AFF '24: Interview with Angela Gulner, Writer and Director of The Beldham

Today we’re joined by longtime actor and writer Angela Gulner to talk about her directorial debut feature, The Beldham, a multigenerational monster movie that screened at this year’s Austin Film Festival. Angela has a long time writing career, writing several independent features. She also has a career as a working actor appearing on TV shows such a GLOW, Binge, and Single Parents. The Beldham is her first foray into directing and it tells the story of a young mother who struggles to protect her infant child from an ancient presence that lurks in her family home. We talk about how to transcribe grief from the page to the screen, using horror as a language to communicate to audiences, and how Patricia Heaton should be the next big scream queen.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I'm a firm believer that a lot of horror filmmakers have one single scene in mind, and then the whole film kind of spawns out of that. Did you have a single scene in your head that you wanted to translate to screen?

I really started with the end. Which is hard to talk about without spoiling, but that ending is sort of where things change. That was the scene. I guess it's horror in some sense, it's horrifying, not in a blood and guts kind of way.

That's another note I made, your third act works tremendously as a third act, because it reshapes the entire film. Did you go the mystery novel route, where you start with the end and kind of work backwards? What was the writing process for you?

Oh, it was a journey. I started with the end, and then I did a couple of different  “vomit drafts,” where I just sort of wrote and then looked at what was there. Then did the note card thing. It was a hard script to kind of nail down, and it went through a lot of iterations. I mean, all scripts are hard in different ways, but I struggled a lot in the writing of it to know when to start the story. My first couple of drafts started way earlier. Eventually, I got it to where the story has to start when we get to the house, because it's very much about the claustrophobia. The feeling that your world is caving in, feeling caged. 

Were you writing it with the intent to direct it, or were you maybe writing for another director?

I really wanted to direct it. I had been kind of afraid of directing. My husband is my producing partner, and we make films together. This is our second one we've made together, and he directed the first one. We had a lot of hardships on that film. We got hit with a really intense winter storm, and everything sort of went wrong. But, he pulled through and made the film. So, seeing him overcome that made me feel like I can do this now. When I started to write this one, I knew I wanted to direct.

You're able to find this wonderful blend of folklore storytelling and grief. Was that atmosphere something that was there day one in the script, or was that something discovered while directing?

It evolved through the process. I really love an atmospheric, sort of vibey movie, and I figured it would have that sort of sense to it. Ksusha Genenfeld was a cinematographer on this film, and she is absolutely brilliant. There was a clear way that she saw the world, and it lined up really well with how I saw the world. I had draft one, and she came in with draft two, and then we worked on it together. 

When you get on set, it's so fun. You have production design, light, costumes, and actors. They are all writing the story for you. It sort of molds and evolves as all of the pieces come together. It teaches you what the film is right after you've laid those foundations. I found that to be one of the most exciting parts of being a director. Having everyone else's version of your story come together, and then you find the collective story.

That's one of the most important jobs as director—surrounding yourself with people that will bolster your vision, but more importantly, will collaborate with you and kind of add to the film. So, what was the set like? It sounded like it was very collaborative. 

Katie Parker, who plays Harper, and Emma Fitzpatrick, who plays Bette, are two of my very good friends. I wrote the roles for them. So it was collaborative even before they got on set, because whether they liked it or not, I would send them every draft. It got to the point where they were like, “Angela, stop it, you only change three words.” 

It was really cool to have their insights on the characters as the characters were forming. We have a really quick shorthand with each other, and a lot of implicit trust. There were also a lot more women on this set. Sets tend to be a bit of a boys club, but we had a lot of women. It felt very warm, open, and collaborative. There was a lot of time on set where it was just Katie, she's alone for a lot of the film. So that was really cool to build out these etudes—these moments with her, where she really gets to explore and dive into feelings and exist in a space. We wanted that space to feel really lived in. 

It definitely feels lived in. The lighting feels very warm and inviting, but you get into the movie and you're like, no, this is completely isolating. Even the filmmaking choices, like the aspect ratio, help add to that atmosphere of isolation and grief. So it sounds like that was like a big emphasis for you? 

We wanted to play with warm light, softness, femininity, and then underneath it is this horror. It's very much a film about women, about mothers and daughters. Of course, this is a big generalization, but I've experienced in my own life being a woman from the midwest. We push our feelings down, down, down, and pretend everything is good, and then it comes out in these really ugly, insidious, subtle ways. We wanted the film to reflect that very feminine experience of horror that men can relate to as well. 

You use the phrasing “comes out in sort of very insidious ways”. The scene that was instantly conjured in my mind was when she's laying in bed and has the crow coming out of her throat. That was so disturbing to watch, how were you able to pull off that effect? 

Poor Katie, she was such a trooper. That was such a messy day. We couldn't quite figure out how to do it, and I think it wouldn't have worked, but our inspiration for that scene was the scene in A Ghost Story where Rooney Mara eats the entire pie in one sitting. You know, eating a pie like that, feels like a very feminine. It’s a “push it down” reaction to grief. So, this coming out felt in the same sort of world, but it was a lot of chocolate bars.

People will have to watch the film to understand why that chocolate bars reveal makes so much sense. I love that you mentioned A Ghost Story, it definitely feels present throughout the movie. When I was initially watching one of the movies that popped up for me was Ti West’s House of the Devil. That's the direction I thought it was going, but you zagged on me. How are you able to use the genre that you're working with to either subvert expectations or tell your story?

One thing I was really trying to do, and it may be successful for some people watching, maybe not for others, but I wanted to play with the idea of an old crone or a hag. The idea of old women in horror being scary, gross, and icky and that’s where the idea for the witch monster came from.  I wanted to flip that a little bit at the end, so that we have more understanding of that monster. Because it's a monster movie, but it's not. 

I have a theater background, and so did the actors, and our cinematographer. What I love about horror and stealing from genre, is that you get permission to do things that are more theatrical. It could have just been a family drama without the horror. But you get to do more theatrical things. You get to embody the metaphors a little bit more, and it's more fun.

Was horror always the genre that you wanted to use to tell this story? How did it make it more relatable for audiences? 

It's quite a sad story at its core. It can be hard to get people to want to watch. Even though I love sad dramas, it's hard for me to be in the right mood to really want to sit down and watch a really sad movie. I think horror can kind of help. It’s a spoonful of sugar, it makes the journey a little more fun. Or the mystery box elements can make it a little bit more fun for the brain. I do think the film is pretty sad, even with the horror elements. But it makes it a little less impossible to watch these horrifying things happen, because you're trying to piece things together. 

The language of horror can be really fun. You're guessing what's going to happen next. I especially like the language of horror for Sadie, Patricia Heaton's character. I think that, because of the history of horror, you're putting a lot on to her that may or may not be in the script. That makes it fun to play with who she is in the world.

You have TV royalty in this film. I love Patricia Heaton and I love Corbin Bernsen. What was it like having such seasoned performers to read your dialog?

It was so awesome. I talk about Patty (Patricia) on set as like watching an Olympian. She'll be like, “Oh, yeah, that's what you get for working in TV for 20 years.” When there’s the reveal at the end, we did two or three different versions—we do something a little gentler, something that's a little harsher, and she could just flip. She can just change everything at the drop of a hat, just such a pro. She would be crying, and then it would be cut, and she'd be cracking jokes. The two of them are so at home, and Emma and Katie too. I mean, they're really terrific actors as well, but Patty and Corbin have been doing this for decades. It's a really cool thing to watch, and also very humbling. 

I loved the design for The Beldham and I just wanted to know, does that come from a historical appreciation, or is that something that was conjured up by you?

It was a combination of things. The word Beldham is usually spelled without the H, but we wanted to add our own little kind of texture to it. But it also has been Bell Damn. It's like an old English word, but it's also an old French word. There's a Keats poem called La Belle Dame sans Merci, which means the beautiful woman without mercy. It's this word that is out of our language now, but used to mean grandmother, ugly, old witch, crone, but also beautiful woman. I loved that throughout history, it's taken on these sorts of different terminologies. I wanted to do that with the monster where she presents as this crone, and we learn more about the monster and the monster's origin, and it holds a different identity at the end. We started there, and then worked with the idea of the old doctors with the plague masks. We built that silhouette with Joe Castro, who was the monster maker. Then we had a woman playing the beldam, and she was actually pregnant while filming. So, we thought that was cool. On set, we loved that The Beldham was a woman and she was pregnant. There were fun ties there.

I think this film does a really wonderful job with inviting re-watches, you're not caught up with trying to piece it together and you absorb the grief of it all. I also thought you did a terrific job with balancing fear, paranoia, and also embarrassment. I think embarrassment is a very present emotion in this film, and the actors all portray that in totally different ways. How do you kind of go about balancing those tones?

Once you get to the end, there's a lot of that happening in this family, and when it happens in your own family, it's such a hard thing to be grappling with. I tried to put it on the page, but the actors really brought that to life. They took the issues that we were grappling with in the film really seriously and in different ways. They all had different experiences with the themes of the film, and I think they brought their own sort of compassion for the reality of what was happening in the movie to their work. They just knocked it out of the park. 

Katie did a lot of work on her physicality. If you ever do a re-watch, and you just watch the way she holds her body and moves her body, it's really quite incredible. It's just such brilliant performances from all of them. They also just hit it off so well with each other. The three of them hadn't met before, and they just had instant chemistry. So, I think that helped build this very real family dynamic.

Wow, that made me really excited. I want to go back to watch her. I saw a pretty funny Letterboxd review that said, “I just kept seeing Catherine O'Hara. They should have cast Catherine O'Hara in every single role in this movie, and I thought it would have been better.” I love Catherine O'Hara, but I really don't think so, I think it's perfectly cast. How did you go about casting? I know you mentioned you know Katie and Emma personally, but how did you go about casting the rest of it? 

We got really lucky in that. We shot in Oklahoma, working with the Oklahoma Film and Music Office and also Cherokee Nation, and we had producers based in Oklahoma that helped us with finding crew. Their company is Rebellion Films, and they had produced a film that Patricia had produced and her husband directed. When we were talking about casting, Patty was on the list from very early on. I just thought she is tremendous, and I just really loved the idea of taking America's mom and kind of flipping that, and seeing her in a very different light. She loves horror, and she had never done a horror movie, and so she was game. 

I hope that, because of your movie, we can see Patricia in more horror movies. She is so built for it, it's ridiculous. 

Yes! Cast Patricia Heaton, scream queen! 

I love that subversive casting, especially from a directorial debut. Is there anything you're working on that you can share with us

With Mark, my producing partner and I, there's always more on the table. The next thing we're going to venture forth on is a romantic-horror road trip film. 

Wow, I don't know if you were doing search engine optimization on my computer or something like that, but that was like everything I could ever want.

Yes, more playing with horror, more playing with genre, definitely.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider becoming a patron of Hyperreal Film Journal for as low as $3 a month!