Capturing audiences earlier this year at Sundance, Thea Hvistendahl’s Handling the Undead reimagines the typical zombie flick through a sedated meditation on what defines the living: having a body or possessing a soul? Offscreen Central had the opportunity to talk with director/writer Thea Hvistendahl about adapting the developing a visual language for the film’s eerie tone, balancing the realism and supernatural aspects of the story, and building a heavenly score to capture the somber pace of the grieving process.

Jillian Chilingerian: Hi. So nice to meet you.
Thea Hvistendahl: Nice to meet you, too.
Jillian Chilingerian: Congratulations on the film, I saw it at Sundance and I watched it again last night. It is one of those films that you just constantly are thinking about and just come back to, I’m very excited to chat with you about it.
Thea Hvistendahl: Great, I’m happy to hear

Jillian Chilingerian: The visual language of this film is so unique from the shots of Anna at work with the black frames around her to the very moody atmosphere, and how the different locations feel very decayed and lived. How was it reading the book, adapting it, and then figuring out how you wanted to present that visually?
Thea Hvistendahl: Part of the locations came from the book when also developing the screenplay because they’re all like different stories of having
lost their loved ones but in a kind of different way. I wanted to make locations more of the essence of what each place is like to live. It feels like a representation of these people because grief is such a universal thing that happens. Since there’s not so much information about who are these characters? I wanted also the interiors to tell as much as possible with a feel of living in.
Jillian Chilingerian: They are so unsettling and when you’re watching it, you’re in it. It raises your senses a little bit, because could something take a turn here or with the pacing and just the atmosphere.
Thea Hvistendahl: Yes, that’s good. That was the intention with this was to get that illusion of what do we not see. What could happen here? Or why are we observing them in this way?

Jillian Chilingerian: These performances are beautiful, because they tap into these different stages of grief, with the relationships between parents and their child. We never think about our parents leaving us even though it’s inevitable. With the family of four, in the beginning, when the child pushes off their mother and then towards the end when she is gone there is that time you’ve lost. Of course, we see it with Anna and her son from what it looks like for a parent to lose their child. How was it to pull out that theme within the book and flesh it out?
Thea Hvistendahl: When you lose someone you love, there’s a vacuum that arises and what does that vacuum do with the dynamics of the family that is left? I thought about it a lot about care and role changing and how losing someone in the family unit or a couple just changes all of that. The father is suddenly left with a different responsibility than he had before but also like the eldest daughter. It was more about how losing someone makes such big changes in the life of the living. It’s not just that someone they love is gone. It’s also that they get new responsibilities or the care they used to get is now gone and what does that mean? How do we deal with that?

Jillian Chilingerian: One thing you do so well here is the blending of very magical with realism. The supernatural of it, but we see them tending to their loved ones as if they’re still alive. So how is that playing with the realm of both of those? They’re just not Oh, someone can come up from the grave and how did this happen but it just felt grounded and realistic as the living played into it.
Thea Hvistendahl: that was the intention and how to do it as realistic as possible. Through a lot of the research that I did, I found that people have apparitions of the people that they’ve lost. When they do that, they don’t feel scared, they feel more consoled. For instance, Joan Didion describes in ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ that when even though her husband had been dead for a long time, she didn’t want to get rid of his shoes, because what if he came back, it would be so weird if she had let go of his shoes. It could all be a mistake, maybe he will come back. That was the ideal for them that the living wanted them back so much, it wouldn’t be scary and also, and they didn’t want to scare the people. They still want to care for them and I think that the undead don’t want to be alive. They don’t do much, but when they’re allowed, they also get to show that they are not the person that they used to be. Even though we can see it as the audience like this is not the person or it’s something is wrong, it’s still, you understand why the characters want to see beyond that and just want to care for them and want to like to bring them back and want to project so much life personality into this undead.
Jillian Chilingerian: It feels like they kind of break them out of this trance that they’re in. When the grandfather is like bathing the little boy in the tub and says “I’m gonna get you all clean” those moments are so heartbreaking. They are never shocked or they’re curious why that’s happening. They just continue to go on as if they never left.
Thea Hvistendahl: That depends on some people might think that it’s strange that they’re not more scared. If you’re in such deep grief, and only want is for them to come back, you accept it. You overlook what is wrong, and you don’t want to know, if it’s not real, you just want to try to carry on, and bring them back.

Jillian Chilingerian: I want to end off asking about the score, which is heavenly. It adds a lot to when we get to the end of the movie. My heart was racing, even though it was very somber, but then the end got you. How did you decide on the sound to match the tone that builds up?
Thea Hvistendahl: The composer, Peter Raeburn, sketched before we went into shooting, which I felt captured the film great. We did listen to that a lot while shooting and then going into the edit. I feel like it’s always like that. It’s like, oh, the film can’t can’t carry as much gravitas as as I think it can before going into the shoot. We did work a lot on the music to find the right balance between having the music leaving too much and also if we tried to push it too much into horror or push it too much with the emotions it just like fell. So he did a lot of work to make that and then and then he’s also a great, great composer. When there was something that didn’t work just let him make something new and then worked very nicely.
Jillian Chilingerian: I’m obsessed with a good film score because it adds so much to the film. It got me in my feelings along with what I was seeing visually.
Thea Hvistendahl: I’m happy to hear.

Jillian Chilingerian: Well, thank you so much for this time. It’s, again, such a beautiful film on grief.
Thea Hvistendahl: Thank you.

Handling the Undead opens in NYC theaters on May 31, 2024 and in select theaters June 7, 2024.
You can read our review of Handling the Undead here.