September 2007: While everyone is hard at work setting up the next shot, David Goyer was all bundled up watching his breath in front of him thinking out his next shot for THE UNBORN, which is also wrote for producers Platinum Dunes and Rogue Pictures.

I'm in Lake Forest, Illinois, just a little over ten minutes from where I grew up, where Goyer and company are hard at work filming this new supernatural horror film that follows an 18-year-old (played by Odette Yustman) who is haunted by a Dybbuk - the soul of a dead person barred from heaven - in the form of a young boy who perished in Auschwitz.

It’s freezing outside and it had just snowed the day before, which turned out to be a blessing for the continuity of exterior shots of the house. The two story suburban white house would become the home to the Nelson family, neighbors of Casey Beldon (Odette Yustman), who have two young children.

After a few random exterior shots (and breaking to let us a bus drive through), the crew would move into the house to set up the next scene. Casey is babysitting Matty Nelson and his new baby brother, when she hears something upstairs. The duration of the afternoon was devoted to shooting Odette’s slow paced walk up the staircase to what will become one of the primo scares in the film (we’re sworn to secrecy!).

After watching a few hours of filming, Goyer invited me up to the top floor where we chatted about his inspirations for the film, along with what makes a film scary. His answers give me serious faith in what could become a pretty frightening tale….

BD: So what’s going on? How’s the shoot going so far?

DG: Today it’s day 19 and its actually going actually quite well. Better than I thought it would.

BD: You seem like your in a good mood, fun shoot today?

DG: Yes, very fun shoot. I would say so far this would be the most fun I’ve done.

BD: So this is your 3rd time directing?

DG: This is my 6th time directing, if you count a music video, it’s my 4th movie and I also did a pilot for CBS. And yea so far we’ve been having a good time and I’m happy with about 17 of the 19 days we’ve been shooting. So that’s a pretty good thing.

BD: So dibbuk boxes, were you aware of them (since they aren't in the movie)?

DG: I was aware of the dibbuk box when I was researching dibbuks. I was aware of the story, but I wasn’t aware that there was another project until after I had written the script.

BD: Where did you learn about Dybbuk?

DG: Well, I knew about Dybbuks ever since I was a kid. I’m half Jewish, I went to Hebrew school and so when I was growing up, like anybody, I was into monsters and I thought about it and was like “are there any Jewish monsters?” So there’s like the dibbuk and the golum and that’s pretty much it.

BD: So what made you go the path you went, with writing the script? Where did that story come from?

DG: I was in Chicago a little over a year and a half ago and my wife was producing a movie in Chicago, that Steve Conrad wrote and directed, that is coming out..he’s the guy that wrote The Weather Man and The Pursuit of Happiness, and I was visiting her in Chicago and I was having dinner with her and I had recently gone on a meeting for a movie that will remain nameless, comes out fairly soon. The head of the studio didn’t think I was dark enough to make a really scary movie, which I thought was funny, but I’ve never done an outright scary movie all the way through. So I got annoyed with that because I’ve been accused of a lot of things, but usually not that I’m not dark enough.. or edgy enough?..So I just was like, well, f*ck it, I’m gonna write just an original scary movie. And I hadn’t written an original script in a long time, I just started thinking about what I found creepy and ghosts I find creepy and twins, I’ve always found a little creepy and so I had this notion when I was in Chicago that what if you were haunted by an unborn twin, a twin that died and so forth. Oh, and the unborn twin should have a nickname, cause he didn’t have a name yet, and it just popped into my head, and I go oh the nickname should be Jumby, and that was the idea. And then I started researching twins and that research let to and that started to feel like a creepy background for this kind of ghost story and that led to auscwitch and Jews. And then I started reading up on dibbuks and it just all kinda came together.

BD: Scary movies are really difficult, especially ghost stories, it IS NOT easy to make something scary, what are you doing to make this scary? What is it that you think will make it scary?

DG: Well, first of all, I don’t think there have been very many genuinely good horror films or scary movies that have been made in the last 20 years. Very few. I don’t actually like, with all do respect to Platinum Dunes, I don’t like slasher films, I don’t find them scary and I love those guys but I just don’t find them scary. They’re just gross and they’re shocking but I just don’t find them scary. In the last 20 years, the only, I think genuinely good horror films that have been made are JACOB'S LADDER, THE RING even though it was a remake, depends on how you wanna look at it..or the original Ring, I think THE GRUDGE has scary moments in it even though I think it’s a bad movie and I think THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE was a scary movie it had some good moments, I think THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES is a scary movie. And that may be it, in the last 20 years, I can’t come up with 10 genuinely scary horror films in the last 20 years that were quality horror films and that were not ‘B’ movies. I mean, there are movies that I think have scares in them, I think THE DESCENT is scary, but it’s still a ‘B’ movie, the acting level, and stuff like that, as a whole. And it’s hard cause usually it’s a genre that you don’t get a lot of good acting and it’s not done sort of creditably. And that was the other thing I wanted to do, you harken back to the classics, obviously THE EXORCIST, ROSEMARY'S BABY, pretty much all those films that Polanski made and those are not only scary movies and creepy movies, but they are also movies that are really well made. So I wanted to make the “classy” scary movie, and it’s hard to do. So I think the first thing you have to do to make a movie scary like that and if you also want it to be classy, it has to have an aire of realism to it and I think that is also what makes it scary. There are moments in EMILY ROSE and MOTHMAN PROPHECIES that the reason that they are so scary is because it is completely real. So the production design and the photography, you know, what we are doing in this, there’s a real kind of observational photography, there’s not any crazy trick photography or crazy angles. Most of the time, it’s at kinda like at eye level, so it doesn’t take you out of what’s happening. It is what it is, I don’t want to attract any undue attention to the fact that we are in a film so that we sort of f*ck with that suspension of disbelief. And then if that’s the case, then that dictates if your doing something like that, that’s scary then you can’t have, I mean, I love EVIL DEAD, but you can’t have those kinda of scares.

BD: Like jump scares…that aren’t really scares…

DG: WELL, well, there are JUMP SCARES in this movie, but I think to make a movie really scary you have to build dread. The cinematography and that means a slower pace in some cases. Its funny cause like MOTHMAN PROPHECIES is a movie that is pretty scary although there are very few outright scares but it’s..OH I’ll tell you a recent one that I found creepy was SESSION 9. SESSION 9 is a creepy movie that there’s almost nothing to it, nothing happens but it’s creepy.

BD: I mean, as your shooting it, are you going like “Man, this is tougher than I thought,” or “Man, I wish I had done it this way” or “This might not work..”?

DG: I mean, Yeees, Nooo, it’s the first movie I’ve made where I’m like “Ok I can really cut it in my head” I mean you never know for sure, but I’ve seen, as we’ve been cutting, my editor cut theEXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE, he cut THE GRUDGE, THE RUINS and a bunch of indie films but the scenes have been coming in pretty much how I thought they would work so there aren’t to many adjustments and I’ve been pleased with that. The vibes working. I also think what makes things scary I think what tends to be scary is ‘the unknown’ or ‘the other’ and so I tend to be more scared by entities that you can’t reason with or can’t understand, and to a certain extent that you can’t communicate with. I think the more that they speak, the less scary they are. If you look at the first Nightmare on Elm Street he doesn’t speak very much in that but in the successor movies he speaks, A LOT. Alien is scary because you can’t negotiate with it, you can’t reason with it, it’s just ‘an other’. There’s a constant battle, even though I’ve been happy with them, the studio is constantly, oh explain why, explain why, explain why…so sometimes I’ve written stuff that explains more. To certain point, they’re like “Well, why does the dibbuk do what it does?” Do you even want to know that? That’s why it’s SCARY! And it’s not just me being lazy, it’s just that if you explain it too much it’s not scary! You can speculate, but never explain. So in this movie, we speculate sometimes what it wants but never explain it. And the dibbuk never really talk directly to her. It enters these kind of hosts and there’s always a little bit of the consciousness of the host in there, as well so I think that makes it scary. It’s the first movie I’ve shot anamorphic, which I’m proud of because it’s not a very expensive movie and it’s something I really had to fight the studio on. I think it looks fantastic, and I also think that it gives it, you know, 2 anamorphic has, you don’t have a lot of depth of field, things drop off and become defocused really quickly and so I think that helps in a scary movie as well because there’s a lot of stuff happening just behind her or just in front of her that’s suddenly out of focus and things like that. There’s a really glossy sheen to the movie that’s pretty cool.

BD: Has this inspired you to start working on another horror film??

DG: YEAH, I wanna do an other and I’m having so much fun and its been so long since I’ve written an original film and it came together so quickly. I was gonna shoot MAGNETO before the strike, and what happened was, WOLVERINE was supposed to roll much sooner than it did so it became obvious that the 11th hour, that maybe it wasn’t going to go pre-strike and I had this in my back pocket and so literially a week before the writer’s strike, we heard that Universal and Platnium Dunes had a film that fell out so I met with the guys and it happened really quickly. So I showed them that script like a week before Halloween and here we are over half way into shooting, 4 months later, so that was really cool. The nice thing about writing your own stuff like that is that at this budget level it was not difficult to get it made. I’ve got some other stuff I have to write, I have another movie that I’m writing for me to direct for Universal but as soon as that’s done I’m going right into another under 30 million dollar..

BD: What type of horror film will it be? What can you reveal about it?

DG: I don’t want to reveal anything about it…but I’m having fun with this one and I like doing this and we’ll see. Also, I think I have a very good idea, I mean I sort of planned the sequel for this so we’ll see if we ever get there. I kinda dilberately embedded things in there, but I would never do a 3rd but I know what the sequel is to this.

BD: Oh like referencing stuff that happens in this one?

DG: Oh my God yes! Yea, there’s stuff that we talk about in this one that you don’t see…Let’s put it this way, the sequel starts 15 years before this movie starts. And then it goes back..if we ever get there.

BD: So you said its been a really great experience and you’ve sorta had really some bad experiences..

DG: Really..ONLY ONE..(laughs)

BD: It really comes down to how much control you have over your vision, right? Is it working the the actors? What makes this such a great experience?

DG: Well, I had to a certain extent control over BLADE, but that was a runaway train, there was nothing that anything could do on that movie, that could sort of stop the shenanigans that were happening.

On this movie we have something called a Lucky Cat. I know you’ve prolly seen it in Asian Cultures. It’s like a rotund little cartoon cat with its left paw or right paw raised and it means like good fortune. So just before this movie started I was in South East Asia for 5 weeks, I was in Vietnam, Cambodia, Phillipieens, and then I was coming back through Hong Kong Airport and they had this special on these plastic, little, golden lucky cats that had chocolate inside, so on whim, I bought them and every Friday I award a lucky cat to the MVP crew member. And its become like ‘the thing’ to get a lucky cat and I decide who gets it..I’m like “Did he get a lucky cat? Did he get a lucky cat?” The ones that got it I rewarded over the ones that didn’t and its this whole big thing now.. “Does he get a lucky cat?” And somebody that got a lucky cat f*cks up, sometimes we take it back.

BD: HAHAHA, but what if they ate it?

DG: You still get the shells...

THE UNBORN arrives in theaters January 9th from Rogue Pictures. Visit the official website.