British filmmaker Ben Wheatley’s first feature, Down Terrace, focused on a dysfunctional British crime family. It blended domestic tragicomedy with well-timed doses of ultra-violence—the father ends up dead and wrapped in packing tape—and earned comparisons to The Sopranos. Wheatley’s latest, Kill List, is a pitch-black tale of two hit men that is equally hard to categorize. Deranged buddy flick? Gruesome horror fever dream about an enigmatic death cult? However it’s labeled, the director’s sophomore film—out now on Video on Demand, and in LA and New York theaters February 3^rd—is a wicked treat for those with strong stomachs. We spoke with Wheatley about genre-bending and the art of making a movie designed to make people feel miserable. 

We’re used to seeing hit men in films or books as cold loners. Your hit men aren’t like that—they have girlfriends or wives, they’re personal friends with each other. Where did the idea for Kill List come from?
I think it’s an idea I’d been working on in Down Terrace: looking at genre and then applying real world dynamics to it. Trying to strip it back to something that was a bit more realistic and human, but still retaining that kind of really funky plotting that you get with genre film. You go back to the source, how people interact, what the reality of working with your friend is like no matter what job it is—looking at that rather than making assumptions about what these people would be like based on seeing loads and loads of other hit men films.

Were there any previous films you were reacted to or working against?
Not especially. I’m not coming from a position of hating other movies. I’m a cineaste, and I love genre movies and I’ve seen a lot of crime films, a lot of horror movies. I really wanted to get under the skin of these characters. I knew that I wanted to take it to a fantastic area, a horror area in the plot, but I wanted to take the audience there via having them invest in the characters, so you really feel unhappy for what happens to them. The main characters in horror movies are generally the murderers, and every other character is a trope—gangs of kids who get knocked off. It’s all very generic. You don’t really feel anything about it. Your enjoyment comes from other places with these places, like the ingenuity of the deaths. I wanted to take it back to a position that got more to the core of what’s frightening, and that’s putting characters in jeopardy that you care about.

How did you play with genre expectations? The thrilling thing to me is that Kill List starts off and you think you’re seeing a domestic drama about a married couple, but the music—dreadful, horror-film music—sets you up for something different.
It wasn’t that I set out in a postmodern way to take these genres and twist them and turn them around, it wasn’t as cynical as that. Basically I sat down and thought of a story I wanted to tell and went from there. We definitely wanted to make a horror film, and there’d been some ideas of pulling something from the crime genre into the horror genre. The critical response I’ve read, that it’s multiple genres—that wasn’t intentional. That’s where the story had taken it. I think you need to just not think about a film as you’re making it, otherwise you could tie yourself in knots. It’s got to be about the characters and about the story and how that moves and mutates.

Was the original Wicker Man at all an influence, in terms of the cult elements in Kill List?
It’s something that comes up, definitely. It wasn’t a massive influence in that we watched it and cribbed from it. It was kind of an influence in that I remember seeing it as a kid and how I felt about it. The thing that’s different between the UK and the States is that the Wicker Man, it’s still around in the UK. It’s not as weird, it’s not something that only exists in that film, it actually exists in the land. If you dig around you can find that kind of ritual, Pagan stuff. This is a country that has ‘standing stones’ that are thousands of years old, there’s lots of little cults, witchcraft going on. It’s much more in the culture here.

In both Down Terrace and Kill List you really portray criminals as ordinary people, at times even pathetic people. They’re not purely evil even if they do evil things. How do you go about writing these characters? For your hit men, did you approach it as if this was like any other job—they could be accountants, but instead this is what they do?
Anybody’s job, when they’re working in a group and under pressure—everyone has the same experience. That’s why genre films are understandable, or crime films are understandable by the cinema-going public. The criminal isn’t such an alien Other, is he? He’s someone they can identify with. The pressures on a crime family are similar to the pressures on real families, they’re just a bit more flamboyant, and the arguments can end up with you getting shot rather than just people sulking or ruining a Sunday dinner. I think that’s definitely where they came from with The Sopranos. It’s not about glamorizing this stuff. It isn’t that interesting in a way, what they do isn’t that dramatic or surprising. What’s exciting are family and human dynamics, how people interact with each other, those everyday moments. Those things we understand—that’s where drama comes from.

How do you manage to film violence in a way that leaves people shook up, without becoming over-the-top?
It’s to do with tone and performance. I’ve come from a background of doing a lot of online stuff. I spent a lot of years making fake video footage where something amazing happened in, and that would be the viral campaign, people would pass it round and go ‘Oh my god, did you see that video?’ The main trick is never cutting away. As soon as you cut people know that it’s not real. On a very simple level the whole construct of editing itself is fake, and as soon as you start cutting around stuff then the audience knows that it’s not real. I guess that’s how the hammer scene works in Kill List—you don’t cut away. The horror of that scene is the absence of editing rather than what you see. If you’ve seen Saw or Hostel or Saving Private Ryan, you’ve seen a million things that are much more violent and visceral than that—but you expect the grammar to be a certain way here, and it isn’t. That’s what wrong foots you and makes you feel ill. Even if it’s really gory—something like Drive, where he kicks that guy’s head in—you still understand that it’s an edit. You know it’s an effect, so you feel safer. But the hammer scene in Kill List feels like something you might accidentally watch on YouTube late at night, some horrible execution footage. It’s got more in common with news footage than cinema.

I wanted to ask you about the one climactic scene shot in a tunnel—it almost looks like a first-person shooter video game. I mean that as a compliment.
I played a lot of games since I was a kid—Half Life, Doom and all those things. I think that experience is totally valid. Everyone has their weird game memories, those intense firefights. But for me the tunnel scene was more about claustrophobia: you’re trapped and there’s nothing you can do. There’s no hiding. You have to confront this thing right there and then in front of you. I was thinking about this the other day…There’s films shot in rooms, there’s films shot in tunnels. Aliens is a tunnels film, mainly. You see a lot of tunnels in Kubrick as well.

Do you want to tell me a bit about Sightseers, your next film?
We just finished, we’re showing it at the moment to the executive producers and the financers. It’s an antidote to Kill List. I came out of Kill List and I felt a bit guilty that I’d made something so horrible. It was quite depressing watching it—this is a film that’s made to upset people, designed to make people feel miserable. I’d gone into making a horror film quite blindly and didn’t think about the responsibility of it. For the next film I wanted to make something that was much lighter and more comedic and kind of silly. It’s very much the opposite of Kill List in many ways, quite light on its feet, more playful, but at the same time it fits well with the other films. It’s using the same kind of improvisational beats, handheld cameras, but it has more odd psychedelic bits as well. It still has the same concerns. It sidles up to things like Honeymoon Killers or Badlands, Thelma and Louise, Kalifornia—killers on the road movies—but it’s very, very English.

So a lower body count than the first two films?
There’s quite a lot of murders in it, to be honest!

But lighthearted murders?
Lighthearted murders. There’s not two men going down a tunnel and shooting dozens and dozens of naked people.

Well, I think Kill List is going to be a great date movie for American audiences.
I hope so.