Yahoo News Buzzy Stone Age Horror ‘The Origin’ Tells Timeless Tale of Human Brutality, Unveils First Clip (EXCLUSIVE)
In the Stone Age horror movie “The Origin,” a tribe of starving homo sapiens must fight for survival in early Britain. It’s a film set 45,000 years ago, but its message about humanity — told through a genre lens — is as dark as it is timeless.
Directed by Scottish helmer Andrew Cumming (“Radiance,” “Clique”) and written by Ruth Greenberg (“The Spark”) in both of their feature debuts, the film — produced by “Saint Maud’s” Oliver Kassman — is launching at the BFI London Film Festival on Thursday with three sold-out screenings.
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Shot on location in 2020 in the Scottish Highlands, the story follows a group of early humans looking for food and shelter in a new land. They subscribe to their leader’s promise of a better life, but find themselves in a dangerous terrain, where they’re preyed upon by a supernatural force. The cast includes Safia Oakley-Green, Kit Young and Chuku Modu.
One only has to utter “Stone Age horror” and most people are instantly curious: There’s an innate fascination about the Palaeolithic period, but combined with the playground of horror, “The Origin” is as interesting as it is ambitious. Adding to the film’s authenticity is the use of a bespoke language called “Tola,” which was developed especially for the project.
“The Origin” is produced by Escape Plan’s Kassman, executive produced by David Kaplan and Sam Intili on behalf of New York’s Animal Kingdom (“It Follows,” “Short Term 12”), in co-production with Scottish producer Wendy Griffin of Selkie Productions (“Calibre”), with financing from Screen Scotland and the BFI. Protagonist Pictures is selling the film in the U.S. and U.K., with Sony handling distribution in all other territories.
Watch an exclusive first clip from “The Origin” below and read on for an interview with director Andrew Cumming:
Where did you draw inspiration for the film?
At film school, I’d read William Golding’s follow-up to “The Lord of the Flies,” which was a novel called “The Inheritors” [and was about early man]. I sort of read this and thought, “Oh, God, this is the movie I want to make in 20 years’ time, if I ever achieve Stanley Kubrick-levels of autonomy.” I thought it would be a dream to do something like that, because I’d never seen it. I watched some documentaries and then I watched “Quest for Fire” and “The Clan of the Cave Bear” with Darryl Hannah. I was watching the treatment of the Palaeolithic period and thinking, “Maybe it’s ripe for an update?” Then I had a general meeting with Oliver Kassman, our producer, and he said he was looking to do a horror movie and had two time periods he wanted to look at: the Roman period, and early modern humans. I said, “Well, this is kind of crazy, because you’ve just described the movie I thought I’d be making in 20 years’ time.” I did a little three-page treatment. Oliver was already working with Ruth on a script that she’d written called “The Competitors.” The three of us met, and Ruth really liked the sandbox that we put together.
This is your feature debut. Did you ever have any hesitation about tackling a period movie with this historical scope?
it was never a case of “Maybe this is too much for a debut.” The feeling was “Well, if we’re going to make a debut when there’s so many films now and the audience’s eyeballs are constantly under assault from so many different sources, you’ve got to have a big swing.” It was always very exciting. My mantra has been, “I want to make movies that I would pay to see.” If you can carve out a career doing that, you’ve done well.
The actors are speaking a made-up language in the film. How did you conceive of it, and what was it like bringing the dialect to life?
Originally, we’d spoken about doing a made-up language, and then I lost my nerve and I think it might have been that first-time feature thing of thinking, “Are we going to close off some of the audience because there’ll be words at the bottom of the screen?” The more we started to develop the project, Oliver and Ruth and I would act things out and discuss it, and it just felt like, if we did it in English, it would have sounded ridiculous. If I was an audience member paying for a ticket to see this movie and it wasn’t in English, I would feel like the director was being a little lazy.
Oliver knew this gentleman, Daniel Anderson, who’s not necessarily a linguist but is multi-lingual and teaches himself languages as an academic so he can translate papers. Oliver asked if he could take this challenge on. We were looking at Basque as an inspiration, which is about 10,000 years old. Daniel used Basque as a starting point, and there’s some Arabic in there in terms of the structure of sentences, and then there is Sanskrit. He used these languages as a ladder to build branches and create this work in a language called “Tola.”
There are also two English-language fantasy behemoths airing right now — “House of the Dragon” and “The Rings of Power” — that might prime audiences to be more fluent in subtitles.
I think you’re right. I think “Game of Thrones” definitely helps with that, as well as films like “Parasite” crossing over in such a way. I think that the stigma that I personally felt there was around subtitled movies has definitely been eroded over the last five to seven years.
You guys filmed the movie in Scotland. Is the story actually meant to be Scotland in the Palaeolithic period?
It’s meant to be Britain 45,000 years ago.
Was there extensive historical research involved around what the landscape would have looked like back then?
Yeah, we did a lot of research. The Natural History Museum in London had an exhibition of early modern humans. The sculptors of that made these amazing, life-like sculptures that brought the humanity of these people right in front of you. So that exhibition was really helpful, and one of the professors of that exhibition is based in Scotland and when we met for the first time, we discussed a lot of things. He brought a lot of things to the table, and said things like, “You should look at this dig site, and you should think about these materials that we found.” In telling him things that I thought about through my research, and things he was coming up with, I realized we had a mountain of research we could build on in terms of diet, and costume and physique, and all these sort of things.
Why was there a long period between finishing shooting in December 2020 and the film premiering now, almost two years later?
We had to do some pickups in March because there was a period of the movie that wasn’t moving fast enough. We had some money left over so we went back and shot some new stuff. The first cut of the movie was two and a half hours long and the final movie is 90 minutes, so it was just a case of, when you’ve got this ensemble piece, you just have to be quite brutal at times about your decisions, and that was a long process of discovery during the edit.
What’s next for you?
I’m doing a thriller for ITV, through Jed Mercurio’s company, which is great. It’s got Peter Mullan who was one of my heroes growing up, so I get to work with Peter Mullan. I’m also developing a couple of things with [“The Origin” producer Oliver Kassman]. Also, I’m not a writer-director, I’m a director. I want to see what is out there that I can lend my voice to going forward.
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