Tilman Singer hopes teens will sneak into his horror film Cuckoo and have their minds blown

Drama series by Sam Levinson Euphoria has been a spectacular launchpad for new movie stars, with Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi all seeing their movie careers blossom after the show’s first season. Hunter Schafer is the latest Euphoria player on the road to movie stardom, with her first leading role in Neon’s horror film Cuckoo. Schafer plays Gretchen, an American teenager who reluctantly accompanies her father, stepmother and mute half-sister to a remote German resort run by a very creepy man (The guest‘s Dan Stevens) whose overly friendly appearance clearly hides deeper motives.

It’s a dark, strange film, built around a central character who’s initially hard to like, but then impossible not to root for as she endures increasing physical abuse and the odds stack up against her. And given the clear disconnect between how the first trailer depicts the film and what actually happens, Cuckoo will likely come as a big surprise to many viewers. Avoid spoilers if you can. (You won’t find any below.)

Writer-director Tilman Singer, a German-born filmmaker, makes his second feature film after the 2018 horror mystery film lighttold Polygon in an interview that he cast Schafer in the film years ago, before the first season of Euphoria even aired. When COVID-19 slowed down his production, however, he was pleased to see her build a fan base through the series — because even though Cuckoo is an R-rated film, but he secretly hopes that younger teens will find a way to sneak into the theater and see it.

“We had to push (the production) one more time because Euphoria was shooting season 2, and by that time it was super hype,” Singer said. “We knew that was all really, really good for us. It made me happy because I was like, first of all, Wow, she has a lot from young fans, and these young people are allowed to come and see our strange film. I remember when I was a young teenager, the first really strange, weird movies I saw, that overwhelmed me, that I didn’t fully understand at the time — I was so grateful that it was happening to me. I imagined that something like that was happening to other young people now, to our film.”

While CuckooThe film’s initial festival run generated a number of reviews comparing the film to films like Stanley Kubrick’s The Appearance and Ari Aster’s HeirSinger would rather people not call it “2024’s.” Heir” — he says he’d rather people call it “the 2024 movie that young people fell into too early and saw.”

Singer looks back with particular pleasure on films he saw “too early,” such as Alex Cox’s 1984 cult film Repo man. “I love that movie,” he said. “I was, like, 14. My uncle gave it to me on VHS in English. My English was really bad. But I was into punk music and I just watched it over and over again. I had no idea what was going on. The other one — around the same age, I watched David Lynch’s Lost Highway. And these just opened me up. So that’s a beautiful thing.”

He compares the thrill of this kind of formative, often illicit cult film experience to having your heart or brain ripped open. “Sometimes something hits you with a force, because you’re not used to hearing or seeing[something like that]and it just rips your skull open,” he said. “(…) I think that’s one of the most formative and beautiful things.”

Shall Cuckoo young viewers in that way? It certainly can. Singer’s horror film is a unique film, full of narrative surprises, an intense and emotional central performance by Schafer, a great mystery in Stevens’ character and vivid images that linger in the memory long after the last shot. Singer shot Cuckoo on 35mm film because, as he told Polygon, he prefers the “big choices” of having to pre-select lighting and framing for a limited number of shots over “all the little trial-and-error choices” of real-time, on-set digital manipulation. It gives the film a lush, hyper-realistic look that may remind viewers of The Appearance.

Singer says he likes the comparison The Appearance was just one of the influences that weighed on him when he Cuckoobut it was definitely an influence. “I must have watched it a billion times,” he laughs. “When we were on location, scouting, and I found this big hall that we turned into our hotel reception lobby, The Appearance just now crops about me. I thought, ‘Oh my God, we to have to shoot here, we have to shoot here!’ Our production designer was like, ‘This place is a mess. This place is going to fall apart.’ And I was like, ‘We don’t have to do anything! The patina is already there!’ They were like, ‘Yeah, we do have to do something.’ one or two things here.'”

Image: Neon/Everett Collection

Singer says all old hotels “always have something ominous about them,” and anything shot in an old hotel is likely to bring longtime horror fans back to Kubrick’s film. But he hopes horror fans will see his other influences in Cuckoo also.

“Especially with a film that feels like it’s wearing its influences right there, you know, on its face,” he says. “I think that’s just what I do. I usually write very subconsciously, tapping into my subconscious and letting it flow, and then later understanding what[I’ve written]and shaping it with the actors. With that process, it’s like a lot of images and sounds and structure are pouring out of my head.”

One thing he approaches more consciously, though, is the belief that horror films need a sense of hope. “I wanted to make a horror film, or a thriller with horror elements, or whatever you want to call it, that wasn’t so grim and didn’t descend into absolute doom,” he told Polygon. “I think horror is a really beautiful genre because horror effectively forces you to confront death, or all the incarnations of death. Could it be violence, could it be sexual violence, could it be all that? And the only antidote to death is some form of religion.”

Singer was quick to clarify that he wasn’t talking about organized religion: “I’m not talking about Christianity or Islam or anything like that. I’m talking about a higher sense for people. How to deal with death. You could call it love, you could call it music, whatever. I think Cuckoo has a lot of that idea — we can overcome death, or if we don’t overcome it, just live with it. I’m not going to give away the last shot, and it’s not that crazy if you just describe it. But that very last shot, to me, is the essence of the whole film.”

Cuckoo is now playing in theaters.