James DeMonaco on '70s psychological horror inspiration, the scene Davidson was itching to shoot, and more.
The Purge creator James DeMonaco has a flair for mashing genres and taking audiences on a wildly fun ride in the process. His latest feature, The Home, stars Pete Davidson and centers on a retirement home where Davidson's character takes a job as a janitor and begins to suspect things are amiss. What seemingly starts out as a horror movie, also incorporates a hefty amount of action and copious amounts of eyeball gore. Fulci would have a field day with this one. Be forewarned, if you're squeamish about eye stuff… you'd better strap in for this one.
The seed for The Home was first planted when DeMonaco read about the rampant problems plaguing elderly care facilities during the COVID lockdown. The news inspired conversations between DeMonaco and friend/The Home co-writer Adam Cantor. In addition to the real life horror in the news cycle, the duo both had “weird experiences as young men, little boys actually, with older people in our family at elder care facilities simultaneously.”
With these seeds already taking hold, like many of us, DeMonaco attempted to use his time in lockdown to get in shape. While looking up yoga videos, the algorithm eventually began to feed the director content geared toward longevity, and from there it was a rabbit hole through the exceptionally weird into something cool.
“I became somewhat obsessed with, ‘Wow, people are out there and they'll try anything to try to live longer,' I became really fascinated with it. Some of it seemed like false pseudoscience. I was like, ‘Oh, please don't buy this stuff.' And then there are people debunking other people. Very strange.
I got a deep dive into that, coupled with some memories I had from not-so-good elder care facilities when I was young, and then my own feelings on climate change. We kind of wove that into the final script. I don't want to give it away, but there's something happening to certain characters in the movie that, to me, was a metaphor for what's being done to the planet right now with climate change and raping it of its resources. That all coalesced into this kind of weird idea of The Home, and here we are.”
The story takes an eyeball-centric stance that stems from what DeMonaco refers to as an almost “generational fear.” He explains, “My dad had a fear of anyone touching his eyes. To this day, I have it, and I'm passing it to my daughter now, sadly. It's like this generational fear. We all have weird eye things going on, I don't know if it's built from that. I don't like people touching my eyes, and neither does my dad. Now he's had multiple eye operations, which is weird.”
But that fear is also intertwined with an overall fascination. “I always wanted to photograph the eye. I think it's incredible.I find it to be incredibly delicate, yet also beautiful.So the idea was I wanted to get in there and really shoot it up close and dive into the eye.
DeMonaco was urged to move away from the eye completely, but he held tight to the original concept. “We met with some skepticism when we sold the script. They thought it would be too grotesque for people, and people would run out of the theater. They were trying to convince me that the underside of the tongue should become the focus, and I found that to be even more hideous to look at. There is beauty in the eye. I was like, “No, I don't want to do that.” So I fought for the eye, to get off the tongue.”
“But it stems from fear, right? Everything, I think. I've been plagued with night terrors my whole life, and I don't even know what the origin of them is. To this day, I wake up screaming at least once every two weeks to a month. My poor wife and my poor parents growing up. I was a sleepwalker, and I think everything comes from these night terrors, and a lot of the dreams are about eyes and other things, too. A lot of stuff I write about comes from those deep fears.”
In addition to the eyeball-centric elements, there is also a good amount of action, which shouldn't come as a surprise to fans of DeMonaco's work. Pete Davidson gets to enjoy some pretty hardcore action in this film, which is considerably different from what we've seen him do in his career so far. When asked whether that was a major selling point for Davidson, DeMonaco's face gives the answer away before he even speaks.
“That's the perfect question. I think I can answer for him. He was just waiting, and we held it to the end. He was just waiting to do the final 20 minutes. He was itching. He's like, ‘You got me sitting in front of this computer and walking around these hallways.' I told him, ‘We're building, be cool.' He's like my little brother, so I was like, ‘Just shut up.'“
DeMonaco and Davidson go way back, “We grew up very close to each other here in Staten Island, I've known him for so many years. We had a great shorthand, but he was itching, as was the crew. Everybody was itching to get to that big kind of bloody finale where this catharsis as horror lovers comes into play.It's important for us to give that cathartic experience for everybody.”
When it comes to The Home's action sequences, DeMonaco said “I was definitely working off my obsession with '70s psychological horror, and then it fell into my more action-y stuff towards the end. And I think that's fun.”
As DeMonaco works on a new entry to his popular Purge franchise, is there a world in which Pete Davidson joins the fray? “For years, he's like, ‘Just bring me in and kill me.‘ We almost had him in The First Purge, which was part four of the series. We got very close, but he had a shooting conflict. But it was a small role, I'd like to give him a bigger role.
“I just finished the first draft of Purge 6, and there's a new role I thought of, it's pretty cool, and we were thinking of trying to talk Pete into doing it. We would love to get Pete in there, it would just be a blast.”
While Pete Davidson in The Purge doesn't have any concrete plans just yet, DeMonaco and Davidson are collaborating on something Purge fans will likely be excited about: “He and I are writing an action comedy together, so we don't know which one will happen first. But yeah, we want to get him in a Purge film. He wants to do it very badly. I don't think he'd be upset with me saying this. He wrote a beautiful comedy Purge, that I would love to make one day. It's very funny. It's also very scary. It's very Pete. So we'll see. We hope.”
