When Netflix released the nail-biting trailer for its new claustrophobic thriller Don’t Move, I couldn’t wait to be paralyzed with fear thanks to its suspenseful, yet simplistic editing that certainly got my heart racing. But what I appreciated the most was that the new movie’s trailer didn’t spoil the whole plot.
Don’t Move has an impressive calibre of talent behind the camera who know exactly what makes the best horror movies, especially directors Adam Schindler and Brian Netto. They’ve previously worked alongside the legendary Evil Dead director Sam Raimi on his 50 States of Fright anthology on Quibi and now Raimi is serving as a producer on Don’t Move.
Don’t Move focuses on Iris’ (Kelsey Asbille) fight for survival after being injected by a paralytic agent. Her entire nervous system is shutting down, while a mysterious killer (Finn Wittrock) is pursuing her deep in the forest. The stranger is never seen in the trailer, but can be heard ominously telling Iris what’s to come as the agent gradually takes over her body in 20 minutes.
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It’s everyone’s nightmare, being chased by a murderer through the forest and you can’t move your limbs no matter how hard you try. But while this horror story comes to life in Don’t Move, Schindler and Netto want us to remove any preconceived ideas of what to expect in the surprising new Netflix movie.
Schindler told TechRadar: “I think Netflix cut such a good trailer of it that it’s not spoiler-y and I think the movie is going to surprise people. I think some people see a trailer and then just make up their mind about what type of movie this is and what the expectation is. But some of the responses that we’ve got from just the marketing materials, people are like, ‘Oh, this is not what I [expected.]’ They hear the concept, and have an idea in their head what that would look like, and it’s very much, I think, not that. It’s something quite different. So I’m just excited for people to actually see what it is. Hopefully it’s anxiety-inducing like we think it is and as suspenseful as we think it is. Hopefully they’ll feel something at the end, where you come away from the movie going, ‘Wow that was an intense ride, and I loved every moment of it, but I also felt something.'”
Netto added: “You’ll get sucked in and then all of a sudden you realize you’re halfway through, or three quarters through, and you just want to see where it goes. I think it’ll catch people. It’ll surprise people in that way. They may just turn on thinking they’re just gonna have a fun passive watch and they’ll just get sucked in.”
Working with Sam Raimi
The iconic Raimi was one of the producers behind Don’t Move. But while Raimi may be best known for directing the Evil Dead horror franchise and the first Spider-Man trilogy, he’s no stranger to producing breathless thrillers. In 2019, Raimi produced the creature feature Crawl, which is about a father and daughter who become trapped in the crawl space of their home and hunted by alligators during a hurricane in Florida. Schindler praised the collaboration process with Raimi and his proactive approach to creating “a suspense thriller with horror elements”.
He told TechRadar: “Working with Sam is great. This is the second time we’ve work with Sam. We worked with Sam on our 50 States of Fright episode, which was a horror anthology on Quibi – rest in peace. Sam’s very, very hands on so we spent hours pouring over the script and reading every line with him. He was very keen on making sure we know what response we’re trying to elicit from the audience, and then making sure that everything lines up to attempt that. He’s given us probably the best script to screen notes we’ve ever gotten before for somebody who’s been in the top of the game for 40 plus years. It’s like we just sat there and soaked in everything.”
Finding the horror in beauty
We all know the usual horror cliché of running away from a killer in the dead of night through a pitch black forest, which of course arouses tension and anxiety from the audience. But in Don’t Move, Iris is targeted by the killer in broad daylight surrounded by stunning scenery, which makes it all the more terrifying. As Schindler said: “It was a fun challenge for us to have this horrific event happen in this most beautiful place, we were like ‘how? How do you do that?.’ A suspense movie that takes place in broad daylight in a beautiful place, we hadn’t really seen that before.”
Despite being set in the sprawling beauty of the Bulgarian woods where they filmed, the tension and isolation of Don’t Move is increased even further by cinematographer Zach Kuperstein (who also shot Barbarian) by using the Sony Venice camera.
“We wanted to make sure that we were capturing the isolation of that even though she knows she’s in a place that, again, feels beauty. It’s incredible beauty, but it also makes you feel very small and insignificant,” Netto said. “And she’s someone that is suffering. She suffers when she’s out in public amongst people, because she feels so isolated and so we wanted to really capture that with the camera as well. So, that’s when we worked with Zach, the DP. We talked about how best to capture that, what lenses to use, and then framing to just make sure the film could live in big places. Then as the film starts to ratchet up, we start getting closer and closer and closer. If you’ve seen the marketing materials, it’s her face, and we live on her face a lot. Once she starts losing mobility, we’re on her fingers. We’re on her face, we’re on her eyes, the things that can express what she’s going through in that moment.”
The nightmare unfolds in real time
To make Don’t Move even more harrowing is the fact that it’s made in real time. The possible best Netflix movie unfolds around the same amount of time as the characters are experiencing so the audience feels like they’re living (or just about surviving) through every moment.
Netto shared: “It’s pretty close to real time. The three things we said we didn’t want to do are: we did not want to do voiceover, we didn’t want to live entirely in her head, and we wanted to tell it as linear story. But I think for us, that’s what made it more harrowing, because we always knew the idea of slowly losing mobility again. If this is something that is fearful for you, if whether it’s people are afraid of deep water or claustrophobic or afraid of heights, you want to milk those moments. I think suspense films are about milking the moments, so we wanted to live in it as much as possible. That’s what I think induces the sweaty palms and makes you fidget in your seat.”
Don’t Move arrives on Netflix on October 25.
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