The Horror Revolution: First off, what’s your favorite horror movie? What movie scared you the most?
Niko Volonakis: My favorite horror movie, simply because it’s one of my favorite movies, would be John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). The original is fantastic, but the remake’s combination of a 12 Angry Men-esque toxic, paranoid, all-male atmosphere, Morricone’s sorrowful, minimalist synth score, Carpenter’s claustrophobic direction, and Rob Bottin’s timeless prosthetics, adds up to a near-perfect film. The film that scared me the most, however, is not often billed as a horror film, at least not exclusively, and that would be Idi I Smotri / Come and See (1985) by Elem Klimov. It’s probably the best war film ever made solely for the fact that it subjectively portrays the great evils humans and / or social conditioning are capable of in the most visceral and genuinely upsetting way imaginable; but somehow, it manages to get in a wholesome message at the end that doesn’t feel out of place, and rather ends up rewarding the viewer with something quite beautiful and life-affirming … if they manage to make it all the way through, that is.
THR: I really enjoyed Lyvia’s House and thought the film did a great job with the psychological horror aspects. What inspired the film?
NV: Well first off, thanks so much! Psychological horror was not until recently a genre I was interested in directing, not because I’m not a huge fan, but mostly because it is outside my comfort zone. As someone who spent the last ten years trying their hand at exclusively political filmmaking, albeit with a horror influence, the visual and sonic mind games often employed by people who do excel at the genre were pretty new to me. So, out of fear of being too derivative of the greats, I chose to draw inspiration from outside the genre as often as I could.
But the first inspiration would be the original script itself. Patricia V. Davis tends to work wonders with character-based drama, and this was no exception. So my task really became bringing something that already leapt off the page onto the screen in the most practical way possible. Since she was also a producer on the project, being able to pick her brain along the way was a massive help.
Secondly, since I knew Patricia was massive fan of Get Out (2017), I went on a binge of 21st century Black horror/sociological surrealism works, such as the rest of Peele’s oeuvre thus far, Donald Glover’s Atlanta (2016-2022), and Nia DaCosta’s criminally underrated Candyman (2021) remake. There’s something inimitable and profoundly genuine about these works, not to mention their crucial political relevance, and all of those and more were instrumental in trying to create something that had at least a semblance of their impact.
I can’t leave out the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, namely The Mirror, The Sacrifice and Nostalgia, though I love all his films and couldn’t possibly name a favorite. We do a direct homage to him in our opening shot, as I thought it was crucial to source where I was getting all the good frame ideas from! But in all seriousness, his tackling of the fragile human condition via an almost-symphonic visual storytelling is everything I think cinema can and should be (time and resources permitting!)
And perhaps most obviously, David Lynch. We’ve had Twin Peaks comparisons graciously directed at us before, and while I’m a die-hard fanboy of that universe, it’s actually Mulholland Drive (2001) that taught me that anything is possible even when all the odds are stacked against you, so long as you stay true to your characters and the spirit of their world. Mulholland Drive is a tear-jerking masterpiece due to its fourth act, none of which would have been possible had the television pilot it was supposed to be not been unceremoniously dropped by its network. Sometimes real chaos and disappointment can lead to magnificent things, and I try to rewatch that film every few years to remind myself of that.
THR: Films with unreliable narrators stumble a lot of the time in trying to keep their stories straight. How were you able to make a film with as many twists and turns as this one and bring it together as well as you did?
NV: Well, I wasn’t entirely sure we had until you kindly said that, ha! I’m a big fan of Brechtian alienation as an instrument, especially as employed by Stewart Lee, my favorite comic and one of my favorite writers in general. But the lesson he taught me in his performances, in which he inhabits the role of a disgruntled elitist that self-critically resembles excesses of his real personality, is that the unreliable narrator is actually very reliable in whatever overall, universal truth they’re inhabiting: In the character of Stewart Lee’s case, the truth always remains that, no matter how much they lie to their audience, admit the lie, or then even negate the admission, they are always a bitter, existentially-terrified little creature that resents the world for not appreciating their genius, or resent their devoted fans for appreciating their genius too much.
In the case of Tara Manning, no matter what is transpiring in the town and their new home, whether it is meant to deceive them, or us, or whether or not they are right in their mind, the universal truth remains that they are a good kid that means well, and are trying their best to both preserve their journalistic integrity and make their romantic relationship work. If you focus just on that, and have the deception be just incidental, the story at its core is actually simpler to comprehend as a creator, and hence easier to illustrate for the viewer, because you strip the beast of its armor, if that makes sense.
THR: I really enjoyed the unique cinematography of the film, and I felt like it really added to the off-kilter narrative. How much of this was intentional in trying to represent the chaos going on inside Tara’s head?
NV: Again, thanks for the kind words! Short answer is, as much of it that was possible was deliberate, though much of it was improvisation. Any filmmaker, from the ‘brokest’ indie brat to the millionaire studio darling with full backing, will tell you that the game is all about meticulously planning everything down to the last detail and then being prepared to throw it all out on the day due to an unforeseen setback and wing it entirely whilst still (hopefully) preserving the narrative, stylistic and symbolic integrity of your initial plan. Oh, and then probably throwing that out in editing and starting yet again because you there’s a technical error in a crucial file. I broke the script down and wrote a parallel 65-page shotlist which was my comic book-esque envisioning of how every line of dialogue should play out, visually and thematically. Unfortunately, logistics on the day(s) of principal photography, from actors getting stung by very angry bees to locations we thought we secured becoming compromised, meant a lot of this had to be reimagined in the span of ten minutes. Good news is, my little attempted graphic novel would always remind me of what the spirit of the initial intent was, and would help me translate what was envisioned as an epic 18-shot sequence into an efficient 3, because, when the sun is setting and the backup batteries are almost dead, your priorities become real clear, real quick.
The other invaluable asset I had was my collaboration with our DP, Cody Martin. Cody had a great philosophy when it came to lighting, in that every source should be ‘practical’, or at least make sense within the established internal logic of the story universe. I fully agreed with it, and moreover, it really helped keep the narrative and its visual delivery grounded. Cody also knew that I was an indie brat that was used to framing my own stuff out of necessity, so rather than try to break me of a bad habit, he graciously agreed to split the creative vision 50-50 with me, and our different styles complemented each other very well. Pretty soon, there was a certain symbiosis, like that between a drummer and a bass player.. It was my first time ever collaborating like that, and I think it really paid off, much more than perhaps my idealized (and retrospectively unrealistic) behemoth of a shot list would have, so thanks so much for asking me about that!
THR: What inspired you to want to become a director? Were there any particular films that made you know this is what you wanted to do?
NV: There most certainly were, and yet I feel that the epiphany of wanting to do this as a career had to happen three times or so throughout my life before I finally put it into action. The first set of films were the Universal classic monster films, such as The Wolf Man (1941), which, coincidentally (or perhaps not!), inspired the climactic scene of Lyvia’s. As a young child, these films and their tragic central characters, brought to life in part by Greek immigrant special FX makeup virtuoso Jack Pierce, made me first understand the magic of cinema and its endless possibilities.
Finally, in my early 20s, Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) changed the game for me. From Italian Neorealism that featured its actors walking past real goose-stepping Nazis, to Cillian Murphy on an abandoned Westminster bridge, calling back to the chilling Dalek Invasion of Earth from 1964, I realized that cities - abandoned, invaded or otherwise - were the playground I wanted to frolic in in a run-and-gun fashion like the methods those films employed. They served as my first in a round of inspirations for Hate Your City (202?), a no-budget DIY feature I spent the better part of a decade working on with just a handful of close friends before the first 2020 lockdown sent it into production limbo.
THR: If you could work with anyone in the industry, alive or dead, who would it be, and why?
NV: I’ve been composing the music for my films since I started, mainly for budgetary reasons, and it’s obviously impossible for me to get an objective reading on how good of a job I’ve been doing on that, so it would be great to work with a proper composer and step aside from that and just let some outside beautiful mind take the reins. My favorite film composer is Terence Blanchard, whom I’ve been blatantly emulating for years, in terms of his unique, warring blend of unease and triumph over adversity, and his unsurpassable harmonic and discordant imagination, so it would be a dream to have him even consider working on something I was doing, although his lifelong collaboration with Spike Lee is an untouchable combination. So that would be my ‘alive’ pick. My ‘dead’ pick would be Bette Davis.
THR: I really enjoyed that Lyvia’s House felt like an old-school suspense film. Is this your favorite genre to work with? What draws you to making these types of films?
NV: Cheers, mate. As I mentioned, it was not my favorite genre to work with, but perhaps it’s becoming so after this experience. What drew me to this particular film were its issues regarding worker exploitation and femicide, two issues that are unfortunately not going to cease to be relevant in this world anytime soon. By packaging something you care about, socially speaking, in a ‘digestible’ genre, you can hopefully spark awareness and motivation in a select audience to seek out the root of these issues in the real world, something less likely to occur, perhaps, with a rigid documentary or political agitprop piece. Nevertheless, the latter are both still mediums I am an avid fan of, and I think all approaches work if you’re trying to encourage a viewer to think and debate after presenting them with something that thematically resonates beyond the screen. I’m not sure I would do a psychological thriller again anytime soon, as I really would be concerned about repeating myself. I think classic suspense, as you called it, is an art form that I personally still need a lot of time to master, and it honestly intimidates me, whereas a more outright horror film is something I think I could wrap my head around in the near future, though obviously it is just as difficult, especially in an age where audiences are getting more savvy, which is, of course, a good development.
THR: How much of your unique background, being born in the USA, but growing up in Greece, comes through in your work? What kind of cultural experiences do you draw from in making your films?
NV: Oh, yikes, so much, haha. I’ve actually only been temporarily back in the US since 2021 for the pre-production, principal and post-production on this film, having spent the last nine years living in Athens. So there are many fresh wounds and Band-Aids I’ve brought back from there.
There’s an old Greek anarchist chant which translates to, roughly, “To hell with country, religion and family: let Greece die so that we might live.” Now, in context, and without meaning to disparage anyone who may understandably hold those three elements and/or values dear, ‘country; religion; family’ was one of the many catchy slogans of the US-backed military dictatorship that was in power in Greece from 1967 to 1973. The negation of that triad, not as necessarily evil things in and of themselves, but as symbolic oppressive instruments of the state, is something deeply embedded in Greek counter-culture, but it doesn’t just date back to the mid-20th century. Greek mythology frequently explored protagonists and antagonists alike grappling with the traditional values they were raised with, and the cognitive dissonance resulting from conflicting ideals in the face of changing circumstances often ended in violent, grandiose tragedy for all players involved.
As one might expect. In our blending of rebel philosophy from both fictional and historical antiquity with modern Hellenic rebellion, Lyvia’s House begins with an abridged quote from Euripides, and ends with a 21st century anarcha-feminist Greek chant about an aforementioned vital social issue. I think, if anything, the film is not just inspired by centuries of Greek existential and sociological dread-mixed-with-occasional-optimism, but is actively fueled by it. Patricia also wrote much of the script as a classic Greek tragedy, so my own experiences in modern, equally-chaotic Greece seemed to gel nicely with the subtext. Good news is, people seem to think the thing still works even if a viewer is understandably not familiar with the nuances of Greek activism, literature and chain-smoking cynicism, so no homework is required!
THR: What’s next for you? Are there any upcoming projects that you’re excited to talk about?
NV: The film I mentioned earlier, Hate Your City, is something I’ve been longing to get back to, though the momentum has been so slowed by both the pandemic and my obligations with Lyvia that I honestly am not sure how to resume. But I’m trying to make that be an exciting thing, and not a scary one. It’s a dark comedy/ thriller that takes place in a single night in both Athens and Cairo, and follows a trio of Egyptian reluctant advertisers trying to thwart a terrorist attack from a Greek nihilist in Athens while trying to save an old expatriate friend of theirs from his grasp.
We shot the entirety of the Egyptian segment over the course of two months in downtown Cairo in 2017, where one of my best friends lives. And the Athens portion is what we were in the middle of filming when the Covid lockdown took effect. Political developments and censorship in both countries have made the film a challenge to complete, as well, and the story details have been altered numerous times to protect the actors and crew involved from persecution. But the older I get, the more concerned I get about what the ramifications of its anti-government satire will be, should it even reach a mass audience, so it is something I am considering reworking entirely whilst still hopefully maintaining the soul of the great performances from my very gracious actor friends who risked everything to make it.
Aside from that, I play for band called Thiasus – who are of course on the soundtrack for Lyvia (because we managed to get us inexpensively– ha) and we’re releasing an album in early 2025 called Exoria. We’re in pre-production for a series of horror music videos of some of its key tracks, which I’m really excited about. Patricia V. Davis and I are also collaborating on two other films, which are in development, and which I can’t talk about just yet, but for which I’m chuffed.
THR: Finally, so much of Lyvia’s House would’ve gone more smoothly for Tara if she had just had some damn wi-fi. On that note, what’s the funniest wi-fi name you’ve ever seen?
NV: Passive-aggressive ones like “YouWontHackThis469” always make me chuckle if the stakes are low enough, as in, if I don’t desperately need the web. But, my favorite of the last few years was probably the alliterate “ArxidatosAris,” which translates to, metaphorically, “Aris the Brave,” but more literally to, “Aris, the one with the Great Testes,” and I think we can all learn a lesson in self-love from that user.
