PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Slashers like Michael Myers in Halloween and demonic entities found in films like The Conjuring certainly instill fear in audiences. But there’s something about the horror subgenre of home invasion—the idea of a dangerous intruder entering what’s supposed to be our safe space—that can truly be bone-chilling. Inspired by classics of the same subgenre, including Stephen King’s Misery, Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Wired Shut was created by Peter Malone Elliott and Alexander Sharp, which is now available for viewing on Amazon Prime, Google Play, and Vudu.
Directed by Sharp, co-written by Sharp and Elliott and screenplay by Elliott, Wired Shut centers on famed author Reed Rodney (Blake Stadel: The Twilight Zone TV series), who boasts a successful career and secluded mansion. But behind-the-scenes, he’s an alcoholic haunted by past actions that destroyed his family. Following a horrific car accident, he’s forced to undergo facial reconstructive surgery and have his jaw wired shut. Just as the isolation of recovering at home threatens to overwhelm him, his estranged daughter, Emmy (Natalie Sharp: Supernatural TV series), shows up with questionable intentions.
On November 30, 2021, the day of the film’s release, we spoke with Sharp and Elliott, who became friends while attending Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. The duo shared details on how Wired Shut is a highly-anticipated career accomplishment, the speedy, two-week turnaround time for filming, and what they hope viewers will take away from the movie.
PopHorror: How does it feel to have Wired Shut officially out and available to the public?
Alexander Sharp: I know Peter feels the same, but I’ll just go ahead and say that I am over the moon about it. I’m still pinching myself.
Peter Malone Elliott: Ditto. It was incredibly surreal this morning going to Prime and seeing it available on Amazon. I’m still wrapping my head around it. It’s amazing.
PopHorror: I understand that Wired Shut is a big accomplishment for both of you. Peter, it’s your debut feature film credit as writer/producer. Alexander, this is your debut feature length film. How does that feel for both of you?
Alexander Sharp: Oh my God, it’s amazing. It’s a dream come true. I knew I always wanted to do a feature; that’s the game I’d like to play. I’ve done a lot of shorts, I’ve done music videos, and I’ve done a couple commercials, but the goal is to be directing movies. That’s been the dream for as far back as I can remember. It feels fantastic to say that I’ve finally done my first feature film, and it certainly won’t be my last.
Peter Malone Elliott: I feel like I’m repeating what Alex said, but what Alex said! I’m pursuing writing in a lot of different avenues. I just finished writing a novel. I’ve written plays, but film is my first love, and it’s something that I’ve always wanted to do, screenwriting. The fact that my first credit is something that I had such a personal hand in, I was so knee-deep involved in it… Alex and I did like six different jobs on set. We made this for not a lot of money, so we had to do a lot of different things. The fact that we got such a holistic film education in our first feature, and the fact that it’s now coming out to the world is surreal, really.
Alexander Sharp: It’s unbelievable. It’s unbelievable because of what you just said, actually. We did it ourselves. Of course, we have so many people to thank, but on set for two weeks, Peter and I set up everything between the two of us. We were running the props closet, we were in charge of, to a certain extent, planning the meals and all this stuff. It wasn’t one of those projects that we had a lot of different departments. Peter and I figured out how to make a movie, and we played the roles that needed to be played, because we didn’t have a lot of money, so we just did everything.
Peter Malone Elliott: If you look at our IMDB, Alex probably has a few more than I do, but each of us probably have a least half a dozen credits, if not more.
Alexander Sharp: I think you’re credited for costume as well!
PopHorror: It sounds like you guys were a pretty well-oiled machine. Was this your first time working together on a project?
Peter Malone Elliott: We went to film school together, so we did a short film right out of school that I was also in. I used to do a bit of acting. But after that, we realized that we needed to do a feature. That was the best thing for our careers. It was a task that we were both ready for, but we knew that if we were gonna do a feature ourselves for not a lot of money, it had to be something that didn’t have a lot of characters, have very few locations, something that we could tangibly do in like two weeks with a dozen people. We’re both fans of the horror invasion, thriller subgenre, and we both watched Scorsese’s Cape Fear remake at the same time. When that finished, we looked at each other and were like, “This? Something like this? Cool, okay, great!” That got the wheels set in motion.
Then someone in my life at the time was going through the same surgery that the main character Reed has. Her jaw had to be wired shut. She was drinking things out of a straw; she had the ice pack wrapped around her head. I was looking at her, and I was like, “I haven’t seen that in a home invasion thriller. What would that be like?” It snowballed from there. At its heart, it’s a father and daughter trying to reconnect, but amidst the genre trappings of the main character, Reed, physically not being able to talk and that affecting his emotional journey as well as his literal life.
PopHorror: Aside from Cape Fear, Wired Shut was also inspired by Stephen King’s Misery?
Peter Malone Elliott: Yes, 100 percent. I think that, Cape Fear, and probably Hitchcock, specifically Rear Window. Those were are three main ones.
Alexander Sharp: Those were the main ones. There’s been so many great home invasion thrillers made. I’m a big fan of that subgenre. Psycho is a favorite of mine. Not really home invasion but in the same fabric of genre, I suppose. Then recently, I’m a huge fan of Don’t Breathe. That’s great.
PopHorror: What is it about that subgenre of home invasion that’s so riveting for audiences to watch?
Alexander Sharp: It’s such a personal, high stakes scenario that basically everyone can relate to, being in your home where you are safe—or you’re supposed to be safe—and suddenly being put in a situation where your home is no longer safe because you’ve got a psycho running after you with a knife. It strikes a different nerve more than, I think, any other genre for that reason. Slashers are great, ghost stories are great, but they don’t quite hit the same nerve as home invasion because, as I said, it’s just so personal. That’s one of my worst fears ever, waking up and hearing someone in my house that isn’t supposed to be. That’s terrifying to me.
Peter Malone Elliott: I would add to that, just from a writing standpoint, it’s such a wonderful opportunity for a pressure cooker for these characters. Every single internal piece of turmoil is going to come to life somehow through this genre mechanism. It’s a wonderfully purposive way to explore these three characters.
PopHorror: So, Wired Shut centers on only three characters?
Alexander Sharp: Peter almost played a character, actually! I don’t think I’ve mentioned this in any other interview, but you were almost a text message character.
Peter Malone Elliott: The main character is an author, and there’s an exchange with his agent via email. Briefly, we were thinking about me doing a voiceover cameo as the douchey agent, but we decided against it.
Alexander Sharp: I thought it would’ve been funny, but maybe a little off. It was a fun idea. I imagine what it would’ve been like if we had done it.
Peter Malone Elliott: It would’ve been hilarious for us. I think the audience would’ve been like, “What’s happening?”
PopHorror: Can you share details on the timeline of Wired Shut? When did you first come up with the idea, and when did filming take place?
Alexander Sharp: I was driving back from a film festival that we were in for our short film in Washington in September 2018. I was driving back through a storm. I got a text message from Peter, and it said, “Wired Shut, home invasion,” and it had the premise. I was like, “Fantastic! Let’s write it.” We didn’t really know when we were gonna make it, but we knew we wanted to write the script, so Peter wrote it. We developed the story together, but it’s really Peter’s brilliant piece of writing. We had it by December 2018.
Then the location, through connections, magically revealed itself to us. I knew a family friend’s contractor here in Vancouver, Canada, and the real estate agent—both of them were involved in this house in West Vancouver that was on the market but not yet sold—mentioned it was being taken off the market for two weeks in March 2019. Peter and I were looking at each other in December 2018 going, “Okay, we’ve got two months to get everything casted, get the props, line the script, do the shot list. That’s like no time at all.” We’re like, “Do we do this right now?” We just went for it. We put it together in two months, shot in March 2019, wrapped post-production a year later, and almost a year later, here we are on digital and VOD.
Peter Malone Elliott: We finished editing literally a week before everything shut down for the pandemic, so the timing was awesome.
Alexander Sharp: That’s right, yeah. We finished our movie, and the whole industry shut down. I’m sure a lot of people could relate to that. I’m sure a lot of people made things, and then COVID.
PopHorror: Did you always intend for the movie to come out in November 2021, or did COVID push it back?
Peter Malone Elliott: We didn’t have a specific date release in mind. The initial idea when Alex and I were editing it was, we’ll do the festival circuit and what happens, happens. But given that the pandemic completely changed the industry in so many ways, film festivals either didn’t happen or they were online and severely cut down on the types of films they were making. We changed gears and looked for distribution straight away.
PopHorror: Are you guys doing anything special to celebrate the release of Wired Shut?
Peter Malone Elliott: I’ve been working, so no.
Alexander Sharp: He never stops!
Peter Malone Elliott: I’ve got a fancy bottle of bourbon that I’m gonna crack open, and Alex and I are gonna FaceTime because I’m in Brooklyn and he’s in Vancouver, so we have to do it virtually.
Alexander Sharp: I’m cracking open a nice bottle of wine, toasting my good friend, Peter, over here over FaceTime, and then I’m gonna watch it with my father and sister, who’s in the film, actually. Nothing big, just a little sort of family screening at home. We’ll do that tonight.
PopHorror: For people who watch Wired Shut, is there anything you hope they take away from it?
Peter Malone Elliott: Obviously, it’s a thriller with horror mixed into it, but at the core of it, it’s a father-daughter estrangement story and trying to reconnect, but they physically and emotionally can’t. It’s about them reuniting. I hope that, amidst all the genre trappings, the emotional resonance of that relationship strikes a chord with audiences.
Alexander Sharp: That’s the main thing. It is a home invasion thriller. It does have elements of horror. It is supposed to be, on some level, a Friday night popcorn movie. It’s fun. But in its most distilled form, at its deep core, it’s a drama between a father and a daughter. My hope would be the same as Peter’s, that people have fun with it and feel the tension, but also invest themselves in the characters of Reed and Emmy and their desperate longing for reconnection, whether they’re willing to admit it or not. That chessboard, that setup of those characters and that friction, hopefully will propel the audiences into the final 30 minutes of cat and mouse thrilling action.
Peter Malone Elliott: I also hope that audiences enjoy the slow burn tension pressure cooker because that’s really what the first 45 minutes is. It’s all building, building, building up the tension slowly until the final third act, and then it’s all purposive, purposive, bang, bang, bang. But action, I don’t mean bang, bang shooting.
Alexander Sharp: Well, there’s some shooting.
Peter Malone Elliott: Ah, true.
PopHorror: Is there anything else upcoming for you guys that you’d like readers to know about?
Peter Malone Elliott: This year, I’ve been writing a novel and I just finished it, so I’m working on revising that. That’s been the big project for me this year, because I don’t know if you guys know, but writing a novel is really hard. It takes a long time.
Alexander Sharp: Really!? It sounds easy.
Peter Malone Elliott: Alex and I also have another feature script ready to go for when the time comes.
Alexander Sharp: Yeah, we’ve got a really great sort of Southern gothic thriller, family thriller. Silence of the Lambs-y, but I don’t want to give too much away. As for me, I’m directing music videos and commercials and I’m writing. As Peter said, we’ve got a script that he’s written and I’ve got a script that I wrote, which I’d love to do. I’m also co-writing another script at the moment, which I’d really love to do. All, including Peter’s, are in the same wheelhouse as Wired Shut, some more than others. But it’s all horror/thriller a little bit. It’s exciting to maybe keep doing that genre. I don’t know that I’m done with it after Wired Shut. I feel like there’s so much more to do just in that genre. It’s exciting.
PopHorror: It’s definitely a fun genre! Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you’d like people to know?
Alexander Sharp: I’m bald if people don’t know that.
Peter Malone Elliott: When we met in college, he said I look like Justin Timberlake, which I don’t think but that’s very nice. And I said, “Oh, you look like Paul Bettany,” and then we became friends.
Alexander Sharp: We just complimented each other. It was beautiful.
