Shudder's new horror movie The Twin is directed by Tanelia Mustonen and written by both Mustonen and Aleksi Hyvärinen. The Twin follows Rachel (Teresa Palmer) and Anthony (Steven Cree) as they move to the countryside with their son Elliot (Tristan Ruggeri) after the tragic death of his twin brother Nathan.
Soon, the idyllic escape turns terrifying as Rachel becomes increasingly convinced that Elliot's twin brother Nathan is reaching out from beyond the grave. A paranoia-laced psychodrama, The Twin devolves into a horrifying story about grief and ghosts.
Screen Rant sat down with Hyvärinen and Mustonen to talk about The Twin. The creatives behind the Shudder film discussed how their own experiences as parents influenced the film, the interesting story behind The Twin's origins, and how the ending is both bleak and hopeful.
Screen Rant: Grief as a conduit for horror is such an interesting topic, and it's easy to think of movies like Hereditary that also deal with it. What drew you both to tell this story specifically?
Aleksi Hyvärinen: Obviously, both of us are parents. And when we kind of came up with this idea, we were fresher parents a few years ago. The background to coming up with the idea has to do with our previous horror film Lake Bodom, which is a Finnish language slasher we did a few years back. That kind of ended up traveling outside of Finland and going to South by Southwest and a lot of festivals, and was bought by Shudder.
It was a wonderful experience, and we got invited to this wonderful festival in South Korea, the biggest Asian genre film festival. The precondition to get there was not only to have Lake Bodom screen there, but also to bring a new idea. I mean, they fly us into South Korea to bring a new idea and pitch it at the project market. And obviously, we didn't have any ideas, but we really wanted to go to South Korea.
We basically spent two weeks banging our heads to the wall at our office [because] we need to come up with an idea. And actually, when you come up with a movie idea, it's a bundle of at least five different ideas. We came up with the basic, let's say five lines of a storyline to The Twin from beginning to end. That's kind of what we felt confident enough to send to Korea. We didn't really have anything else, ended up having 10 to 15 meetings a day at the project market, developing the ideas, and stealing ideas from people who were asking us questions [laughs].
And at the end of the day, at the end of the week, we ended up winning the whole thing - Best Project Award - which was kind of sheer luck, I guess. But that gave us a huge motivation to write the story and develop it into a script. And it was not easy. It took us a couple of years after that. But yeah, I think that was kind of the very concrete background of how this came to be.
Taneli Mustonen: To answer your question about the grief, I think we noticed something early on. We went through the films and talked about a lot of the films we grew up with here in Finland. Wonderful films like Don't Look Now or The Changeling or The Omen, and Rosemary's Baby. You have to always mention that and The Shining. But we basically noticed that nowadays, it seems that in a lot of horror films, we use, grief or tragic loss as a setup, and then we go over the jump scares and all that. That's fine, awesome. I love it.
But we started talking about, "Wouldn't it be cool to write this story?" We would write drama, just a character study and really try to write it so that it really dives into what grief can cause. Basically, that was the thing that was driving us, and it was such an interesting process when writing with Aleksi - we've been working together since film school and we really both had to dive [into] those questions and really look [at] ourselves through the writing process.
It's not easy ask[ing] those hard questions about being a parent, because as soon as you get the knowledge that you're going to have a baby then this worry enters your life and that that was something that you feel. At first, you think it's gonna go away and you're gonna be back to your normal self, but then it just lingers there and it's such a horrifying thought to think that something would happen to your child and the most precious thing you have. It was a quite rough starting point for the script, but then I think we really ended up saying something about grief and the nature of grief also, but the nature of evil.
Similarly, twins are also such a fantastic horror trope from The Shining to Goodnight Mommy. With Nathan and Elliot and that twist ending, you kind of subvert that and flip it on its head. As a director, Taneli, did you find any challenges visually while laying the foundation for that twist while portraying the twins?
Taneli Mustonen: Luckily for us, we had Tristan [Ruggeri]. Our awesome casting director, Katie Ringsell from the UK, she really worked hard to find us Tristan, and it was one of those marvelous situations you really wish you have in every film that is, you get this self-tape, and there it is. That was exactly the case with Tristan. And it was hard because we started with Aleksi, we worked on a family film where we have eight kids, pretty much the same age as Tristan, but it's light comedy.
Here, we have to deal with really heavy subject matters. So of course, we took a lot of care [to] make sure that we never put him in harm's way. [But] it was weird that Tristan really understood what we were doing. Kids are some marvelous. If you really speak honestly with them, that we're dealing with grief and all that, he really got it. He was sublime all the way through.
Rachel is really put through the wringer in this movie, and Teresa Palmer just seems so game for everything you guys throw her way. Aleksei, when you're behind the scenes and working with these actors, how do you build that relationship and that trust to get that performance?
Aleksi Hyvärinen: Well, it's obviously amazing. Like, after you've worked on a script and a story and then those characters for years. It's amazing to see all of that come alive. It is crazy to see all of that come to life in front of our eyes. In this case, it felt like a match made in heaven. Teresa, she knew the characters better than we did and her being a mother - and she had done her background work so good - that we just felt she became Rachel.
We were joking about it when we were shooting that our focus puller forgot to focus during some of thescenes when we were just watching them act and looking at the monitor. And it was like, you're just basically relaxing [with] your popcorn and you kind of forget that you're shooting. So it was a really, really great ride and we're just super, super flabbergasted - we're two guys from Finland. We wrote this in Helsinki, in the darkness of the Finnish winter.
And I guess we I have to admit, we never imagined to find cast like this. And it's been a crazy, crazy ride and we're just so grateful for the opportunity to have worked with these people who were amazingly talented and experienced, as well.
With a movie like this where you have a major twist that sort of flips everything on its head, as writers, do you start with the twist or does it come in the middle of the process for you?
Taneli Mustonen: Every creative process is a messy one. At least for us. We sort of started off with just talking about the grief and, as a parent, what would happen if you will lose your beloved children, but then we came up with the concept of twin and just the idea that you would have an identical twin. What would happen to the family dynamics there? But we were basically leaving our office pretty much going to the airport or something and then we started talking about [how] there's something missing from the story. It's too straightforward. And then we came up with those "what if"s?
At first, we felt like, "Oh, could it be something further?" That's the wonderful thing about writing. The script or the story, sort of like tells us what a story should be about. From that point when we realize that they're sort of like the twists, then it became so much more fun for us at least and that became a focal point. Of course, it's the hardest thing. We wanted to make sure when writing the script, that we don't cheat the audience and we don't make them wait and sell them something that if you rewind the tape and go back from the beginning, it starts to make sense. So those were our main goals when running the script.
I love a bleak ending and, without getting into spoilers, it's really bleak. A little bit hopeful, but still really bleak. Why did this ending feel right to you guys?
Aleksi Hyvärinen: You're probably referring to the very final scene. Well, I think there's no specific answer to that. But I think we were playing with the kind of the questions of, if you're possessed by the devil 200 years ago, it's actually pretty much the same as being mentally unstable or ill today, in our modern world. The symptoms are the same.
The rest of it is up to your belief system, and the world you believe in and the very naive question of what is real. And that's kind of something we wanted to explore and in a way that the final thought was probably, "What if?" What if it actually wasn't true? And in a way, Rachel, our main character, ended up going through this tragic event, but at the same time, being happy about what happened. She found happiness in a terrible cage of lunacy or possession and it's up to the audience to decide which one it was.
Taneli Mustonen: It's one of those things that [is] missing nowadays. Sort of like an open-end or an irony in the end that we don't have to over explain everything. We felt that, wouldn't it be cool to have this kind of story where you actually want to grab beer or go to coffee with your friends and really talk it through like, "What did we see?"
And for me, to add what Aleksei just said and I really like what you said because I think so as well about the story, but it also became a question, especially during the shoot, about the nature of the evil, the true evil, and what would be the devil's way of working things through? You don't want to see you know, you know, the monster in the way the winter horses, what do you call them? Like the true nature of evil. And this goes back to those things in Don't Look Now or Changeling and those films that we admire.
It's more than just a physical form or something. This the devil, he lives in Finland. You really want to create the same sort of like atmosphere. That was something me and my composer worked [on] a lot with the music. We went back to those wonderful wonderful tapes of the early 90s. Like black metal like Darkthrone. You really want to keep the audience on the edge of their seats, you could say. We don't want to over-explain, but we don't want to leave it totally open as well. So yeah, but it's a fun scene.
You mentioned your slasher film Lake Bodom earlier. The Twin is in a different space in terms of being more of a psychological thriller/psychodrama with elements of Pagan horror. Did you find yourselves approaching this movie differently on a visual and storytelling level? Did that process change for you guys?
Taneli Mustonen: It's a really good question. Yes, and no, yes and no. Right after Lake Bodom, we had decided we would never ever try to write anything so complicated for us. We're not that smart [laughs]. With the twists and turns. Literally, on Lake Bodom, I had a call to Aleksei during nights, like, "So how did it go again?", and, you know, really go through those ropes. So when we started, never again, were we going to write anything with that kind of twists and turns.
It was [a] weird process with The Twin. Basically, we started writing, and then the story took on its own journey. It sounds so stupid when you say the story tells you where to go, but it's sort of like, we had so much fun on writing and coming up with stories [but] it was a hard script to write and it took some time. But it also was a really interesting time for us, because we learned so much. And that's the other thing, the wonderful part is when you'll learn so much from your previous projects and then you have sort of like the answers through your experience. Like, maybe you shouldn't go that way. Maybe you can go this way. Or maybe you're going to explore these things a bit more.
I don't know if that answered your question, but it was super for us. We wanted to do a bit more adult-themed if that makes sense. But in the end, it's funny when you compare Lake Bodom and The Twin. They both feel like real questions about [the] human condition, about basically, underneath everything, there's love. And it's surprising to us, you know, tough guys that we are.
The Twin begins streaming on Shudder on May 6.