PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Would you rather deal with a shady landlord or the supernatural? For Sam Rudykoff, director and co-writer of the short film Halfway Haunted, it’s a no-brainer…he’ll take some floating furniture and self-closing doors any day over the nightmares that often coincide with renting.
Halfway Haunted, which celebrated its premiere in August at HollyShorts Film Festival, blends horror-comedy with social critique to showcase the harsh realities of the current housing crisis. When Jess (Hannan Younis, What We Do in the Shadows 2019) is threatened with eviction by a cheerfully capitalist landlord (Sugar Lyn Beard, The Studio 2025), this desperate renter forms an unlikely partnership with the ghost (Kristian Bruun, Ready or Not 2019) haunting her apartment. Together, they fight back against the erasure of not only Jess’ home, but the history and community that it represents.
PopHorror caught up with Rudykoff to discuss his latest project and how he hopes this darkly comedic, politically-charged take on mass displacement and gentrification opens audiences’ eyes to what others are facing on a daily basis.
PopHorror: I really enjoyed Halfway Haunted! It’s very different from anything else out there right now. The ghost isn’t trying to scare or haunt her, per say. He wants to be an ally. What sparked that idea?
Sam Rudykoff: I watch a lot of horror movies and haunted house movies, and something that always bubbles up in my mind as I’m watching a lot of them is that the ghosts aren’t doing anything that bad. They usually just sort of spook people and make them go nuts. I’ve had times where I’ve dealt with worse things than this in a house. If you’re dealing with a fire hazard, bad wiring, bad plumbing or, God forbid, an eviction situation, that can cause a lot more problems in your life than just some floating furniture. Then I started thinking, it’s probably not great that that’s my reaction to these stories. Why is it that this doesn’t seem so bad? It struck me that it’s a sort of depressing fact of the way housing is right now, that people are regularly dealing with problems that they would probably trade for a haunting if they had the choice.
PopHorror: I feel that! I’d rather have a ghost buddy than an infestation or something major leaking.
Sam Rudykoff: Exactly. So the idea bubbled up from there. That was the genesis of the project.
PopHorror: You mentioned that you’ve watched a lot of horror and haunted house movies. Did any lend inspiration for Halfway Haunted?
Sam Rudykoff: It’s such a boring answer, but The Shining is probably my favorite horror movie of all time. Obviously, things don’t work out so well for the characters in that movie. But, you know, a few hallucinations here and there, it doesn’t seem so bad on paper. As far as more direct influences, there’s definitely a little bit of Beetlejuice in there and the Peter Jackson movie The Frighteners is one of my favorites. That’s a movie that I think has a lot of fun with the idea of ghosts just as people who happen to be dead rather than as these sort of mysterious spectral forces. The Sixth Sense is another great movie that does that really well, where the fact of them being ghosts is secondary to the fact of them being people. I thought that was a really interesting and more grounded way to approach a ghost story.
PopHorror: As much as you’re comfortable sharing, how much of this film comes from personal experience? Have you dealt with bad landlords and the housing struggle?
Sam Rudykoff: Up to a point. I would say that it’s an amalgamation of things I’ve dealt with and then things that friends of mine have dealt with. I’ve been lucky in that I’ve never been suddenly evicted or anything like that, but I’ve had landlords who were a little sketchy, for sure. I had one who, basically, if anything broke in the place, she would not only not fix it, she would accuse you of breaking it. It gets to a point where you feel like you’re walking on eggshells because everytime something breaks, you’re like, “Oh, this is going to be something that somehow I’m going to be blamed for.” My producer Mark [Delottinville] has been evicted twice under totally shady circumstances. The landlords will say, “Oh, my cousin needs to move into this place.” I’ve been lucky that I’ve never been thrown out of a place or anything like that, but I’ve lived in some places where things that should’ve been take care of and dealt with were not. In some cases, those became gradually more and more stressful.
Ultimately, and this is something that the movie deals with a bit, a lot of landlords know that tenants don’t have the resources to advocate for themselves, even when the law is on their side. That’s a very different story than actually being able to hire a lawyer or take time off work to go to renter’s court or whatever it may be. So even though, technically, tenants may be protected by the system on paper, reality tends to favor landlords. If they decide that they want to impose their will in an abusive way, there’s often very little people can do to stop it. To me, that’s scarier than most ghosts.
PopHorror: Halfway Haunted talks about some really big real world topics, including displacement and housing struggles. Do you feel that the horror genre is a good tool to start conversations about these things? Is this something that can be done more often in the industry?
Sam Rudykoff: For my sake, I certainly hope so. Horror has always been very strongly invested in social commentary and allegory. It doesn’t have to be, but it’s a genre that relies on magnifying our worst fears. Often, those are things that are based in reality as much as fantasy. So my answer would be yes.
PopHorror: I’d love to talk about the dynamic between Jess and the ghost. As we touched on earlier, it’s super unusual and fun. What was your approach to building that relationship? Did the actors have any input while filming?
Sam Rudykoff: The actors had a lot of input. I was very lucky to have a really fantastic cast with Hannan Younis and Kristian Bruun. I started from a place where I wanted the central tension of the movie to be that there were these two forces pushing in on Jess. On the one side, she’s dealing with the ghost. On the other side, she’s dealing with the landlord. She has to make a determination, essentially, of who’s the lesser evil. Following from that equation, I knew that the ghost would have to be a problem, but would also have to be able to make a case for himself that he wasn’t the biggest problem.
So the character grew out of defining that balance of, this is definitely a problem for her to live in a haunted house and this ghost is causing problems, but how much of that can we chalk up to just supernatural mischief and how much of it is genuinely malevolent? And then having the landlord on the other side, who’s obviously pretty malevolent. So crafting the characters, I knew that I wanted her to feel like somebody dealing with real life problems as opposed to just a scream queen. And I knew that he had to have enough depth and enough humanity that he could make a case for himself as an ally and as the lesser evil. Both of the actors were really instrumental for that.
PopHorror: Have you worked with these actors previously?
Sam Rudykoff: Kristian, I’ve been a fan of his since Orphan Black. He’s really amazing at portraying negative emotions in a way that isn’t off-putting. He can be angry or pouty or scary even, but he still has an enormous likability to him where he can get away with these kinds of emotions that a lot of other actors aren’t able to navigate with the light touch that he does. So that made him really fantastic for that kind of push and pull with the ghost and how he was going to be perceived.
And Hannan is somebody that I’ve known for over a decade. I initially met her through the comedy scene in Toronto and her sense of humor is incredible. She has a really strong background in comedy and physical comedy, which obviously comes to play later. But she’s always up for trying something that’s not the expected thing and that made her really great for this grounded, kind of everyday [character]. What I told her is, I wanted her to feel really over it as opposed to terrified and we built the character from there.
PopHorror: Can you talk about building your vision for the landlord? She’s so sunshine-y and corporate, but is more malevolent than the ghost.
Sam Rudykoff: Real estate is one of those things — and I don’t want to paint it with too broad of a brush — that a lot of people get into either because it’s a family business or because they see it as the quickest way to make a lot of money. I haven’t met a lot of landlords who, when they were kids, were like, “When I grow up, I want to be a property developer.” That’s not to say that there isn’t a place for property development and real estate and all that, but — without going into too much of an eat the rich mode — it is a profession which I do regard with a degree of mistrust and I don’t think I’m alone in that. So I wanted her evil to be defined by a self-centeredness as opposed to a more typical hatred of others.
I think what gets missed when people are talking about the housing crisis and really, inequality in general, is that people who aren’t directly affected by it don’t necessarily hate people who are well-off — it’s that they don’t really want to acknowledge them. It’s this feeling of, “Well, I’m okay. Your problem is not related to me.” But in fact, it is. So I wanted her to embody that point where apathy and selfishness becomes a kind of evil. It’s not that she hates Jess — it’s that she wants what’s best for herself and she genuinely isn’t thinking about other people. But we should all have a responsibility to think about others. Unfortunately, that is a form of evil. So that was how we crafted her character and Sugar Lyn Beard, who played her, was just fantastic at throwing herself into that kind of bubbly personality that’s just barely hiding a tremendously selfish person.
PopHorror: I understand that for this project, you reunited with producer Mark Delottinville, with whom you previously worked on the short film Cruise. Since that film, how has your work evolved?
Sam Rudykoff: I’ve known Mark since college. We were friends before we were filmmakers or co-workers and that helps a lot in the creative process in terms of collaborating. We both know each other well enough and trust each other enough that we can be honest with each other about points of disagreement. We can both say no to each other. We both trust each other’s judgement. That’s something I would say to anybody who is interested in making films — try and do it with people who you feel like you would probably want to know outside of just one context.
As for how that relationship evolves, it does just by virtue of, the more you do something, the more you learn. We both get to learn together where our collective and individual limits may be and how to navigate those. In terms of our artistic evolution, it’s always very hard to say when you’re in the middle of it. The last film that we made together, it was just a few people in one room and it was a much smaller, more contained kind of thing, whereas this takes place in three rooms. So we’re expanding our count a little bit! It’s been good to expand the canvas that we’re working with, learn new tools and form new pathways, so to speak. I hope that it’s a success.
PopHorror: Halfway Haunted had its premiere recently at HollyShorts. How did that go? What was the reception?
Sam Rudykoff: Pretty good! I’ve been keeping an eye on the old Letterboxd reviews and they seem to be positive. We played the horror block. There are some great films in there. It’s a good festival in that they do a really good job of programming a very wide variety of films and also pulling from a lot of different experience levels, and levels of scope and accomplishment. We were behind Letitia Wright (Black Panther 2018) on the red carpet and then there’s other people there who it might be their very first film. So it’s a great festival in terms of providing a platform for newer filmmakers like myself and also bolstering it with some heavyweights. We saw some really great films from other filmmakers and the people who were at our screening seemed to enjoy it.
PopHorror: With a short film, you only have so much time. You have to make every minute count. Was it hard to condense Halfway Haunted to 15 minutes? Was there anything that we didn’t get to see that had to be cut?
Sam Rudykoff: It was a challenge. In fact, when I first came up with the idea and started writing it, I gave up on it because I didn’t think I’d be able to fit it into a short. I thought, “Okay, this is probably going to be just something I develop as a feature script.” But then Mark, my producer, was like, “Well, why don’t we see if the Arts Council here in Canada wants to fund this thing?” I thought that they never will, but sure, fine. Then they gave us a production grant. So I called up my co-writer Bryn Pottie, who’s a really fantastic writer. He actually just published his first novel. I said to him, “I have this script and I can’t decide if it’s a feature or a short, and it needs to be a short.” We took out our knives and started hacking away at it. I think we probably went through five or six rewrites to get it to where it ended up being. But the nice thing is that we had a lot of ideas that didn’t make it in that we’re now developing as a feature version of the script. In a perfect world, that’ll be coming down the pipeline in the next year or two. We’ll see.
PopHorror: Looking ahead, are there other themes or real world issues that you would like to explore in another project?
Sam Rudykoff: There’s lots. With both of the shorts that I’ve done, something that I’m drawn to — and this sounds very bleak, even though they’re both kind of comedies — is the way that capitalism beats people down. It’s not in dramatic ways, but the things that people come to accept and then the positions that puts them into. I think things have been getting a lot worse, at least socioeconomically. It’s a gradual diminishing of quality of life and standards of living. Salaries aren’t growing, rents are going up. Day-to-day, it doesn’t seem like you’re giving up that much, but then when you think about how things were 10, 20, 30 or 40 years ago, it’s like, people used to be able to buy a house. That didn’t used to be something you needed help from your parents to do or had to have a really high salary. That used to be something people took for granted.
Moving beyond housing, I think that’s true of a lot of things right now. Things have been spiraling into a place where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. It puts people into positions where they have to act out of desperation all of a sudden when a couple decades ago, there would have been, if not a social safety net, just a more robust society there to support them. That’s something I think about a lot. I’m a millennial, so I’m probably right on the border of people who grew up with the promise of this wonderful Clinton-era vision for the future and then had it taken away. Growing up, I remember assuming that things would just keep getting better and better, and then at a certain point, they stopped. So that’s something that I think about a lot and that is something I’ll continue to be exploring in my work.
I don’t think short films or popular entertainment needs to change the world, but being able to make people think about things in a little bit more of a concerted way, even if it’s just for a few minutes, is something that I hope I can accomplish.
PopHorror: For anyone who watches Halfway Haunted, what are the main things you hope they take away from it?
Sam Rudykoff: First, I just hope that they have a really good time with it. But I hope they have a good time with it so that they feel a little bit more aware of those below the line kinds of effects of poverty. The housing crisis is the example that the film is working with, but I think in general, everybody could stand to think a little bit more about people with problems that they don’t necessarily have, which is a very broad mandate. I don’t love message movies. I really didn’t want to make something that was didactic or, “Here is the metaphor.” But I do think that art has some responsibility to at least make people think about something in a way they didn’t before they saw or experienced whatever that art is. That can be emotionally, it can be politically, it can be whatever.
I hope that in this case, it makes people realize that the housing crisis isn’t just this abstract thing that happens to people who get struck with these crazy tragedies. It’s something that now is just a reality for so many people, especially younger people. It’s a shame because you need affordable housing not just because it’s a human right, but because communities are built on people being able to have a place to stay, being able to afford to raise families or start businesses or take risks for their ambitions. If they can’t put a roof over their heads, they can’t form communities or have lives.
PopHorror: It’s truly crazy anymore! They’re building these luxury apartments that have so many issues and a one bedroom costs almost $2,000.
Sam Rudykoff: It’s the kind of thing where if all you’re doing is transporting in people who already have sorted out their lives, that’s not really much of a community. It’s more just a country club. You’re not around people who are going to be doing exciting things or starting new families and new communities. It’s not to say that the rich people suck or are boring or anything like that. But so much of what makes a city or a town, what gives it an identity, are the people who come with very little and build something. So if all you’re doing is working with pre-built parts, you have an IKEA community. That’s what those condos sort of are.
PopHorror: Will Halfway Haunted be available for streaming?
Sam Rudykoff: Since we only just premiered a few weeks ago, we’re currently just at festivals. We have a few coming up and hopefully will have a bunch more over the next six to eight months. If anyone wants to keep track of that, they can follow myself on Instagram @samrudykoff. Once we’ve done our festival run, we will make the film available online in some way, shape or form, but that won’t be happening for at least a few months.
Thanks for speaking with us, Sam!
