‘Recluse’: How Physical Media & Childhood Ghost-Hunting Laid the Foundation for Henry Chaisson’s Film [Tribeca Interview]

I open up my computer to start writing up my interview with Henry Chaisson, director of the horror movie Recluse, and my heart drops. My audio recording from the day before is blank. A note from the cloud says it’s still processing. The audio file has been corrupted or, rather, intercepted.

This feels fitting after watching a movie about a cassette-tape-obsessed audio engineer named Joan (Sasha Frolova) who returns to her family’s cavernous house in New England to care for her burned and dying artist father (Xander Berkeley). There’s something charming about the stilted and reserved Joan, who, instead of refreshing a feed for this week’s episode of her favorite podcast, listens to scratchy personal recordings for comfort.

I somehow managed to download the file, uncorrupted, to my phone. This little recording device ironically had sat on the table between Chaisson and me, its screen like a black mirror, while I asked him questions about the eerie sonic landscape of Recluse. “I love horror movies about sound, because it’s a bit ambiguous, and you’re not entirely sure what you’re hearing,” he told Dread Central. 

Against the backdrop of an artist’s house, there’s “this more ambiguous layer of sound that’s telling us, ‘Oh, something really bad happened here a long time ago,’” Chaisson, who also served as composer on the film, said. “I thought it would be interesting — especially in a theater, hearing it in surround sound.”

While writing Recluse, Chaisson drew from his own experiences of ghost-hunting at his grandparents’ house with a tape recorder. “One time I caught a voice and still don’t know… Was it a neighbor or a cousin messing with me, or was it genuine? It haunts me, for sure,” he confessed.

Sound has always been important in the genre: Doors creaking, bones cracking, blood-chilling screams. But from Hush to Undertone, specifically have continued to freak viewers out. Chaisson drew inspiration from John Travolta-led , in particular, for the film’s more “tactile” feel. While takes place in the present day, Chaisson wanted to highlight the fact that Joan is returning to the space of her childhood.