It was just last month that The Cellar, directed by Brendan Muldowney (Pilgrimage) and starring Elisha Cuthbert (Eat Wheaties!) and Eoin Macken (Till Death), made its world premiere at SXSW. The Austin, Texas-based festival returned in full force with in-person screenings and events, two years after it was forced to shut down and move towards a virtual-only experience amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. “SXSW is such a great festival for this genre,” says Cuthbert in our interview ahead of the festival, “so [it] was very exciting to see that [SXSW] was interested in us and wanting to premiere our film.” Indeed, The Cellar was selected to be part of the Midnighters program, during a collection of horror, and horror-adjacent, movies are scheduled for late-night screenings throughout the festival’s run.
The Cellar finds Keira and Brian Woods (Cuthbert and Macken, respectively) moving their family into a centuries-old home in Ireland. Not too long after moving in, they experience strange occurrences in their house. When Keira witnesses their daughter’s disappearance in the house’s cellar while on the phone with her, she immediately launches an investigation and ultimately discovers that an ancient demon is possessing their home. For Keira, it becomes a race against time as she desperately tries to locate her missing daughter before the demonic entity can claim the rest of her family. “It’s based on a short film I made years ago,” says Muldowney of The Cellar, referring to his award-winning short The Ten Steps. “I’ve seen it taught in schools, and I’d been following comments on different platforms over the years [and] I used to see a lot of comments from people saying, ‘I wonder what happens next.’ That was really where [The Cellar] came from: ‘I wonder what happens next.'”
When it premiered at SXSW, The Cellar was met with praise. Flickering Myth, for instance, applauded the film’s “admirable tonal restraint and aesthetic self-assurance,” while The Irish Times called it a “chilling tale.” And now, The Cellar is set to release simultaneously in theaters and on Shudder on April 15. Shudder, in particular, has become one of the most popular streaming platforms for horror, thriller, and supernatural content since its inception in 2015, boasting a collection of Shudder-exclusive movies and critically acclaimed original programming.
Cuthbert Praises Muldowney’s Script and Direction
“It felt, for me, very real,” says Cuthbert of shooting inside the actual house seen in The Cellar. As it turns out, both she and Macken resided on the property throughout production. “The house had a lot of really incredible vibes and sort of took on a life of its own. It made it a lot easier for me because I felt very immersed in it, and [the story] felt very real because of that.”
With a string of 2000s horror movies under her belt, Cuthbert is no stranger to the horror genre. What sets The Cellar apart for the actress is the agency Keira has that wasn’t otherwise available to her previous horror movie roles. “That’s what I loved about Brendan’s script. That’s what made it so intriguing for me because there was a consistency to [Keira’s strength] and an organic feel to it. She doesn’t come on as all of a sudden strong when things hit the fan. It’s from the get-go: you see her at work, and you see her carry the strength from beginning to end.”
At the heart of The Cellar‘s haunted-house tale is a story of family and love, underscored by a feminist perspective that seems to echo across popular horror movies from within the last decade or so: between A Quiet Place Part II, Us, and The Invisible Man, to name a few, women characters in horror movies have evolved from being “scream queens” and “the final girl” to outright leading the narrative. “Women are so multifaceted, and [they] have to be strong and work and carry a family and balance work life and mom life — and I felt like, wow, this is a really strong, incredible female character,” says Cuthbert. “Keira is never the victim and is not afraid of anything.”
The Cellar’s Contribution to Irish Horror Cinema
“There’s such a legacy in the history of these kinds of dark entity-based or horror-based and tragedies and so forth. [They] are embedded in Irish culture, so it kind of makes sense,” says Macken when asked about the sort of renaissance Irish horror cinema has experienced within the last couple of decades. Ireland’s last hit horror movie, in fact, was arguably The Hole in the Ground in 2019, which Macken also starred in. This year, at SXSW, The Cellar was one of three Irish films present and one of two within the genre, the other being Antonia Campbell-Hughes’ body horror It Is In Us All. “I think it’s kind of indicative of the fact that there’s some incredibly talented Irish filmmakers. It’s so cool when you get Irish filmmakers traveling to big international festivals. I think they deserve to because there’s a really great industry in Ireland, and there are incredibly talented filmmakers and incredibly talented crews.”
Macken himself has worked behind in the camera as a writer and director. His works include the 2020 drama Here Are the Young Men, starring Dean-Charles Chapman, Finn Cole, and Anya Taylor-Joy, as well as the upcoming relationship drama Grey Elephant, which will explore two couples’ first meeting after months of being on lockdown, effectively joining a chorus of recent movies about the pandemic. When asked if working on The Cellar has inspired a desire to write and direct his own horror feature, Macken said: “I actually find watching horror films really scary. I’m not good. I’ve actually had to leave two apartments in my life that were genuinely haunted, [so] I’m not sure I’d have the tenacity to make one just yet.”
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