PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Masked slashers, possessed dolls and haunted houses can certainly be terrifying. But what’s truly the stuff of nightmares? Dedicating your entire life to a dead-end job that gives you nothing back in return. This is the concept of The Mill, a new thriller that premiered on Hulu Oct. 9.
Joe (Lil Rel Howery, Get Out 2017), a businessman at a tech company called Mallard, wakes up beside an ancient grist mill situated in the center of an open-air prison cell, with absolutely no idea how he got there. Each day, he and other prisoners must complete a specified number of rotations on the mill, or risk being “terminated.” The catch? Mallard is running this entire operation as an employee training program. After putting in years with the company, and even risking his marriage to put in more hours at the office, Joe expects a promotion…not this. Can he make it out before the birth of his child?
The Mill is directed by Sean King O’Grady, who PopHorror had the pleasure of chatting with as part of the streaming platform’s Huluween press junket.
PopHorror: To start, I feel like there are so many corporate/office movies that are comedies, like Office Space, that kind of thing. What about that world makes for the perfect thriller?
Sean King O’Grady: I think because it’s relatable, right? I think comedy and horror or thriller, I think they kind of exist on the same spectrum, just different ends of it. We spend a lot of our lives in workplaces, and we have our dreams come true there, we have our nightmares play out in ways that we can’t even imagine would happen in those places. So I think anywhere life happens is where good stories happen.
PopHorror: Sure! And I loved all the little nods to corporate culture, like when he got the pen [as a reward]. It reminds me of like, “Oh my God, you did such a good job, here’s a pizza party.”
Sean King O’Grady: That’s exactly what it is! It’s funny, there was a version of the script at one point where we had dozens of those coming in and then we realized we went way overboard. But yeah, it definitely is the corporate pizza party.
PopHorror: It very much takes place on the one set with the one actor, who was amazing, by the way. Does that make your job easier or harder to have less moving pieces on the set?
Sean King O’Grady: In our case, I think Rel was so fantastic that it made our job a lot easier. Everybody across the board on our team really did something incredible I think in terms of the set design, I think in terms of the way it was shot. I think all those things that the world was built and created and was real, and Rel brought a reality to the performance, and all we had to do was capture it. Honestly, once we built the world, it was like making a documentary.
PopHorror: Can you talk about the mill itself? Is there any deeper meaning to that?
Sean King O’Grady: Not to quote the movie, but the meaning is, there’s no meaning. That’s what it is to me, and I think there are people who have vocations or professions or things they do where they feel they’re getting something from it and they’re giving value to the world, and I think just the way that our society is and the way that corporate structures are, there are people who feel like what they’re doing has no meaning. And that’s a really terrifying way to spend the bulk of your life, to spend eight hours a day, eight of your waking hours a day doing something you feel doesn’t have any meaning. That’s genuine horror.
PopHorror: With that false hope that you’re going to get something out of it, but…
Sean King O’Grady: Yeah, but the system’s just gonna keep taking from you and taking from you. You’re never gonna get that payout.
PopHorror: Can you talk about — without giving it away — the decision of ending the movie the way that it is? It’s very abrupt. We have some closure, but not a lot of closure.
Sean King O’Grady: To me, I think that…how do I do this without spoiling the ending? I wanted to give the movie the feeling of a real mic drop ending and sort of put a period on it, but it’s the end of the sentence. It’s not the end of the paragraph or the novel.
PopHorror: Now just in general, can you talk about how you got involved in this project, and what made you want to be involved?
Sean King O’Grady: This is a really rare thing, it never happens this way, but I was looking for a specific type of project, and I was talking to my producing partner Josh Feldman. I said, “I want a dystopian science fiction thriller, I want it to be contained, I want it to touch on technology, I want it to look at these things.” And he said, “You’re not going to believe this, I have a script that does all of those things.” And so he sent me [writer] Jeff [David Thomas]’s script and I read it and didn’t sleep that night, and just knew that I had to make this movie. It hit me really emotionally. It touched on a lot of themes that I’d been wanting to tackle for a long time but hadn’t found the right material for it, and it did it in a really cinematic and fun way that I’d never seen done before.
PopHorror: To wrap up, is there any message that you hope people get out of the movie?
Sean King O’Grady: I hope people have fun, first and foremost, I hope it’s a fun thriller that they can enjoy. But if they’re gonna take something away from it, I think it’s to examine the systems and relationships in your own life and say, “Am I giving more to this than I’m getting out of it?” And obviously, it’s not that simple, right? There are certain circumstances where we need to stay in those situations, we need to pay the bills, we have responsibilities, whatever it might be. But I think if we can examine all the systems and relationships in our lives and look at those that are maybe broken, and start to think about them in a different way and start to see if there maybe is a way to either break the systems or break ourselves out of the systems, that’s what I would want people to do. So just examine and look for ways to make your life better.
Thanks for speaking with us, Sean! The Mill is now available to watch on Hulu.
