Passenger Director Breaks Down The Horror Movie's Biggest And Most Inventive Scare [Exclusive]
by Jeremy Mathai · /FilmWarning: This article contains major spoilers for "Passenger."
How do you craft something that audiences have never actually seen before? Director André Øvredal certainly tries to accomplish exactly that with "Passenger," the newest thriller from Paramount Pictures about the scariest prospect in all of America: driving cross-country in the dead of night. Okay, so it's a little more complicated than that, but it's remarkable how much mileage (pun 100% intended) this story gets out of essentially a road-trip travelogue. We follow young couple Maddie ("Foundation" star Lou Llobell) and Tyler (Jacob Scipio) as they pack their bags and leave New York City in favor of hitting the open road ... until they inadvertently pick up a malevolent presence known as the Passenger that latches on and refuses to let go.
Leave it to the filmmaker behind "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark," "The Autopsy of Jane Doe," and "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" to find a way to pluck some seriously inventive scares out of this premise. The most memorable of these, however, goes down when we least expect it. While parked out in a dark forest, Tyler and Maddie hook up a projector to unwind and watch "Roman Holiday" before soon realizing that they're far from alone. What follows is a goosebump-raising sequence that weaponizes shadows against us, hinges on Maddie using the still-running projector as an actual light source to hunt down the Passenger, and even involves the translucent movie screen that could be hiding anything.
Fortunately, I had the chance to speak with Øvredal over Zoom to discuss how this technically challenging scare came together — from lighting the set to figuring out how to project classic film images across trees to doing all of this practically.
Passenger director André Øvredal explains how he pulled off the film's biggest 'technical challenge'
When André Øvredal joined the production of the jump scare-heavy "Passenger," the script by co-writers T.W. Burgess and Zachary Donohue was already in place. But actually translating that from the page to the screen proved infinitely more challenging, especially when it came to the film's biggest and most effective scare of all. While speaking to /Film, Øvredal explained how this entire sequence turned into a series of problems that needed to be solved:
"How strong is the light source coming from the projector? How big is the projector? Because [Lou Llobell] has to lift it up and kind of casually do this. And that means that it has to be very lightweight, in a way, for it not to become cumbersome on screen. And then in addition, it has to be a very strong light from it. So we have to experiment so much."
This painstaking process involved testing everything, from the logistics of the lighting to the material used for the screen — with the crew going through at least 10 different types before landing on the perfect one, according to the director. And, bear in mind, the scene also requires projecting images from "Roman Holiday" onto real trees and foliage in the middle of a dark forest in order to build to the ultimate reveal of the Passenger himself, played with incredibly physicality by Joseph Lopez. According to Øvredal, "We had to go out into the forest in the middle of the night and test this out again and again."
The cast and crew of Passenger 'did everything for real'
While certain proclamations about blockbusters not using any visual effects at all can induce some eyerolls (looking at you, "Top Gun: Maverick"), this genuinely rings true with a movie like "Passenger." The modestly-budgeted feature spends the vast majority of its runtime creating a claustrophobic, small-scale atmosphere where all the tension and scares come from the simplest of aspects: the environment, the way the camera frames an empty road (or parking lot) at night, and the clever usage of lighting and shadows to maximize dread.
It's no wonder why director André Øvredal is so proud of how he and his creative team took a back-to-basics approach to bringing this particular sequence to life. In essence, the sheer amount of effort put into crafting this one scene might as well have been a microcosm for the film as a whole. As he told /Film:
"And that's what I loved about making the movie, is that it's all real. We all did everything for real. There's no special effects in that sequence. It's all real projection onto the trees and onto the characters and onto everything. So that was something I was insisting on, and we were all collectively, in a way, all in agreement on: that that's the way we're going to make this movie."
The results certainly speak for themselves. While horror is enjoying quite a run lately, most recently with the breakthrough box office success of "Obsession," moviegoers will want to carve some time for this. "Passenger" is now playing in theaters.