Les Chambre Rouges (Red Rooms) is easily the most intriguing film of the last year. It is deeply dark and disturbing while not relying on on-screen violence to shock the audience. The IFC center in Manhattan was showing the film, so I took the opportunity to see it a second time, and talk to writer and director, Pascal Plante, about the questions the film has left me with for the past year.  

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

 

ORTEGA: Thank you for talking to me

 

PLANTE: It’s a pleasure. Thank you for having me, taking the time. 

 

ORTEGA: First of all I loved Red Rooms. I’ve actually seen it twice. I saw it last year at Brooklyn Horror Film Fest, and haven’t stopped thinking about it since. When you wrote it, were you setting out to write a horror film, or did it just start morphing in that direction?

PLANTE: We actually didn’t want to overtly label the film. If you’re expecting horror, I think you might be disappointed. We play with the genre. Sometimes in drama I can laugh more than in straight up comedy, because comedy you position yourself, as an audience, you’re almost daring the film to make you laugh. I think with horror, it kind of works the same way. We expect something from horror, and we judge whether we like it or not based on the preconceptions we have. Whereas, we were cautious to not label the film. The critics actually labeled the film as more horror than we were in the beginning, because it slowly lures you into very horrifying territory. It’s just a better mindset if you dive into the film thinking that it’s a slow burn thriller, and then it becomes horrifying without you knowing. We liked it better this way.

 

ORTEGA: I think it’s probably one of the most disturbing films I’ve seen in the past couple of years!

 

PLANTE: It’s actually funny. Writing it was very harsh because obviously it’s based on very gloomy research, but the act of doing it, it becomes—you just want your film to be efficient, period. You use all the tools you have in the filmmakers toolbox to make it more potent, and I think it’s only later in the process that we realized, “Oh yeah, actually I think it’s pretty efficient.” We saw the livid faces of people at some point. When you’re doing it, you’re in tunnel vision, even down to working with the sound designer. When we did the sound design for the harsher scene in the film we didn’t notice how intense it ends up being. We were like, “Oh yeah, I wanna hear the blood spurting, I wanna hear the drill.” You kind of get lost into it, and it becomes a weird game, crafting the film to make it efficient. But once it’s done, and it’s efficient indeed we were like, “Oh yeah, we went kind of hard.” Laughs

 

ORTEGA: I know you did a lot of research for Red Rooms. Can you tell me about that?

 

PLANTE: The first research I did was about the fans of the killers. Because it was always the core idea just to flip the perspective of these kinds of films. This was the very basic idea without any flesh around the bone: let’s have the “groupies” as protagonists. Then I basically studied the satellite—the periphery around the crimes—and the widespread obsession about criminals and the cases, and all of that. That led me obviously to talk a lot about the media. It was a challenge to have the protagonist who is a fan of the killer. She’s more than that, she ended up being more than that, but it started as: we have this protagonist who is a fan of the killer, and then how do we make her a good, active character in the narrative. We always want the character to be as active as possible, for her to feel stronger. 

 

So that led me to the second half of the narrative: the interactive crimes. Digging deeper into— I’m already pretty geeky, and pretty online—but that led me to even more. I don’t spend time on 4chan for fun, but I spent time on 4chan doing research for the film, so it played with my head a little bit. That got me down the rabbit hole, and a little closer to Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy). I started being even more online than I was. To this day, I pride myself by saying that I didn’t see a real person die on screen. Because obviously it would have been fairly easy to find, but I didn’t want that, so I tip-toed around that. I basically searched around the subject matter, I read a lot about it without subjecting myself to it. I don’t have any real issues with the Tor network as a piece of technology, I just didn’t want to go there.

 

The second part of the answer is that I had consultants. I had people who work in cyber crimes who did see so many gruesome images online that were talking to me about it, so I didn’t feel the need to subject myself to it first hand. So yeah, technological consultants, and eventually consultants for the courtroom scenes, just to make the scenes authentic. The entry point of the film is to create this parallel universe where if such a case were to happen, this is pretty much how it could happen realistically. That’s the starting point, and then the film evolves into something more expressionistic, and we get into the head of Kelly-Anne, and the film indulges in style a bit more. It starts really muted and almost in a documentary way.

 

ORTEGA: I know in other interviews, you’ve said that realism is really important to you. How do you think in this story that is so dark, what is the connection to realism? Do you think it’s exaggerated? Red rooms are a folklore of the dark web. How much truth do you think there is to that?

PLANTE: Big, vast question. When I did the research and discussed with my tech consultant, he was one of the first people to keep reminding me that red rooms don’t exist the way the Creepypastas make it look, or there’s no real evidence. Not only that, there’s also real technological limitations because on the Tor network, your browser is very slow. He literally said at our first meeting, “If I were to do a live stream of a murder, I would just go on Discord, and do it through an app on the surface web. I don’t need to use Tor to do that. I would just use a VPN and Discord.” I was like, “yeah ok,” but I really wanted to go there because to me—the killer in the film is completely fictional, he’s not based on a real killer per say—but he felt like the kind of guy who was this incel, terminally online guy who literally uses that folklore to make it more appealing to certain demographics who are into that stuff. Red rooms don’t need to literally be red rooms, but if I were a psychopath and if I were to dabble into that, of course I would paint the wall of my garage red. It’s tied to folklore, so it’s almost like, what inspires what? Does the folklore come first in inspiring the people who do that deed, or is it the other way around? In my parallel universe, the guy maybe understands the technological limitations, but this is what’s appealing about the whole thing, and this is what the subculture wants, and that makes it even more valuable in his and his audience’s eyes. So, is it true or not true? 

 

I might have an anecdote. The producer of the film used google alerts with Chambre Rouge, Red Rooms, stuff like that so obviously she gets news about reviews of the film, but also that crosses into the real world. You could literally get a google alert about real news that talks about the real deal, so even that becomes a bit muddy. Where does fiction end and reality begins? We’re still not sure if they exist in the way the film depicts them, and yet it crosses over into real news territory. It’s a complex question.

 

 

ORTEGA: I’ve made a lot of my friends watch this movie. And something that keeps coming up is discussions of what we’ve all seen online. Have we actually seen any real death footage, or true real-world violence? Most of us had, whether intentionally or not. I want to know what you think about the accessibility of violence online.

 

PLANTE: You make me wonder because I keep saying, I haven’t seen real people dying, but then again, I’m sure I’ve seen documentary films about maybe the war in Syria, or any war really, and then of course I’ve seen people die. It is a bit more safe if you’re watching content that at least tries to be very ethical about it. It already feels a bit more removed. But if you are seeking that content, and it feels like it’s for your eyes only, that’s an added layer of darkness, that’s the boundary that I haven’t crossed. 

 

But if you’re even referring to the Magnotta video, the stats are terrifying. It’s been estimated to have been seen tens of millions of times in the timeframe that it was originally on “Best Gore” or whichever site it was on. That’s a lot. That’s a lot of eyeballs looking at a real person dying, and that person has a name. That person is Jun Lin, and there’s a family that is destroyed by this. To me, it’s like our empathy switches off in order for us to receive these horrible images because if we think for a second, “that’s a life, that’s a person who’s never going to breathe again, that’s parents, family, friends devastated,” that’s pretty heavy. 

 

Even down to the true crime shows, some of them are good, but some of them are very irresponsible. They’re cropping up on Netflix, the most used platform. Then you have a documentary about a guy who killed like 30 people and there’s not even a mention of their names, or real focus on the sadness and devastation that it brought to the people who survived. I’m kind of rambling around your question, but yeah, we’ve seen real people dying. Even me, maybe, but in true documentaries that made it in a more digestible way, but even that – sure.

 

ORTEGA: I think one of the reasons that Red Rooms stuck with me so intensely is because of the ambiguity that it portrays, but also reflecting back my own ambivalence about being a fan of true crime media, and my own exposure to violent images of the genocide in Palestine. Can you talk a little bit about the ambiguity in the film? Especially about Kelly-Ann’s intentions?

 

PLANTE: I’ll talk about it in relation to the film, but in real life, sometimes it’s fucked up. Sometimes we kinda need those intense wake-up calls. For instance, there was a photograph of the Syrian migrant crisis of a dead child on the beach. Or going back to the napalm image that shocked the world in Vietnam, where that person eventually died of the burns. That’s already pretty gruesome, and it felt almost needed to give a strong wake-up call. I think we’re kind of post that. Sometimes we do need those still: using death to stir up empathy, but it’s a very thin line and it’s very ambivalent because seeing too much can actually make you… If you are very empathetic, even watching the news becomes extremely depressing. The world is going to hell laughs. I wanna crawl in my bed and stay all day. So of course the film is ambivalent. I myself am ambivalent towards it, so of course if the film resembles me in any way, it has to be ambivalent. The film makes a point in acknowledging the victims, so it goes to show where my heart stands. 

 

But that’s at odds with me trying to make an efficient thriller. So, why is it at odds, and why do we, as an audience seek… Why are we bloodthirsty when we seek that kind of film, that kind of content? Why do we want shit to hit the fan in order for us to be entertained? That’s kind of weird. So I tried to make a film that is, yes, sometimes entertaining, but sometimes not entertaining. Sometimes the film is aimed at shocking you, not in the way Cannibal Holocaust or exploitative horror wants to shock you, but you kind of go through something in order for you to wonder, “why was I as an audience craving to potentially see gruesome images, why did I root for Kelly-Anne to acquire a snuff film of a 13 year old. Why am I, as a viewer, craving these things?” I think we need to ask ourselves these questions because I think a lot of trash true crime shows make you passively entertained, and I think this is very not the kind of content we should consume passively. 

 

There’s a midpoint scene where it’s almost like, “pick your character.” You have Kelly-Anne on one end who is very stoic and almost likes what she sees and you have Clementine (Laurie Babin) who is very much affected by it, and she’s the one at this point who is the most human of the two. But then she leaves the film and you’re kind of trapped in very cold and dangerous territory because you only have Kelly-Anne from this point on. I think it’s important to have Clementine so at least there’s a mirror character that might actually react to violence the way I would. Otherwise, the film would be very dreary.

 

ORTEGA: With Kelly-Anne, part of the thing that makes the film interesting is that she’s a little bit unknowable, but do you, as the writer, know her, or is she still a mystery to you as well?

 

PLANTE: It’s fun to keep her a mystery. Like I said, she started rooted in research. I read books about the potential profile of someone who would come willingly, day after day to the trial of a serial killer. There’s a spectrum, and that’s why Clementine exists; to show that there’s this side of the spectrum, but there’s the exact opposite side, which can be Kelly-Anne. I tried to understand her very quickly, even putting labels on her. She’s majorly adrenaline seeking, she’s also potentially a hybristophiliac, or turned on by violence. But it felt very unsatisfying to label her. I knew I wanted to avoid backstory. 

 

There are a few films I like that do that—like Nightcrawler—and I think the film ended up being way more efficient. In Nightcrawler, Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, you kind of deal with it: this is what he does, and you might not agree with it, but this is what he does. There’s even a society that allows him to do what he does. He films these videos, he sells them, that’s a business. To me, it always felt way more interesting to talk about the society that allows these behaviors to exist and thrive, than just judging them. I knew really early on that I didn’t want any backstory. 

 

Even with the actress who plays Kelly-Anne, Juliette Gariépy, we didn’t talk that much about it. Kelly-Anne isn’t like that because she has trauma, for instance. We’ve avoided these shortcuts extremely willingly. The added layer of mystery is because I wanted to step out of the research and the labels that I was mentioning before. With Juliette, we talked about Witchcraft, we talked about, for her she’s almost like a supervillain/superhero. She saw her as this kind of Batman-like character. We film her almost like a ghost or a vampire. All of these things add up to the mystery. This is why she alludes even me, and this is why I’m pretty cautious to give super blunt psychoanalytical answers as to why she does this or that.

 

Sometimes in interviews people ask me why she takes the selfie at the end, or dresses up in the courtroom. I always play a joke now, because I’ve done quite a few Q&As. It’s been more than a year since the film was finished and released. Instantaneously now, I just ask, “What’s your take on it?” It’s not to be cocky because to me, even though I’ve written the whole thing there’s a sense of mystery in cinema. You don’t decode the images the same way I do. I’m not you, you’re not me. We don’t have the same upbringing, we haven’t watched all the same films, we haven’t read all the same books. It’s also very fun, and part of the fun to have diverging views on why she does this or that. So it’s not me not knowing what I do. On the contrary, I have my theory very clear cut, but I would be doing a disservice to everyone if I were to cut off all the other diverging theories. 

 

Sometimes people give meaning to stuff I haven’t thought about. Stuff in the background that the art director decided to put there, and I just said, “Yeah cool,” and I didn’t look into it. Juliette has a tear at one point after ten minutes of a long take, and people give meaning to that tear, and that’s actually the actress having a genuine emotion. It wasn’t scripted. If you give meaning to that tear, it doesn’t mean it’s not there, because the film exists, and I chose to leave it there in a way, but that’s it. That’s a long, drawn out answer to say, of course she alludes even me, and I think that’s very positive, and that the film can live longer because of that. Because of the diverging opinions and talk about it.

 

 

ORTEGA: The film talks about and even shows when the security footage is edited and data moshed. To me it seemed like it was trying to say something about the nature of truth, when everything we see on screen can be edited. What can you say to me about that?

PLANTE: That’s very interesting, and to me the data moshing in itself—if the extension of Kelly Anne’s persona is so online, if she almost lives this double life – she almost kills her digital self in order to be rebirthed somehow. So to me, the data moshing or the death of the digital image was also interesting to talk about Kelly-Anne in a way, as the death of the digital part of herself. But on what you’re mentioning, yes of course! I’m pretty good with photoshop. I do stuff all the time just for kicks.. We just need to be educated about that matter, at the end of the day. It’s even come to a point, for instance, you look at a fashion magazine, and we kind of know now that everything is super fake, so I don’t think it’s as damaging as when it was a bit more hidden. 

 

I think if you talk to a 19 year old today, they know that these Instagram images and whatnot had 15 takes, they chose the best images, they even potentially photoshopped it or put a filter on top of it. We know that. Also the idea to have the data moshing, surveillance cam was an aesthetic idea to have a clash between hi-fi and low-fi images. I think that on the tor network, there’s something very interesting, and it’s even a bit gloomy. Low-fi, especially in horror and thriller, if used well puts you in a dirtier mood. It’s almost 1999 internet looking, interface of the screens, going back to old chat rooms. It also contributed to the mood I was going for. 

 

ORTEGA: Your brother, Dominique Plante, worked on the music in the film. What was that like? The moment in the courtroom is so strong, when the killer finally looks at the camera. How did you work together to craft that scene?

 

PLANTE: I’m a big music buff. It was my brother’s first score on a narrative feature film. I’ve worked with him, but in a smaller capacity in my previous films. For instance, he would maybe replace one song that ended up costing too much. So he always worked with me. Some films are playlist films, but this felt like a score film. In my previous films, I used pre-existing music, but for this film, since we’re in the head of a character, I really wanted to have kind of a theme.A good, old-fashioned theme. Something a bit obsessive that we could go back to, so it just made sense to have an original score. 

 

Also, when I’m writing, I’m spending a lot of time curating a musical moodboard. So basically a two hour long playlist that I listen to over and over and over again while I’m writing. That musical mood board was pretty depressing, but it included many different genres. I had black metal in there, I had noise, harsh electronic, baroque, funeral marches, lots of funeral marches, medieval folk. This all coalesced into the score that was in the finished film, even though they are all drastically different elements. I didn’t want the music to sound like a Fincher film with pulsating synth and electronics. It can work very well for him, but we’re in the head of Kelly-Anne and she’s into this medieval stuff and century old dark romanticism. It feels so wrong to start this film with harpsichord, that it ends up becoming right again. It just ended up becoming the personality of the film. I told my brother, “I want a melody that a six year old can hum.” and he went with that. 

Also, I put temp music everywhere, so he knew exactly where I needed score. So he tried to understand what I liked about the temp tracks that I put in the score. He tried to keep that, but had a singular theme evolve throughout. 

 

For that particular moment, I had a very harsh song that had screams. It also blended metal music with baroque or classical components. It worked, it felt very cathartic, but we couldn’t use the song. It’s such a key moment in the film that it needed to be perfect. There’s so many other cues that my brother did, first try, where I was like, “Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Let’s just tweak this or that and we’re good.” But for this we worked quite a bit to be honest. We included some screams. But I always knew that this whole sequence was built on music. That’s not something that accidentally happened. As early as the first cut, I had a very harsh, very intense song in there. After that, we were chasing the intensity of that song. It was a lot of work. It’s not by accident, we spent so much time on it. 

 

ORTEGA: From talking to you, it really seems like the success of the film is because of your meticulous intentionality with it.

 

PLANTE: Thank you so much.  

 

ORTEGA: Thank you so much for talking with me.

 

PLANTE: Likewise!    

 

Red Rooms is now available to rent or purchase online