Something very creepy happened while they were making the movie in Roscommon…
Ireland has always been fantastic at telling creepy stories, passing down unnerving myths through the generations. However, it feels like only recently that we’ve managed to tell these creepy stories successfully in movies, thanks to the likes of The Hole In The Ground and You Are Not My Mother.
Before this recent ramping up of impressive Irish horror, way back in 2004, The Ten Steps was shown to audiences at film festivals around the world, and completely freaked everyone out.
Written and directed by Brendan Muldowney, it tells the story of a teenage girl who is afraid to go down into the basement of her home during a power outage, so she rings her parents who are out at a dinner. The dad tries to comfort her, staying on the phone while she descends into the basement, and things take a turn from there…
The short film still receives requests from film festivals to this day, and Looper recently listed as one of the ‘most unsettling short films ever’. It went down in London’s Frightfest Film Festival history as one of their most memorable screenings, with horror critic Kim Newman describing it as “The most purely frightening ten minutes in Irish cinema”.
Watch the short film in full right here:
Jump forward to 2022, Muldowney is adapting his own short film for the new feature length Irish horror movie The Cellar. This time around, the plot of The Ten Steps is just the jumping off point, with the girl’s parents – played by Elisha Cuthbert (24, The Girl Next Door) and Eoin Macken (Merlin, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter) – realising that their is something very wrong with their new home.
Ahead of the movie’s release, JOE caught up with Elisha Cuthbert about her role in the movie – as well as looking back at the impact of The Girl Next Door, and looking forward to the possibility of an Old School 2 – and it turns out that something very spooky happened while they were filming The Cellar in Roscommon.
Cuthbert told us:
“One thing that I did notice that was very bizarre, and that was right after we finished quarantining, a day before we started filming; Brendan, Eoghan and myself all had three separate cottages, and all three cottages had an infestation of dead flies appear.
“Thousands of dead flies. And it was sort of like ‘Wait a minute, what’s happening?’, there’s this plague of dead flies. It was really creepy, and so that sort of kicked off our first day. And they had to have an exterminator come and get rid of all of our flies in the places we were staying.”
The Cellar is released in Irish cinemas on Friday, 25 March, and you can check out our interview with Elisha Cuthbert about the movie right here:
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