Elric Kane is fulfilling a lifelong dream with his new film The Dead Thing, a twisty, atmospheric, and altogether enthralling dating app horror film. He faced years of obstacles to getting the film made, but one of the biggest moments of validation came with his admission to Fantasia, the beloved Montreal film festival that just hosted The Dead Thing‘s debut.
Kane has always wanted to solo direct a feature film, and along the way has done many other admirable things, including heading the film program at Los Angeles’ AMDA College of Performing Arts and co-hosting (with Brian Saur) the Pure Cinema podcast — one of the greatest of all film podcasts, and a frequent stop of Quentin Tarantino. (The podcast is produced by the New Beverly Cinema, which Tarantino owns.)
But Kane, who was born in Brooklyn and grew up in New Zealand, didn’t come to Los Angeles just to talk about films — he came to make them. He worked on several smaller New Zealand features in the aughts, but longed to pull off a film of his own. And with The Dead Thing, starring Blu Hunt as a devoted online dater searching for something tangible, he’s made something both fascinating and unique.
Seeing Hunt’s performance was one sign he knew he had been right to chase his dream: Best known for The New Mutants, she seems primed to explode as an actor.
Further validation for his pursuit came when Kane received an email from Fantasia artistic director Mitch Davis. Kane remembers is well.
“It doesn’t just say, ‘You’re in.’ It says beautiful, beautiful words of not just encouragement, but also, I completely saw what you did. I understood it. I was emotionally touched by it. And we’d be honored to world premiere your film.”
The Dead Thing debuted at Fantasia — one of MovieMaker’s 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee — on July 26 and 28th to kick off a festival run that will go for the next several months. We chatted with Kane at Fantasia about not online dating (he’s in a long-term relationship), how to ask people for money to make an indie film, and why hosting a podcast ended up contributing to his dream of directing a movie, instead of distracting from it.
MovieMaker: What was the first inkling of the idea that became The Dead Thing?
Elric Kane: I wish I knew. But I know it was on my phone. My phone notes that said “dating app horror ??” for about three years. And I don’t know where that idea even came from.
But what I remember very clearly is going to work — and I work in the office this movie is partly set in — and our secretary would come in every day, a young woman, really funny. And she would tell me about different dating apps and different guys she was meeting. They were never dark or disturbing stories. It was always goofy. And it sounded like a full-time job.
All the different apps are so weird, because there’s some like, “Oh, you have coffee with doughnuts.” Or it’s the back of a taxi, and you just take a ride with somebody. It was fascinating to me as someone who wasn’t in the dating pool.
So I remember just coming away from that going, “Okay, what could I do with this?” and I talked to my writing partner Webb Wilcoxen, who lives in New York, and I live in L.A, so we often write when I’m on long drives, talking on the phone. We just started to one-up each other, where it’s like, “OK, so a girl meets a guy. What if she finds out something happened to this guy?” And we start building a mystery around it. And eventually, we started going, “How do we kind of create a modern version of an urban legend?”
MovieMaker: There’s something very surprising about the seemingly perfect guy she meets — played by Ben Smith-Petersen — but I don’t want to say what it is because it’s a great surprise.
Elric Kane: It’s hard to write about it without spoilers, because it will sound like a Lifetime movie. But she has a dark obsession, and this is a horror movie. … Our delivery is much more focused, deliberate, in an arthouse-type manner.
MovieMaker: It’s so universal. One thing I like about this movie is that you could watch it at an arthouse theater, you could watch it on Criterion, or you could watch it on Lifetime, and I think the Lifetime audience would be engrossed,
Elric Kane: I like that. You always think you’re making this weird, small thing when you’re creating. But even when I finished, I would still call it a small movie, and somebody had to go, “Now that you’ve made it, it’s just a movie. It’s not a small movie.”
Elric Kane on Podcasting and Directing The Dead Thing
MovieMaker: You make one of the greatest, if not the greatest, movie podcasts, Pure Cinema. For a while you felt like that was maybe taking away from your goal of making movies. But that ended up coming around and helping you make this movie, especially with casting.
Elric Kane: I moved to America having made small, independent stuff in New Zealand, and you come here as a filmmaker, but people don’t know your previous work. And so pretty much after a couple years, I had two podcasts, one a Fangoria horror podcast, and the Pure Cinema podcast for the New Beverly. And at a certain point, that’s what you are to people. And it makes sense. You can’t blame them — you’re just a podcaster.
But at a certain point, you start to feel a little bad about yourself, because you know why you’re doing this. So I kind of made the turn to make sure that behind the scenes, I was trying to write something that I could actually make — like not just writing another dream — something doable. So I started doing that.
When I got to the casting part, the actress that I sought from the very start, Blu, had been in the New Mutants. It was obviously a film that was shelved [before its 2020 release] and had a lot of production issues, but was still a big project. It’s still a superhero movie.
I finally, somehow, through a casting director, got to her people, got to have a Zoom with her, and her first line was ‘Yeah… I’m a really big fan of your podcast” — like she wanted to get it out of the way.
And when she said that, I was like, Oh, this could actually be something that helps. She has really good taste and her Instagram was all about Robert Altman movies. And so as soon as I saw that I felt kind of invigorated.
There’s a good Tarantino quote: If you really, really love movies, you probably can’t help but make an interesting or good movie. And I think there’s some truth to that.
MovieMaker: What was your biggest obstacle in making The Dead Thing?
Elric Kane: The first biggest obstacle? Me. Because you want to do something perfect. And so one my friends, Rebekah McKendry, who is a filmmaker, and who I’ve been podcasting with for 10 years for Fangoria, said, “You are your problem, because you want to make a perfect thing that everyone will respond to, but you have to just make a thing. You have to get out of your own way.”
Initially, when you’re younger, that’s not the problem. You’re just making stuff. You’re not thinking too much. But if you’re away from it for a while, you start to go, “Oh, but if I’m going to make a film it has to be a great film.”
So that’s step one. And then step two is I’ve never asked anyone for money in my life. And that was something that, with my upbringing, felt wrong or something. And so I said to myself, well, I’m gonna have to start somewhere. I had no luck for years trying to raise a couple $100,000, because there’s no money person — that doesn’t exist in the independent world. So I gave up on that and realized, well, but I can ask every person I know for five grand, and maybe brick this together. So we started going down that road.
And I thought the first person I had to ask is the person I least would want to ask, and be most humiliated to ask: my uncle. Not for any reason, but just because he’s family. It just feels like a strange thing. And I did that. And he wrote back: “Of course.” When I read those words, it was like something lifted off my shoulders.
So those were the first two hurdles, and then everything is a hurdle, whether it’s putting together a team on a low budget, or trying to cast the right people. But the casting came together so beautifully that once you have a cast that you feel really excited about, now you feel like you owe it to them to deliver as a director.
When we had our premiere a couple days ago, I was seeing them and thinking, I love that somebody might get cast from this movie. One of these actors might get a real break, because they’re so good in this.
Visit here for more information on Fantasia, including screening times. As for the wide release of The Dead Thing, stay tuned and follow Elric Kane.
Main image: Blu Hunt stars in The Dead Thing.