30 Days of October: Director Jonas Govaerts, "Cub"

To celebrate the chill of October, for each of the next 30 days, Film Yap writer Joshua Hull will take a look at the best in upcoming horror films and discuss them with the people who make and watch them. From big-studio horror all the way down to micro-micro-budget films, Joshua will crawl into the crypt with sinister scaremeisters and haunted horror fans to find out what makes them and their films tick.

#3: "Cub" – Director Jonas Govaerts

"Cub" is a horror adventure in which a young, imaginative 12-year-old boy named Sam heads off to camp with his Cub Scout pack, leaders Peter and Chris and quartermaster Yasmin. Once they enter the woods, Sam quickly feels something is not quite right. He soon stumbles upon a mysterious tree house and meets a shifty, masked, feral-looking child. When Sam tries to warn his leaders, they ignore him: The boy often tells tall tales, and Sam’s mysterious past, which he refuses to talk about, makes his leader Peter mistrust him. As Sam gets more and more isolated from the other scouts, he becomes convinced a terrible fate awaits them: the feral child, it turns out, is the helper of the Poacher, an evil psychopath, who has riddled the forest with ingenious traps and is intent on slaughtering the scouts… one by one.

http://www.cubthemovie.com/en/

What is "Cub"?

"Cub" is a Belgian slasher film set at a Cub Scout camp. It's also a — partially — autobiographical ode to my own scouting days.

Were you a Cub Scout growing up or have friends in the Scouts? Any real-life experience in the film?

I was, indeed; my totem was Imaginative Toucan. All the leaders and cubs in the movie are named after former fellow cubs and leaders from the 46th Xaverius scouting unit. Sam, the protagonist, is named after myself (my middle name is "Samuel"). One of my former leaders, Kris Roelants, even cameos as a corpse. All the scouting traditions you see in the movie — the night games, the songs, the campfire tales — come from personal experience. There are a lot of horror films out there set at summer camps, but I'd never seen one that actually portrays a scout camp realistically, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

It's a pretty grim concept for a movie starring kids. Did you have any problem convincing financiers / parents / kids to do the film because of the subject matter?

Surprisingly, there was only one child actor we couldn't get because his parents didn't want him to be in a horror film. I recently saw him in a very bad police drama where he gets his entire head blown up by a hand grenade, so go figure. Other than that, no problems. I was afraid I was never going to convince the parents of Maurice Luijten, who plays Sam, to hand their son over to me, but his dad turned out to be a huge genre fan: as soon as he started talking to me about "Hellraiser" and its rejected score by Coil, I knew I had one less problem.

My first introduction to "Cub" was that incredible tree poster art. Where did the concept come from?

If you are gonna do another horror film with a mask, you better make it a memorable one, so I turned to witchcraft. An artist friend of mine, Fia Cielen, has a special interest in nature and the occult; actually, she's a bit of a (white) witch. Fia and me came up with the basic design — a ripped-off piece of bark with a branch that looks like a horn - which was then refined by Saskia Verreycken, who does all my special makeup effects. The poster itself was designed by Justin Erickson of Phantom City Creative; we quickly decided we should use the most iconic image of the film, namely the mask. I love the little details Justin hid in the artwork; look closely, and you can find Sam in there, and even the treehouse ...

Nature tends to stand in the way of filmmaking. Can you talk about what was it like shooting a majority of the film outdoors? Any advice to filmmakers planning a wilderness heavy film?

You make it sound like we were shooting "Deliverance" or "Fitzcarraldo"! You might not know it from watching the film, but we have no real forests in Belgium; walk an hour in any direction, and you'll be back in civilization — or, even worse, Luxembourg. Honestly, the biggest worry we had were ticks.

Do you know what's next?

Not really; I never do. I have my eye on a very dark graphic novel I'd like to adapt, and my editor, Maarten Janssens, recently pitched me a very interesting idea for a Flemish home invasion movie. But it all depends on how "Cub" is perceived; it might very well be the last film I ever make, so I'm glad I got to make it the way I wanted to, without any compromises.

What do you think the future of indie horror / genre filmmaking looks like?

I always like to be surprised, so I'm hoping for less zombies, less CGI blood, less found-footage and less sequels. More Steve Moore scores would be good, as would be more cannibals, more Trent Haaga scripts and more "secret" Johnny Depp cameos.

Finally, what horror / genre films are you looking forward to seeing most over the next year?

"Tusk" looks like it might be a lot of fun; Kevin Smith has been an inspiration since film school, where I shot a remake of the "37 dicks" scene from "Clerks" as my first assignment. The trailer for Eli Roth's "The Green Inferno" got me really excited as well — it looks spectacularly nasty — so I hope that film gets a release soon. I loved the book "Horns" by Joe Hill, but judging from the trailer, I'm not sure if Alexandre Aja got the tone right. Let's wait and see! Also: "The Babadook," "Crimson Peak," "Let Us Prey" and "It Follows."