he’s the prosthetic guy. He’s the Tom Savini of Australia. We felt very lucky to work with him, and he’s the nicest person!
That car scene was a combination of practical and VFX work. It was just a lot of discussions in advance as to how we were putting it together. Our VFX guy, our prosthetics guy and our cinematographer, working out what we need to shoot so we don’t get stitched in post (production). We didn’t have a lot of time to prep this movie at all, so we definitely tried to throw as much of our resources towards those shots and those kill scenes, because that’s what really kind of matters in a movie like this. We can make the script as good as we want in our own time, but when you’re on the clock those (scenes) are the ones you can’t mess around with.
Sissy is screening in Australian theatres from November 3rd, 2022.
