For all those with memorable summer camp stories from back in the day, there’s a good chance your memories don’t quite measure up to the mind-melt that the youngsters endure in the critically acclaimed film The Hole in the Fence. The Mexico-set psychological drama centers on an esteemed religious school for boys, who get sent every year to a summer camp in the picturesque countryside.

What’s supposed to happen is, the boys strengthen themselves on physical, moral and spiritual level during their stay at the camp. But during one session in particular, they discover a “hole in the fence” that surrounds the camp, which sends their minds for a loop. Are they in danger? Is there something the teachers and priests aren’t telling them? Does the town outside the camp have something to do with this? Is there a monster lurking about?

We recently caught up with director Joaquin del Paso and his co-writer Lucy Pawlak to learn more about their twisted tale of conflicted kids at a mysterious summer camp, where evil lurks in one form or another…

A ‘Monstrous Kind of Manipulation’

When it works, it works. Once a writing team starts to gel, they’re just not to be stopped. It’s no surprise, then, that The Hole in the Fence is not Del Paso and Pawlak’s first collaboration. “We wrote my first feature called Panamerican Machinery,” del Paso told us. “And after that, as we were finishing the film, I told Lucy about an anecdote that happened to me during high school, about a school camp where I studied for one year in a religious school, a little bit similar to the one in the film. And I told Lucy the story where they really freaked us out through some kind of paranormal situation that was happening in the camp.”

Related: The Hole in the Fence Review: A Disturbing Display of the Dangers of Forced Religion

From there, the idea for their latest collaboration was birthed. Pawlak continued off del Paso regarding how it all started with this latest project: “When he suggested working on this, which was another multi-character movie with a progression into a really monstrous kind of manipulation, I was delighted to have the opportunity to create this world with him. And I thought it was such an interesting starting point that’s universal, while at the same time being very relevant to Mexico, and this idea of a kind of summer camp containing this kind of psychological manipulation and a critique of the education structures in Mexico for the elite, yeah, it just seemed like a brilliant adventure.”

The Hole in the Fence
Amondo FilmsCárcava Cine

“In a way, I wanted the title to be really, really straightforward, to not hide the important plot element,” continued del Paso. “This discovery of the ‘hole’ in the script was planned to happen very early in the story… and then you still have the whole film ahead of you.”

“Joaquin is brilliant coming up with titles,” added Pawlak. “I love the fact that well within the whole arc of the narrative, the hole changes from something that’s a narrative device also employed by the teachers in order to imply that something has got [into the camp], but then at the same time, in the end, it’s also the possible way out. And so it has all these multiple purposes and maybe never really offers any of the things that we hope it might.”

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village is just one of the movies that comes to mind when watching The Hole in the Fence. The psychological and horror elements certainly echo other classics as well. “One of the films that we saw while writing the script was Battle Royale,” said del Paso. “I kind of thought about the film recently and how it’s a little bit senseless in a way, but it kind of builds up very violently. And it wasn’t like we aimed to do something like that, but that was one of the films we watched that I guess had an influence.”

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Ruben Östlund and Future Projects
Amondo FilmsCárcava Cine

Pawlak also noted another award-winning director’s influence on the overall feel of The Hole in the Fence: Cannes darling Ruben Östlund, director of Force Majeure and The Square. “We watched Play,” said Pawlak in regard to brushing up on the acclaimed director’s past work. “I think also, [we looked at] just the general narrative arc of a lot of thriller films in order to consider how those movies manipulate the audience, and then how the teachers might deploy something similar in their live-action roleplay game of, ‘Something’s entered the camp.'”

Pawlak then noted some literary influences:

“We read quite a bit as well. There’s a book called The Lost Boys. Lord of the Flies was another one. But in The Lost Boys, it’s an investigation of the psychological minutiae, like all of those 1970s Stanley Milgram-type projects of psychological experiments on people. There was a lot of summer camps that were like fake summer camps, where they were investigating and testing how kids would respond to certain things in order to test cruelty, because everyone was obsessed with our potential for cruelty after you know the second World War and whatnot.” Östlund’s latest film, Triangle of Sadness, won the coveted Palme D’Or at Cannes and went on to snag a Best Picture Oscar nod. But both Pawlak and del Paso couldn’t sing enough praises about his groundbreaking earlier project. “I think a Play by Ruben Östlund was big because I think it’s a brilliant movie of just the nature of youth and how social groups, even when they’re young, can just get antagonize each other,” said del Paso. “And a big inspiration was this book called The Way, this insane kind of like a manual for life and how to become basically a tough man in a way. It’s a very interesting book.”

Looking ahead, the two seem to be busy as ever with future projects. “I’m working on a project about the appropriation of Indigenous practices in order to like sell luxury treats and whatnot,” said Pawlak. “It’s been super fun developing this White Lotus, Triangle of Sadness-type [project] relating to all the horrors of that zone.”

“I also have another film upcoming that I’m shooting at the end of the year, that is quite different,” said del Paso. “It’s a drama, it’s not a collective film. It’s a film with four characters. And it talks about migration and also about the devastation of the Mexican forests.”

From Amondo Films and Cárcava Cine, The Hole in the Fence is now available for streaming.