Sick: Production Designer Jenny Möller on Pandemic-Themed Horror

The COVID pandemic created a lot of uncertainty within the industry when it hit its peak in 2020. Still, as society slowly reacclimated itself thanks to preventative measures and the advancements in medicine, Hollywood found creative avenues to provide commentary. Director John Hyams and writers Kevin Williamson and Katelyn Crabb found such an opportunity in the Blumhouse horror film Sick for Peacock. The story follows Parker (Gideon Adlon) and her best friend Miri (Beth Million), who, due to the pandemic, decide to quarantine at the family lake house alone – or so they think. Production designer Jenny Möller spoke to Bleeding Cool about filming horror with the pandemic spin and its creative commentary.

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Bleeding Cool: What intrigued you about ‘Sick?’
Möller: I liked the script. It was intelligent and funny in a lot of ways. It had that ‘Kevin Williamson’ vibe and read that way. I like John Hyams. We had a great FaceTime chat. He seemed incredibly decisive. He seemed to know exactly what he wanted, which is great as a designer, walking in with somebody with a clear vision. That was an easy choice for me. In our interview, John said he wanted to do it as a straight-up slasher film, which I enjoyed. I like that high-energy, on-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of thriller horror film.

What type of things were you able to play with you wouldn’t do in a more conventional horror film?
The story was pretty straightforward in what we were trying to achieve. There was that great twist at the end. Most of it was deciding how we would present this house that we had spent so much time on. How were we going to tell a story with that? In the final cut, they actually cut out a large story point; there was a little sister at one point who had died at. That’s where we come into Parker’s trauma as an adult and play with her intimacy and boundary issues, and get into the family side.

I don’t think that made it into the final cut. When discussing how to present this house, if you notice, the house is pretty stark and has a real S cabin vibe, but it doesn’t necessarily feel super homey. That was intentional. We wanted it to feel like these people have some privilege with the size of the house, to speak to Parker becoming more aware as the film continues. As a young woman of privilege, she was not aware in the beginning, and we wanted to drive that home. It was intentional you don’t see family photos, that you don’t see knick-knacks, that no one lives there. She says her dad comes up once a year, and that’s what we wanted it to feel like, like a well-done, well-kept home, but a well-kept house, but not a home.

Given how ‘Sick’ deals specifically with the pandemic, was there any planning on the commentary with the spacing?
We planned out all of the spaces, but we weren’t trying to make too much of a commentary on that. There were going to be some funny moments as there are when any actor gets a hold of the material and it reads as funny in some places. Some areas were funny; I didn’t expect they would be. There were areas I thought would be funnier, and they played them differently. The grocery store, in the beginning, looks post-apocalyptic. That was intentional because of how we felt at the time.
It might have been it was an exaggeration of what was actually going on, but during the beginning of the pandemic, we were all worried about running out of food, and none of us knew what was going to happen [laughs]. We took those emotions we all remembered having and heightened them visually so that they looked like what we all felt, regardless of the actual situation. I remember that as being an extensive conversation about how to make that commentary, but the rest of it was left to the actors and John about how he would portray that. It was important to him that the girls were fully formed characters, and they weren’t there to be killed or terrorized.

Was there a sequence that was the most challenging for you to lay out and plan?
This movie came together so well. It was one of those rare situations where everyone I interacted with was of the same brain. We were all of the same minds and had the same goal. There were always some challenges. The house is on a lake, and there’s that deck scene where they jump into the river, into the lake. When we got there, the water was down so far that we couldn’t do it there. We had to come up with another way to do it. John and Yaron [Levy], the DP, had to devise another way to shoot it. It was logistically impossible for us to do it there at the house we wanted.

It was one of those things where I wouldn’t say that there were any massive problems that I can remember because anything that came up was handled, collaborated on, and worked with well. We had some good source material to work with, which is always amazing that there’s not a ton of stuff that has to be reworked or had to think about. The house we found was an amazing resource for what we were doing inside. John had to block and choreograph it so that it worked in the space we found. It came together; many of our choices were intentional, but we didn’t have to force it.

Sick, which also stars Dylan Sprayberry, Joel Courtney, Marc Menchaca, and Jane Adams, is available on Peacock.