10/03/2025 - The Swedish director breaks down his indie horror flick set in a retirement home, which is based on a novel by Mats Strandberg

(© Peder Cederling)

Swedish director Mattias J Skoglund presents his indie horror flick The Home [+see also:
film review
interview: Mattias J Skoglund
film profile] at this year's SXSW, in the Midnighter section. The setting for the film is a retirement home for elderly people. We talked to the auteur about the scariness of such a place, about his approach to the story, which is based on a novel by Mats Strandberg, and about the importance of sound design.

Cineuropa: A home for elderly people is certainly a spooky place, somehow. It reminds us of our possible future. Why did you choose it as a setting?
Mattias J Skoglund: The whole project started with me reading the book The Home by Mats Strandberg. He's a friend of mine, and that's why I was able to read it at the manuscript level. I wanted to do another feature and wanted to find something that could be done on a limited budget. The novel was an impactful reading experience for me because I think it's a terrifying setting. A close relative of mine was suffering from dementia, and I wanted to confront the topic. I also felt that it was different to many horror stories. So, Mats and I started to work on the script together. First, we tried out a very linear, rather traditional, adaptation, but it didn't work. We agreed on a loose adaptation of the novel. We basically kept the three main characters but cut out a lot of the side characters. We created another back story to connect them.

Domestic violence is one of the main topics of the film. What were the most important aspects you wanted to talk about?
We started to look for ways to connect the trauma of both mother and child. The son is returning to try to save his mum from a supernatural possession, but it's also a story about a person trying to confront his personal trauma without losing his mind. They're connected in their trauma, which is related to their abusive father or husband. The theme of the movie is abuse, but also encompasses many other things related to it – forgiveness, for example, and friendship. And the underlying topic is the fear we have of losing control over our mind. Watching it happen to people with dementia is really scary.

The film depicts a spiral of violence, inherited from one generation to the next. It hints at the fact that many more people might be affected by it than we think.
The movie doesn't close in on the fact that the main character, Joel, is cured of his trauma at the end. I wanted him to become more physical, violent and desperate as the movie progressed, signalling that when you've been abused and you have trauma, it's very easy to continue that cycle. It's a very hard chain to break. So, it's not clear that he's getting over it. But at least he gets to hear one thing at the end that could be a seed for change. His mother says: “I should have protected you a long time ago.” That's a key line that he has to hear from his mum because, obviously, neither of them wants to confront this.

Most of your cast are elderly people. Was it difficult to find them?
I had a great assistant director and casting director, who did a fantastic job. Some of the cast are elderly actors from the Royal Dramatic Theatre or are longstanding movie stars from Sweden. And some are actors who hadn’t worked for a very long time. But they’re combined with mostly amateurs as well. We shot on Gotland Island and got in touch with the local retirement organisation. Through an open casting, we found some of the elderly people.

You were saying that you had a rather low budget. Can you tell us more about the production conditions?
The biggest constraint was the number of shooting days. And we were a pretty young team, with a lot of team members coming from different countries. So, it was a challenge to work efficiently. Moreover, we had only a few locations, and we found them pretty close to each other. We ourselves stayed at the retirement home where we shot. So, we could work constantly, prepare scenes, and basically wake up and go to work immediately. That helped a lot.

You use virtually no special effects, so sound is essential. Can you tell us more about your concept for the sound design?
I wanted to start out by lending a horror or genre feeling to it, and then let it develop as the story progressed. I'm very much influenced by Alan Splet's and David Lynch's sound design. They use a lot of drones and uncanny sounds, but I wanted to do something slightly different as well, so we worked with the combination of industrial and natural sounds. Sound should always be very subjective and most often be designed from the protagonist's perspective. I wanted to create a tone that would be very raw, intimate and slightly uncanny, and I tried to strike the right balance between all of that.