No doubt about it: Unwelcome is a dreamy, ethereal thrill fest. Director Jon Wright’s (Brassic, Robot Overloads) latest film may be one of the most picturesque horror films/creature features to hit the screen this season. Tres fairytale-like, it lures you in and dazzles you with plenty of eye candy—and frights. Welcome to Unwelcome.

The ambitious horror story tracks Maya and Jamie (Ant-Man and the Wasp’s Hannah John-Kamen and That Dirty Black Bag’s Douglas Booth) who flee their urban nightmare hoping to find solace in tranquil, rural Ireland. Things are tense from the get-go. For starters, Maya is very pregnant—yeah, so, basically things will get wonky real soon. Then the couple hears stories of the mysterious beings who dwell in the ancient wood at the foot of their new garden. They are warned by new neighbors that in Irish lore the Redcaps help people needing to be rescued. With an emotional price, of course. The creatures must be fed daily—or else.

But fed what? Oh, let the romp unfold. The film also stars Colm Meaney (Marlowe, The Serpent Queen, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), Jamie-Lee O’ Donnell, Chris Walley, and Kristian Nairn. The film is based on an original screenplay by Mark Stay (Robert Overloads).

“Sometimes in mainstream films, things are very predictable and very formulaic. You can sort of tell where they’re going and what’s going to happen,” director Wright told MovieWeb. “That’s not the case of this film. It’s very hard to know what’s going to happen. I don’t mean that in the sense of just random things happen. It will make sense. It’s all very carefully plotted and figured out. It’s a coherent story, but I don’t think many people would know where it’s going or how it’s going to end up.”

The plot thickens. Wright and Booth share more with MovieWeb, taking us deeper into the world of Unwelcome.

Here a Goblin, There a Goblin

To be sure, Unwelcome falls into that addictive creature feature horror genre. It vividly explores the grueling concept of a home invasion—a someone or something suddenly in your home, but there’s not much you can do about it except scream and get really clever. While working on the script together, Wright and Stay wanted to explore themes surrounding violence that were personal to them. Curiously, they both admit to being pacifists, but together, they aimed high, showing how a pacifist could react when pushed to their limits.

Enter the Redcaps. These creatures are part of Irish folklore and myth and are considered “magical.” Wright, who hails from Ireland—Stay is Irish on his maternal side—wanted to effectively capture these “home invaders.” Early in the film, audiences learn that the Redcaps are downright violent, bloodthirsty goblins that need to be fed daily. Skip a feeding and, well, things get hellish. “I love ‘gremlins’ and the movie Gremlins,” Wright shared. “One thing I’ve always enjoyed about those movies is the sense of mischief and malevolent joy they take in all the terrible things that they do.”

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Wright’s Irish roots found him surrounded by Irish stories, mythology, and legend, too. As such, he and Stay researched Celtic myths and the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson fairytales. When they came across the far darrig—aka the Redcaps—they realized they were playful goblins, prone to pranking people. So, in Unwelcome, Stay wanted his creatures to “represent the violence within us.” Hence the dark, evil-looking features. And when it came to creating the Redcaps, Wright insisted the creatures wouldn’t simply be VFX-generated.

“CGI in films nowadays can be absolutely incredible. But quite often with creatures you see, they look great in the close-ups, but they’re not really quite right,” he said. “They’re not in the place where they’re supposed to be. Their gravity doesn’t seem quite right when they walk, jump, and run. And particularly when they’re active, you get a sense they don’t really have the correct weight. So, I really wanted to photograph something unique.”

Past Influences Factor In

Warner Bros. UK

Wright also noted how intrigued he was by the 1985 Stephen King film, Cat’s Eye, starring Drew Barrymore. Mostly, how the creative team used a very tall adult actor and tweaked the set. The overall effect made everything look more realistic and believable. Could he and Stay, in fact, create something similar in Unwelcome?

“We did the same thing, building these giant sets,” Wright explained. “When you see the goblin come to the back of the house and Maya is terrified, it reaches up to the door handle—that door handle really was above the actor. It was six feet high, and the door itself was 12 feet high. Every time you see a goblin, there’s an equivalent ‘giant set,’ and everything was measured exactly.”

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When it came to the close-ups, Wright and the team motion-captured an actor who performed all the voices and facial expressions of the goblins.

“The visual effects department used the masks that we had on the goblins—the goblin actors—which were these brilliant, beautiful masks made by a creature effects genius called Shaune Harrison, who worked on all the Harry Potter movies,” Wright added. “We’ve a sort of marriage of the very old-school technique and a very new-school technique. And in doing that, I think we’ve created a really pleasing illusion that the goblins are actually on our set.”

Feeding Frenzy

Warner Bros. UK

Funny enough, Booth wasn’t a huge horror fan growing up. He loved The Lord of the Rings and Gladiator, and other epic adventures, and even took a liking to The Shining, but “I just never liked the slasher films like Saw,” he noted. “But I fell in love with the process of making a horror movie, and I’d love to make another one because as a team, you’re playing with tension. That’s a lot of fun. How do you build tension and play with those elements? That really intrigued me.”

“Now, I find it now easier to watch a horror movie because once you’ve realized how they do it—all in the blood, the boom operator, and more—it’s not too scary,” he went on. “I did actually go and see Cocaine Bear at the cinema recently, and I had a lot of fun. We were howling with laughter.”

When asked about blending horror and comedy together, which Unwelcome does to a much lesser degree than Cocaine Bear, Booth pointed out that, “it puts two very opposite extremes of your emotions together. It’s like the equivalent of going to a sauna and jumping in the freezing cold water. And then back in the sauna. It makes you feel alive. I think that that’s fun to go from one extreme to the other.”

Overall, he wants audiences to be thoroughly entertained by Unwelcome. “The movie is original, and a lot of things these days are quite formulaic. And that’s what drew me to the script. I just thought it was a really fun, original, quirky film. So, I hope people seek it out.”

Wright mused that there are so many “deadly serious” films in cinema these days that, “have this really sort of dark, earnest seriousness. I personally always prefer things where the characters are allowed to be funny.” He goes on to say that Unwelcome is a real Friday/Saturday night kind of movie.

“This is a film you can escape into,” Wright said. “It’s going to take you on an epic fantasy. It’s a bit like a roller coaster ride, which is how we sort of always intended it to be. So, you’ve got that slow belt kind of cranking as it takes you up to the top of the crest and then…”

Hang on tight. And remember to feed the Redcaps.

Unwelcome will be released in theaters on March 8 as part of the AMC Thrills & Chills lineup. Catch it on digital on March 14.