PopHorror Let's Get Scared
If we’re friends, then you know how much I love The Bye Bye Man and anything by Brandon Cronenberg. When I heard Douglas Smith, star of The Bye Bye Man (the film also stars Carrie-Anne Moss, his costar from The Bye Bye Man) and Cronenberg’s Antiviral (and is the brother of Gregory Smith who starred in my favorite TV show, Everwood), had a new movie coming out AND it was written and directed by Lowell Dean, I was in. Lowell is known for the campy fun films, Wolfcop and Another Wolfcop so I knew his new film, Die Alone, wasn’t going to disappoint. Throw in Douglas, who is so incredibly passionate and talented, and it’s sure to become a fan favorite.
Tells the story of a young man who has amnesia. He bands together with a rugged survivalist in a zombie-like outbreak to find his girlfriend.
To celebrate the release of their new movie, I chatted with Lowell and Douglas about the film, finding the perfect Hawaiian shirt, horror movies, and more!
PopHorror: I’m a huge fan of you both so this is super exciting for me. I loved Die Alone and can’t wait to hear more about it. My first question is for you, Lowell, what inspired the story and how did the project come about?
Lowell Dean: This movie was inspired by a few different things. I’d say one being a filmmaker from Saskatchewan and just wanting to see more of a Saskatchewan landscape in a pandemic zombie-type movie. Two, I just got really sick of technology, and this was 10 years ago so you can imagine how much I love it now. And I just had this dream of standing on a hill and smashing my phone so I wouldn’t get text messages or have to talk to people, which is kind of the beginning of our film. Three, I just wanted to make a love story so all those elements or influences coalesced and I wanted to say something interesting about how far people would go for love but do it in Saskatchewan and do it in a way where we got away from cell phones and a lack of a real connection.
PopHorror: I hear you about technology because my internet was down for two weeks and you never really realize how much you rely on it until it’s ripped away from you, but it was kind of nice at the same time.
Lowell Dean: Yeah!
PopHorror: Douglas, what intrigued you about the script and made you want to be a part of the project?
Douglas Smith: I really liked how it sort of drew you into this house and I think I thought it was going to keep going elsewhere and it just kept circling around this one place and this one place took on more and more meaning with every turn of the page. It excited me both from a story angle, but it also excited me from a practical angle because it’s a Canadian independent movie and you kind of want to keep your scope a little bit within a small sort of sphere if you really want to make something that looks good. I was excited by the turns and I just kept wanting to read, but I was also excited of the possibility of it being attainable, to make something that seemed exciting in my head. It seemed like that could happen. The reveals and stuff were interesting. I don’t know, I just kind of blew through it. I think me and Lowell have similar sensibilities or something because I just felt like I got it. It was really fun. It’s fun when you get a script and you just start scrolling – talking about technology – reading it on my laptop and I was like, “Oh, this is good, this doesn’t suck. This is good, this is good. Oh yeah!” And then your question is, is the movie real? Is it actually happening though? Or is it just a good script that’s not going to get made and I’m going to have my heart broken?
PopHorror: Was there anything that you were adamant about bringing to your character?
Douglas Smith: Hmm… We were talking about this. I guess, Lowell, you were like, at times, we wanted to push Ethan into being more urgent about finding Emma, but I wanted to sort of hold onto what was happening to him internally. We didn’t want to reveal too much to the audience about that, but we wanted it enough to be there that when certain reveals happen, you can watch it back and see that that was happening. That was the constant tug-of-war I was having, sometimes with Lowell and sometimes just with myself. Your assistant as well, Lowell. She was always telling me if I was doing not enough or too much.
Lowell Dean: That’s funny because my answer was going to be the Hawaiian shirt.
Douglas Smith: Oh god! That would have been so much more simplistic! Yeah, that Hawaiian shirt.
Lowell Dean: Yeah, a good Hawaiian shirt.
Douglas Smith: We weren’t going to use it because the costume department couldn’t find a double, and so we tried all the other ones because you need to have a double. Or maybe she only had three? She had more than one.
Lowell Dean: Yeah, a movie like this, you need several versions and they’re like, “We could find one,” so Magda (set supervisor Magdalena Shenher) had to drive around to various cities to get more of the shirt.
PopHorror: Neither of you are strangers to the horror genre. Lowell, I love Wolfcop and Another Wolfcop. Douglas, The Bye Bye Man and Antiviral are two of my top films. I’m actually staring at a one-sheet of The Bye Bye Man right now. I have it hanging in my office.
Douglas Smith: Wow!
PopHorror: What is it that keeps drawing you back to horror?
Douglas Smith: I’ll let Lowell go with that one because I’m curious what you’re going to say.
Lowell Dean: I have a weird relationship with horror. I don’t think everything I do is horror per se but it’s always put in the box of horror, and I think that’s probably because of the blood and the weirdness and things like that. I consider Wolfcop as much a comedy as a horror and I consider Die Alone a love story as much as a horror, if not more. I think I’m drawn to, I guess what I call genre filmmaking because it’s really fun and because you can tell heightened stories, you know what I mean? I’m not saying I’d never make a movie of two people having a simple relationship problem, but if one of them could be a squid or a werewolf or a vampire, I just feel like it’s going to be more texturally interesting and fun and weird. I don’t know, I love that but to me that’s the icing of the story, not the cake of the story. I will be shocked if I do things that aren’t genre in the next few years.
PopHorror: I love that! They’re really horror adjacent, I wouldn’t call them straight horror either.
Lowell Dean: Horror adjacent!
Douglas Smith: I think I’m drawn to human stories that I can understand, and I can figure out what I want to bring to the character, so I wouldn’t say I’m drawn to a particular genre. I get scripts and I read them and I’m like, “Okay, am I a good fit for this?” I’m always just questioning that and trying to be objective because you can sometimes just want to do every role you read but trying to be like, but is this a good fit? It’s a little bit like, do I relate to the writer’s voice? Do I think we can pull it off with the reality of what it is? You get a script and it’s a hundred million dollar American studio movie, you think differently than when you get a script for a Canadian independent movie that’s being shot in Saskatchewan, even though it is, I think, the biggest to be shot in Saskatchewan in what, I think like 10 years?
Lowell Dean: Over 10 years, yeah.
PopHorror: Wow!
Douglas Smith: So, it was a big movie for Saskatchewan but if you read a script like I was saying before, like the script for Inglorious Basterds. If you read the script for Inglorious Basterds and they told you they were going to make it for a few million dollars in Saskatchewan or in Canada, you’d be like, “How are we going to pull that off? That doesn’t seem like a good idea. That doesn’t sound like we’re setting ourselves up for success.” So I think I do have a practical brain because I’ve been working on enough things. I want to work on things that I think have a shot at being good and filmmaking, so much has to go into a movie to make it good. So I kind of have a lot… My brain… Sometimes I need to shut off part of my brain.
PopHorror: I can understand that. I have one last question for you both. What’s your favorite scary movie?
Douglas Smith: Halloween. Halloween II would be the second.
Lowell Dean: For me, I would say Jaws just because it messed me up at a young age and I revisit it and I never dislike it. I was afraid to have a bath when I was seven years old when I first watched it. That’s how much it traumatized me.
Douglas Smith: I love Jaws, but I don’t think it’s scary. I watch it every summer and I’m a surfer.
Lowell Dean: If I saw the shark from Jaws right, I’d be uncomfortable. It’s absolutely, to me, a scary movie. I can at least outrun Michael Myers. I’m in the water and a shark is there? That’s it.
Douglas Smith: Ah, Jaws is great.
Thank you so much to Lowell and Douglas for taking the time to chat with us. Die Alone is now on Digital and On Demand!
