The Big Picture It Lives Inside director Bishal Dutta shares his favorite horror films and greatest influences. He reveals the true story that inspired the film. Dutta explains why he chose the Pishach as the film’s demon.
In his debut feature, It Lives Inside, director and horror aficionado Bishal Dutta tells the story of Sam (Megan Suri), an Indian-American girl who rejects her heritage in an attempt to fit in with her peers. When a mythological demon known as a Pishach gets ahold of her former best friend Tamira (Mohana Krishnan), Sam must embrace her roots if she wants any hope of defeating it.

During an interview at San Diego Comic-Con with Collider’s Perri Nemiroff, Dutta talked about some of his favorite horror movies and greatest influences like Terminator, Jaws, The Shining, and more. He also revealed the true story that inspired the movie, discussed why he chose the Pishach as the film’s demon and pinpointed a vital filmmaking lesson he learned via his actors.

Hear about that and more straight from Dutta in the video above or read the conversation in transcript form below:

PERRI NEMIROFF: It is a miracle to make any movie, but in particular, when someone gets a first feature off the ground, we need to stop and celebrate that achievement.

BISHAL DUTTA: Thank you so much. Thank you. It was a crazy experience making this movie. I am lucky enough to have had great collaborators and partners through the whole process. My partners at QC Entertainment came on board when it was just an idea, and then six months later, I had written a script, and they called, weirdly enough, on the same day that I was finished, and they were instantly on board. And you know, these guys they kind of pioneered this form of cultural horror in mainstream storytelling. Obviously, it’s been done in the history of horror in such beautiful ways, but Get Out was such a checkpoint movie in this subgenre. And so working with these guys from the beginning, and then Neon who have really kind of changed the landscape as far as films about other cultures being in the American zeitgeist, that partnership from the beginning, it was just unbelievable to have that through the entire process.

Image via NEON

I’m coming back to both of those companies in a minute, but just so our audience gets to know you a little more, I was reading that when you moved to North America, you were consuming a lot of horror movies and you found them quite influential. Many questions about that. First I want to know, what is the very first horror movie you ever saw that terrified you?

DUTTA: This is going to be a little controversial. A lot of people don’t think it’s a horror movie. I think it 100% is.

Oh, I could go on and on about this topic.

DUTTA: The original Terminator I think is very scary. It really scared me when I was a kid, and it affected me in that way where I was genuinely having nightmares about it. I think I had asked for Terminator 2, which probably would have been more appropriate for a five-year-old, but my parents were like, “Oh, Terminator 1, Terminator 2, same thing.” So I got T1, so I saw a guy get his heart ripped out in the first two minutes. That really stayed with me, but that made me want to get into real horror movies, let’s say, and the ones that really stuck with me, Alien, Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist.

And when I say that it helped me with my Americanness, I mean there’s a component to American horror cinema that there’s so much iconography, cultural iconography. Even something like Nightmare on Elm Street with the, “I’m your boyfriend now, Nancy.” There were these moments that I had seen my friends talk about and whatnot, and I would go and see these films to try and understand and, man, watching these things it was like, “Okay, I think I have an obsession with these kinds of movies.”

I’m a big believer in genre-bending movies. Sometimes I deliberately don’t use the word “horror” because I feel like many box it into a very specific thing when it can be so much more beyond it. I think we need to reintroduce the idea that horror can be a multitude of things.

DUTTA: Certainly! And you know, I think that horror is such a crucial part of a bigger umbrella of American cinema, which is the American blockbuster, right? You can’t really talk about Jaws or Jurassic Park without talking about the horror. Both horror films and both affecting the audience in that way, and I think that’s part of why we go see these films in a mass audience. I mean, there’s nothing like screaming with an audience.

So we know that T1 is the first movie to scare you. What about the very first horror movie you saw where you had such a good time being scared that you walked out saying, “I need more of that feeling in my life?”

DUTTA: I can pinpoint exactly the moment. I was 16 when the first Conjuring film came out, but I’ll tell you, the hype around this film was that there’s no bloody violence, there’s no language, there’s no sex, but it’s still rated R because it’s so scary, and the kids were daring each other to go see it in high school, right? I saw it and I was so terrified, and then I showed it to my parents. They couldn’t make it through halfway. And there’s this component of horror filmmaking, which is playing jokes on people, right? Playing a bit of a prank, and I just loved it. They were yelling and they were mad at me. They were like, “Why would you do this to us?” And I think there’s part of that prankster in me that really enjoyed that experience, and I was like, “I have to keep seeing these things. I have to keep seeing how they affect an audience, as big of an audience as possible.”

Image via NEON

Have your parents watched your movie yet? Did they watch the whole thing?

DUTTA: They have. They did watch the whole thing and now my dad doesn’t go in the basement anymore when it’s too dark. But it’s a dual experience because while they’re scared, this film in so many ways is so personal, and I think it meant a lot to them to see these moments that are really from our life and whatnot.

I respect his choice not to go in the basement. You have a couple of very memorable elements in this that I can’t stop thinking about it. Every time I see a jar, I think about it being a containment thing. And then on top of that, there’s a line in your movie about whistling and I’m a big whistler, and now every single time I whistle, I feel like I’m welcoming the evil in.

DUTTA: But you know what’s wonderful about you saying that is that that was so much of what was exciting about making an Indian horror film, right? It’s bringing those elements of our culture that we grew up with, these strange little superstitions, and now infecting the American public and the international public with these things. I think that’s what’s so great about horror films. In a way, culturally, we’re sharing commonalities, but we’re also sharing these differences. Whistling, we just don’t like whistling. There’s a component to it, but now you have that, too.

[Laughs] It’s definitely burrowed its way into my brain!

I love asking this question because I love hearing about how ideas evolve along the way; what is the biggest difference between your very first draft of the script and what we now see in the finished feature?

DUTTA: You know, I just reread the first draft just as a kind of nostalgia trip a couple of weeks ago and I was surprised by how much is still the same. In the sense of the foundation of the story, what Sam goes through, the family dynamics. But you know what struck me, and this was a misconception I had before making this movie, is that there’s no real final draft of a script. The final draft happens when the movie goes to the theaters and people see it, right? But I was just so struck by how much more effective the film was at telling its story. A lot of that was the rewriting process, a lot of that was the expertise of my partners at QC and Neon, and it just is so much better at it being itself than it was in its first draft. I guess there’s no huge difference that I can think of beyond. I think it’s just so much more effective and that’s what was so inspiring about it. This is what collaboration is like when you have people that really care about the story. You’re just constantly making it better and telling your own story better.

To get a little more specific with that idea, can you tell me about an especially challenging day on set, a time when things weren’t going to plan, you had to find a creative way to pivot and you wound up finding new magic that you had never planned for that made the movie even stronger?

DUTTA: One of the hardest days was, and you’ve seen the movie, it’s a moment where our teenage characters go to a quarry area with a little lake and they have a fun party sequence. It was very planned originally and then weather issues came up, as they often do. It became the sort of thing where, “Okay, we have less time for this than we thought.” I really leaned on my actors for that. The young actors in this film are phenomenal. Megan Suri plays that scene so well, and I can just hold a camera on her for so long, and she gives you so much intelligence and so much emotional nuance and everything. And then Gage Marsh is in that scene too, and the two of them, it was kind of like, “Okay, why don’t you guys play with the scene?” We had it very choreographed, very blocked out, but in the end, I so much more preferred the kind of loose energy of the camera kind of reacting to what they were doing. I think there’s much more nervousness in that scene because of the lack of time, because [with] these two actors it was kind of like, “Okay, here are two cameras. Let’s just see what happens. Let’s see how you two play off each other.” It was a great lesson not to overstep as a director, and to really let the actors live in the energy of the scene.

Oh, now I want to go straight to a specific scene with Megan, but I need to ask something else before I get there, the demon that you chose here. Was the Pishach always the first choice for the evil entity in this movie or did you ever consider anything else?

DUTTA: It was always the first choice, and I’ll tell you why. A lot of this came from my grandfather, [he] told this story, right? That when he was a young man, he went to a family friend’s house and the friend’s daughter had a jar that she carried around and talked to. And one day he said, “You know, there’s nothing in the jar, right?” And she opened the lid angrily and threw something at him, but nothing came out. And so he goes home and then he starts hearing weird noises in the middle of the night. He says he heard galloping horses. And then the big one, and you could see where the movie came from, the big one is he left a pack of peanuts out one night and then he heard chewing and he turns around and they’re gone, right? So this is a story I grew up hearing and it was one of my favorite ghost stories that my grandfather told. But I remember thinking to myself, what could that have been? And that was the project of the movie. That’s really where the inspiration came from was, what could that thing have been? What was affecting him? And as I was reading more and more, there were other demons but really, making a movie about teenagers, and a teenage girl coming of age and finding her identity as I was reading about the mythology of the Pishach in our cultural text, it was like, “Well, there’s no better monster than this.” This thing feeds on mental instability, it feeds on loneliness, and it just felt right for both the concept of the film and the characters.

Image via NEON

So given that story you just told, I’m assuming the containment method was always planned to be a jar.

DUTTA: It was always planned to be a jar. And I love these iconic things that can hang with us from movies. I love the scissors from Us, for example, and I really love when a film has that. Christine has the car, the John Carpenter Christine. So I wanted one iconic piece of memorabilia in there.

You nailed it. And seeing Tamira — everything about her look and holding that jar, there are so many moments where the way you frame her it’s incredibly eerie, but also strikingly beautiful at the same time.

DUTTA: That makes me so happy to hear. Preston Sturges made a film called Bad Day at Black Rock, right? And the whole thing was that studio didn’t want him to do this in CinemaScope because it was five people in the whole film. They were saying, “Oh, you need CinemaScope for Cleopatra, you need it for Spartacus when you have thousands of people in the frame.” But his argument was that there’s no better format for showing loneliness than CinemaScope because the single person is so small in the wide frame. And that was a huge part of how Matt Lynn, the DP, and I approached the framing of this movie. There’s the one where she’s walking through the rain. It was always about, how lonely can we make these characters within this very wide CinemaScope frame?

So now we’ve set up your evil entity and the fact that it is contained in a jar, so I can ask about this particular scene. It’s the scene in the locker room with Sam and Tamira when she knocks the jar out of her hand. I understand sometimes things happen in the heat of a moment and you can’t control yourself, but because the audience already knows something bad will happen if the jar breaks because they’re watching a horror movie, you run the risk of Sam breaking the jar and then losing the connection to the audience. So what was it like having a conversation with your actors in terms of finding the right tone so that felt authentic in the moment, but you didn’t lose that necessary connection?

DUTTA: It’s a pivotal scene in the movie. I’m so glad you brought it up. This is a great story. One of my idols, one of my favorite directors saw the film and when that moment happened, he said, “Oh no!” And it was just so gratifying for me. So I’m so glad that moment lands. But, you know, it was really something we were working on to the end in the edit room. We were playing with the levels of distant whispering and all that because it’s all about Sam’s point of view. I’m a huge point of view person when I’m thinking of how to shoot a scene, how to cut a scene. That scene, you’re absolutely right, we were always afraid that our main character loses the audience 19 minutes into the film.

But, I think the storytelling challenge was establishing this character with enough depth and conveying enough of this very universal emotion, this feeling of “I want to fit in” but there’s something in the room that doesn’t allow me to. And the idea was if we could use this kind of slower first act to get the audience there with Sam, if we could understand her point of view then we’re getting into what is ultimately the core of the curse movie, right? Starting with Night of the Demon and all the way to a huge film for me, Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell. And it’s the same kind of element, right? It’s that you get to know a character and then they commit a transgression and then they’re cursed until they can undo the transgression. It’s a structurally brilliant sort of subgenre of the horror genre.

And so that was the idea, was she does have to do something wrong for this curse to kind of come on her, but that we also don’t lose the understanding that as much as we would like to say that we wouldn’t have, maybe some of us would have also done this in high school out of fear and insecurity.

Image via NEON

It’s authentically fallible. Characters aren’t interesting if they don’t make mistakes.

DUTTA: I fully agree with that. And that’s the idea with this character arc, and certainly every movie I want to do is that there is something missing in the character that we hopefully see in ourselves. That we have to be honest with ourselves and say, “I think I dealt with this too.” And I think that’s why we made this movie, ultimately, because as much as it is about the specificities of being Indian-American, I think who doesn’t know that feeling? Who hasn’t been there and felt small and different, right?

That’s why I love horror, but also all genres of storytelling. I find it easier to process difficult human truths and maybe my own faults via movies, TV shows, books, etc., rather than facing them head-on myself.

DUTTA: What I love about what you just said, I think that every sort of transgressive taboo subject that’s tackled in the mainstream in a prestige drama, for example, I think 15 years ago has been done in a horror film. And I think that the reality is there are certain experiences that to convey them realistically, you have to do them in a horror film, right? And that’s what was the idea of this film is that what she’s feeling, if I tried to express that in a very dramatic format, in a kind of straightforward coming of age film, I think we would be outside of that emotion. But doing it as a horror film …

You don’t feel the equal of the true feeling.

DUTTA: Exactly! When you’re in high school, these feelings feel massive, right? It feels life-ending, and for an audience to really get that, for an audience to feel the film — the fact that modern American horror is really coming from German expressionism, right? And expressionism with Caligari and [F. W.] Murnau, that was the whole idea was externalizing the internal feelings. Hopefully we’re still doing those kinds of films because they really mean something to an audience.

You’re a true student of horror and it is really exciting me right now. You’re name-dropping all the right things!

Before I have to let you go, I want to make sure to ask about how the Pishach attacks. Did you always know that the invisibility angle was the way to go? Can you tell us about the evolution there in terms of the way you shot those action scenes and discovered all the possibilities that ability came with?

DUTTA: Absolutely. That’s one of the rules that we do know from our mythology is that it can be invisible and that it can shape-shift. The shape-shifting component we didn’t do as much with in this film because it didn’t end up working with the tone we were going for so much. But the invisibility angle, it worked perfectly for how I wanna make films. I’m so constantly looking at movies like Jaws or Alien, and I think that leaving it in the audience’s imagination is so much scarier, as any filmmaker worth their salt will tell you.

But in this case, I loved the idea of playing with the audience’s expectations, and there’s a psychological component to the film, but bringing the audience in on what Sam and then Joyce and the mother and the father are going through where it’s, is this real? Is this really going on? Am I seeing things? My favorite sequence, I think the most effective sequence of horror in the film is when Joyce is in the bathroom, she’s playing with the lights. That’s a real thing. I have a laundry room that has one of those light timers and every time it goes off, I’m convinced I’m gonna die. Every single time. I’m just so scared. But it’s that same kind of very primal feeling. I think if you can’t see the thing, but it lives in the darkness and you have eyes staring out, which I think Rob Savage did wonderfully in The Boogeyman. It’s just so, so primal.

I have to end with this question because now I’m just too curious; what is your favorite movie of all time?

DUTTA: That’s a tough one. I think the film that I’ve watched the most and that [has] just seeped itself into my mind is probably The Shining. If I had to teach all the filmmaking that I know at least, which is very little, I think everything’s there in The Shining. I’d also say Hitchcock’s Notorious is another one where it’s like everything is there. But they’re movies that really pull you into a world and into the characters. Those are movies I could watch any time, any day for as long as it’s on TV.