The ‘Undertone’ Team Talks Bringing Terrors From Beyond to Life for A24

The marketing campaign for A24’s upcoming horror movie Undertone has leaned into the phrase, “The scariest movie you’ll ever hear.” While it might not objectively be the scariest movie you ever hear, but this tagline embraces both the film’s narrative and also the ways in which filmmaker Ian Tuason has utilized sound design to freak you out. And, while the theatrical experience is something every filmmaker wants for their audience, the power of hearing Undertone unfold cinematically is unlike any other horror film we’ve been given this year that we doubt will translate as effectively at home.

The story itself follows Evy (Nina Kiri), who is in virtually every shot. Her mother has fallen ill and is unresponsive, with Evy feeling like she’s merely waiting around for her mother to die. To help keep her busy, Evy hosts a podcast about the paranormal with her friend Justin (Adam DiMarco), which they record remotely. When Justin receives audio recordings from a mysterious email address, they make the perfect subject for an episode, but the more recordings they listen to, the more bizarre Evy’s surroundings get, leaving her to wonder if she’s surrounded by an otherworldly darkness or it’s merely all in her head.

With such a large chunk of the film spent on merely showcasing Evy’s reactions, Kiri recently shared with MovieWeb the experience of having to act out the idea of listening:

“When I watched the movie, I was like, ‘Ugh, my own face.’ But the one thing I was really impressed by is, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I really wasn’t acting when I was listening.’ I just didn’t realize at the time that, ‘Oh, no, I have to be listening.’ I also heard a lot of the recordings for the first time as we were shooting it – well, I heard all of them for the first time as we were shooting it. Obviously, if we did the scene again, I would hear it. But no, I was just really listening.

“I didn’t realize that until I watched it, and I’m like, ‘Oh,’ I’m just sitting there listening. There’s nothing else, really, to do. I think I’m happy that that’s all I had to do.”

With most movies, filmmakers and performers try to show as to avoid merely having to tell, but the nature of Undertone‘s premise meant the opposite. This required DiMarco and Kiri to tap into a different set of performing skills. DiMarco reflected on some points of inspiration, given that we never see his character on screen:

“I skipped through certain things. I was talking to a friend of mine who, she would fall asleep listening to horror podcasts, and that whole idea blew my mind. So talking to her about that, she was like, ‘Well, there’s sometimes an ASMR-type quality to them.’ So that intrigued me and I brought that to Ian, I think pretty late, like the day we started. My first day, I was like, ‘Wait, wait, wait. Forget everything that I did before,’ but I found that pretty late in my research. I found some YouTubers who had some interesting … when they read out those scary stories, they have a sultry quality to them. Corpse Husband was a big inspiration for me, as well.”

Kiri added of her preparation, “I was going to, but I actually had a podcast when I was at university. So I remember the feeling of going into your radio voice and then I started to listen to some podcasts, but then when I was listening to them, it felt so removed from the movie that I’m like, I’m just gonna take these things that I’m noticing that they’re doing and stop listening because I don’t want our thing to be like this. So yeah, it was just to get bits of inspiration.”

Describing the Indescribable

What really makes Undertone so effective is that, in the tradition of movies like The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity, the storyline and sounds help conjure images in the audience’s mind, allowing our own imaginations to freak us out. Tuason detailed finding that balance of just how much to show and just how much to tease:

“It was baked into the script. So there would be lines like, ‘The negative space behind Evy’s right shoulder looms’ or ‘fills the frame’ … And yeah, that was written.”

The filmmaker also confirmed, much like the finished product, the script itself was unconventional. With a runtime of 94 minutes, Tuason revealed the script was 270 pages. He explained, “I threw in a lot of reference images. So I took frames from different movies and they weren’t all horror films. I was taking from every genre. There was Sopranos in there … I did go a little campy with the writing. The last five pages is all in caps. I didn’t do that on purpose, because I didn’t know anyone was gonna read it. I just did it. I was gonna shoot it myself.”

Undertone hits theaters on March 13.