New Horror Movie Heretic Was Inspired by Robert Zemeckis’ Contact

With all of Heretic’s promotional material referencing blueberry pie and Hugh Grant being creepy, we bet you didn’t think about Jodie Foster. But for Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the co-writers and directors of the film, that’s exactly who they were thinking about.

“Scott and I have talked a lot about [Robert] Zemeckis’ Contact and Stanley Kramer’s Inherit the Wind as templates for a conversation about religion,” Woods told io9. “There’s a lot of ‘religious horror.’ I put it in quotes because there’s a lot of Catholic horror that uses Catholicism as justification for some kind of supernatural threat in a movie. There’s a lot of those movies, but very rare is the movie like Contact or Inherit the Wind that are adult conversations about religion in a kind of popcorn movie context.”

That was the inspiration behind Heretic, which features Grant as a creepy man who traps two Mormon missionaries (played by Yellowjackets‘ Sophie Thatcher and Fabelmans’ Chloe East} in his house and asks them to play a game. He wants to use the two woman who have chosen religion for their life’s work to explore what that means, and, well, things get super sinister.

Heretic is out this week and in the lead-up to release, io9 spoke with Beck and Woods about those Contact (a Zemeckis film based on a Carl Sagan book) inspirations, what it takes to make a movie about religion, and how they feel about the future of A Quiet Place, which they helped create. Then, after release, check back where we’ll reveal the second half of our interview discussing the film’s ending, spoilery revelations, and specific pop culture references.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Germain Lussier, io9: When I saw your movie at Fantastic Fest, I was so excited afterwards when you guys mentioned Contact as an inspiration. The idea of religion vs. science in that movie really blew me away as a kid and it crossed my mind watching this so I’d love to hear more about what that movie meant to you guys and its inspiration on Heretic.

Scott Beck: Yeah, well, first and foremost, Zemeckis is the master of making movies that bring you to the movie theater, but they’re also rich in terms of what their characters are. And I think that back and forth between Jodie Foster’s character and Matthew McConaughey’s character was really thought-provoking at the time. Not to go too deep into it. But at that point, yeah, I was a teenager, I was going to church every single Sunday. And I feel like that movie was one of the few movies that opened me up in certain ways of stepping outside of what I had been raised to know and thinking of relationships with faith or with atheism in a three-dimensional way.

And then seeing the other side of the spectrum in that movie of Jake Busey’s character, kind of this fundamentalist point of view. Then all of a sudden, like discovering “Oh, I have a friend who has a family member that was in the Jonestown Massacre.” And how insane is it that somebody who can seem at first so balanced, following the belief system of this charismatic leader, and all of a sudden they’re committing suicide? There’s a degree at which religion intersected into Contact in such a bombastic way, personally.

io9: What about it directly related to this movie? Did you specifically think “Oh let’s make our own Contact?” or were you writing and it became “Oh, this reminds us of Contact?”

Bryan Woods: It was a conscious decision. Over the years, Scott and I have talked a lot about Zemeckis’ Contact and Stanley Kramer’s Inherit the Wind as templates for a conversation about religion. There’s a lot of “religious horror.” I put it in quotes because there’s a lot of Catholic horror that uses Catholicism as justification for some kind of supernatural threat in a movie. There are a lot of those movies, but very rare is the movie like Contact or Inherit the Wind that are adult conversations about religion in a kind of popcorn movie context.

And so for years, since Scott and I first saw those films, we’ve been asking ourselves, “Can we? Wow, one day it would be a dream come true if we could make a movie that is a conversation about religion, all of our feelings, all of our fears, all the things we think are beautiful and terrifying about religion all in one movie. Can we do that?” And, to be honest, it seemed like an impossible thing. It seemed like we’ll never [do it for a number of reasons.] What is our stance on religion? We’ll never know enough about the history of religion. It was just this dream bucket list thing that seemed impossible to do. Then, over the years, you get to a place in life.

I recently lost my father unexpectedly to esophageal cancer, which is [also] like Scott losing a father because we’re basically all family at this point. We were just at a low point in our personal lives, feeling very vulnerable and dark. And we were just like, “Now is the fucking time to write this exploration of religion.” Now is the time to talk about the terror of not knowing what happens when you die, and exploring that in the context of a scary movie.

io9: I’m really sorry about your dad, Bryan. I lost my dad a few months ago too, so I get it.

Both: Oh no, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

io9: Thank you. Thank you. But to that point, it’s one thing to say that, right? “We’re gonna write this movie about religion.” Actually doing it seems like a whole other thing. Just a massive, overwhelming, and impossible amount of research. So how did you approach gathering information and different points of view for the film?

Beck: Yeah, I mean, the interest of all things: religious or cult or otherwise, that feeds into it. Lawrence Wright writing this incredible piece about Scientology, Going Clear. Reading Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins’s work from an atheist perspective. Looking back at the holy books and diving into The Book of Mormon. Trying to understand everything from, truly, an empathetic perspective to make sure that a complex conversation about religion can be seen from many different sides.

Our whole fear with the movie—and it skirts this but, I think, subtly addresses it—is this fear of people with certainty. Where they are firmly rooted in what they think and believe and they’re unwavering. To us, that’s not really the way that we personally live our lives. We are constantly evolving, reacting to new experiences or relationships and whatnot. And I think a lot of the movie injects those personal journeys that we’ve had, and the spectrum of friendships that we’ve made that represent so many different belief systems. The movie situates itself on these three characters with Hugh Grant’s character, Mr. Reed, and Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes. These are all characters that are representing this triangle of different points of their relationship with the great unknown. And I think firmly in the middle is where we come down in the discourse of the film.

io9: I agree with that. But I’m curious how that impacts the process. Do you guys have debates amongst yourselves when you’re writing something like this as you conjure up each side? Because, yes, you are in the middle but you still have to write both sides. 

Beck: Yeah, that’s something I can’t say we’ve quite reflected on because I feel like Bryan and I have known each other since we were 11 years old. And so, by virtue of that, so much of our outlook on life is in step with each other. So the debates we have are not necessarily debates because we’re of differing opinions. I think we’re sponges. I think we try to look at the outside world and try to understand why people come to conclusion. Which sometimes can mean like… Donald Trump. How does Donald Trump become Donald Trump? Because you’re not born into spewing absurdities on television. There’s something that makes you that. So we just love to investigate the world at large, I think, together. The debates we have are more creative debates. I feel like if Bryan comes in swinging about a film that he absolutely adores and I don’t, we’re happy to get into it.

Woods: That’s what’s nice about having a partner, right? We’re open-minded. So we do spar about certain things. And it’s like, “I feel this way. Scott feels that way.” We talk it out. Or maybe he changes my mind, maybe I changed his mind. Maybe now we’re on the opposite ends of the spectrum. And that ability to listen is the most important thing you can have as a writer. You have to listen to the world. You have to hear how people talk. You have to have empathy for everybody and put yourself in everybody’s shoes. These are just the kind of the toolkits in our art form. So it felt natural for a piece like this.

io9: Switching topics slightly, you guys wrote A Quiet Place. How does it feel to see it still going strong, and how involved, if at all, are you guys with where it goes in the future?

Beck: First and foremost, we never in a million years thought it would have the longevity that it did and that’s simply because we designed and created A Quiet Place from very humble means. We thought, “Nobody’s gonna want to make this weird silent horror movie. We’re just gonna shoot it ourselves in our home state of Iowa.” But last week, we went to the Universal Studios maze that they had of A Quiet Place and we’re walking through seeing these Universal actors portraying the characters straight from the page, and it’s unexpected and we’re still living in that surreal reality that it’s had a life.

But in terms of where it goes from here, I mean, it’s kind of like sending your kid off to college. Our focus is not in the Quiet Place universe right now. For us. It’s movies like Heretic where we just love the original idea and when we approach a script page not knowing what this is we’re gonna create. That’s the exciting lifeblood of filmmaking that we go after: the unknown. And whether the movie we create fails or succeeds, it’s the pursuit of doing something unique that’s exciting to us. But we loved what Michael Sarnoski did with Day One. We thought that was a really exciting entry into it. So if they keep churning them out, our hope is that it just continues to innovate what the idea of A Quiet Place movie is.

Woods: We would really love to see an international movie in A Quiet Place universe. One that’s not necessarily English language-based. That would be really cool.

Heretic opens on Friday. Check back next week for more from Beck and Woods.

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