The director of Red Rooms wanted his terrifying thriller to be hard-hitting

Canadian filmmaker Pascal Plante was already exploring the horrors lurking beneath the surface of the dark web before the COVID-19 pandemic put him on lockdown. But in 2021, his self-inflicted misery, combined with being stuck at home for a long time, resulted in the scenario for Red Rooms.

A brilliant examination of parasocial voyeurism in our current vortex of true crime content, Red Rooms follows Kelly-Anne, a model who cannot look away from a high-profile serial killer case. She attends the trial, glued to every update on the suspect in the back row, as lawyers describe his livestream murders in gruesome detail. She turns every conceivable clue back to Google and comes out to gamble crypto on online Texas Hold ’em. Every now and then she books a photo shoot. Where her life – and Plante’s film – goes is unexpected and incredibly creepy.

Red Rooms isn’t an obvious choice for viewers in the spooky season, but Plante is in complete control as he transitions from austere thriller to the kind of horror that would tickle Brian De Palma fans. It shook me to my core. Now that the film is in theaters and available to rent on digital platforms, Polygon spoke with Plante about how he went so dark – and entertaining – without crossing the line.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Polygoon: You’ve been thinking and working on this for years. What does it look like now with some distance?

Pascal Plante: I’m still glad it has a conversation with whatever the current times are, because time flies, especially in a film that deals with technology. I actually had to flirt with science fiction when I was writing. For example, let’s say its AI: It’s weird to say it now, but ChatGPT didn’t exist (in 2021). And so for a technogeek film to be current, you have to think about how people use technology, what makes it relatable, even though some things may become dated sooner or later. Everything about this film will be technologically dated. But it makes you think much more about the tools, human nature, and how people interact with those tools. And that doesn’t actually change.

The film grew out of the cult-like interest that can arise around murderers. How did you extrapolate that into a thriller that could work as a movie?

I have a documentary bent where I know we’re creating fiction and distorting the truth, and that’s fine. But I appreciate a lot of films that can portray niche subcultures in a relatable way, in a way where I’m not just empirically exploiting and stealing the folklore of a scene to turn it into something completely fictional. I would love, in an ideal world, that the people who are knowledgeable about what I’m trying to talk about and can distill an artistic vision from it could be the ones who, in some sense, endorse the film first.

You want obsessive serial killers to say, “Do you see me.”

I know you’re joking, but we had a meeting after a Q&A session: a woman came up to me and the producer and said that she herself is a fan of killers, and that she spends so many hours a day working on them spends, and so on. That. I’m actually glad this happened because it shows that I’m not overly judgmental of the characters. I try to study the phenomenon, and the phenomenon is rooted in society. This behavior is allowed and enabled by something macroscopic. That’s what I’m trying to convey.

I’m not trying to say this is a crazy woman and she’s evil and all that. It’s much more than that. So just the fact that that person felt comfortable coming to talk to us meant a lot. It just meant that I try to make valuable art that can engage in current and hard conversations. But no, I was talking more about people on the dark web hanging out on the internet. I wanted people to permanently watch the movie online and say, “Oh, (she’s) one of us.”

It sounds like you did a lot of research on the topics of serial killers and the dark web experience, but how did that fit into the film? When and where does imagination fit in?

It has to become a film at some point, because research only gets you so far. I’m not doing a PhD. I don’t dedicate my life to it. I dedicate a three-year cycle to my life. That was my obsession at the time. And at some point I had to let go of research and start writing. The imagination must take over. And it was much more of a safe space than the research part, because the research was rooted in something that was so grim and so depressing.

Making a genre film for a filmmaker in 2024 is actually great because fans of genre films are very bold. They want unique films. They want films that challenge them. But that’s a lot of fun when you know that there may be an audience that is willing to accept all the idiosyncrasies of your creation, of your work. This forces you to become bigger, bolder, more colorful and expressionistic, go wild with music, go wild with sound design.

This is the moment when it becomes a movie. The film has four stages of aesthetics: It starts off almost super robotic, almost like VR, almost like a computer is in charge of the camera work, because we’re in that character’s head. (…) Then it doubles more into a paranoid thriller, when she is seen a little more, and she feels as if she is seen. And we end up all in giallo, like with crazy filters and crazy colors, because now she’s completely over, on the other side of the mirror. She is in her fantasy.

Red Rooms revolves around a gruesome series of murders, but we barely see any of it. This is not a gory movie. It’s bloody–sounding film, between dialogue and off-screen videos. How far did you want to go with it?

That also has to do with the way I researched the film, because I always tiptoed around the subject – I didn’t want to see anything. I didn’t want to go too deep into it. So I always got the notification from third parties, such as police reports or lawyers. So there is a distance.

And yet, every time you deal with something that appeals to the imagination, your imagination runs wild. And so by tiptoeing around so many things, I just kept letting my imagination run wild and creating those images. So I tried to get that core idea into the finished film, which of course could appeal to all the senses. I felt like if you turn off one sense, the others become hyperactive. We fill in the blanks and enter into dialogue with the film with our imagination.

I kind of fell down the rabbit hole of YouTube, like creepypastas, and I’m used to watching horror movies. When I watch a horror movie, the comfort zone is easy for me. I know the codes better. It’s rare that I’m particularly haunted by a horror movie. But some creepypastas did, and some were really good storytellers. I felt I was onto something. I wanted to retreat from the age-old tradition of gloomy campfire stories that just put you in a strange mood. And that’s how the movie will function. He’ll just put you in a weird mood, not necessarily by being extremely graphic, but graphic verbally, just the details, the attention to just the storytelling, the slow burn, so it ends up being disturbing in itself.

And you don’t even see the snuff movie scene in the movie, but you hear it – it’s terrible. I’m not making it easy for you. I’m going hard on you.

The man you have to play Chevalier, the accused murderer on trial, plays this perfectly. Maxwell McCabe-Lokos is silent throughout, but absolutely terrifying.

I know! Especially because the film revolves around him, but he is not the subject. He is an object character in the sense that he is being looked at. So I was actually shy to even interact with and approach some of the actors. I had wild ideas, because he plays a non-speaking role, so he could be anyone – he could be a musician, he could be someone from the United States, he could be someone from Europe. Anyone could be the killer. So it really made me think about what I wanted. I wanted someone with charisma, but not a Zac Efron type to a certain extent. I’m very aware of the criticism of so many true crime films with very handsome, charismatic actors, or, on the other hand, with someone who is too ‘monstrous’. I wanted someone in between.

The interlude eventually became banal. But there was something specific I was looking for, namely the eyes. I wanted someone with eyes that looked like Peter Lorre, big, blue, expressive eyes. And so Max, my producer, Dominique Dussault, knew him, because he’s a Canadian indie filmmaker doing really interesting things. He is also an actor. He understands the artistic process. I was almost too shy to ask him, “Oh, Max, yes, there is a role in the screenplay, it’s not much…”

But at the first meeting he said, “Yeah, okay, but it’s almost like there’s a microscope on my face all the time? So if I rub my hands or cough, people go crazy?” And I said, “Yes!” So he immediately understood the challenge, which is that everything he does generates meaning, he is scrutinized by the camera, the characters. And so it’s actually quite physical. He took it as a challenge for an actor, which I underestimated. And he understood immediately.

The anchor of the film is Juliette Gariépy, who was previously a model before making the film. How did you end up playing Kelly-Anne, who is also a model?

I guess I’ll narrow it down to one thing: it’s pure magnetism. The only way this film works is if you as an audience look at her the way she looks at the murderer. So you have to say, okay, there’s a danger lurking, but you’re not quite sure what it is. But you can’t look away. She has that sense of danger, but in a very photogenic and magnetic way.

There is more than that. It’s clearly a big role to play. It’s very physical. She learned to play squash. She learned about cryptocurrency. She has learned so many things. I let her watch movies and listen to playlists of music I put together for her. It’s an appropriate role. And not only that, Juliette too terribly different from her character. She is very cheerful, very funny, very expressive. But there’s something about her eyes… the madness, like Klaus Kinski’s eyes. You’re just like, Oh my God.

There’s quite a difference between people who seek out snuff films on the dark web and viewers who enjoy gory horror films. But do you hope the film will wake up people who like dark things? Did it shock you in terms of the appetite for violence in films?

I think there are two things going on here. I find it much easier to watch a naive, exploitative, sometimes gory and tense film. I can watch Cannibal Holocaust. I can watch Inn. But I have a harder time with cruel films – even though there is sometimes a fine line. There are filmmakers who create characters to crush and dominate them. A good (Lars) von Trier was not like that, but the bad von Trier are not visible to me. The man is too sadistic. He’s too nihilistic. It’s not fun in there at all.

Cutting off a head in a Tarantino film with blood spurting is very different from psychological torment in a movie. So there is a limit, but I think the limit is: it has to come down to the filmmaker’s view of the world. Are they just saying that everything sucks and that we’re all going to die? Or is there something else? Is there some light? And even though of course I just did that dark film, I try to give the characters some kind of redemption. There is light at the end of this very dark tunnel, which is important, if only to get our daily lives going. I don’t long for happy endings, but give me some air!