This interview contains mild spoilers.
The horror film Cobweb about an eight-year-old boy who hears tapping noises behind his bedroom wall caught the attention of The Blood List in 2018. Later, it attracted versatile producer Seth Rogen. Screenwriter Chris Thomas Devlin spoke with Creative Screenwriting Magazine about his love of horror and how Cobweb came about.
“I’m attracted to horror in the same way a lot of people are because it is one of the best ways to Trojan horse different ideas, themes, and perspectives in the world that is entertaining,” says Devlin.
The screenwriter understands that audiences don’t like being preached to and horror “is the best way to approach a complicated idea, that you might not even know your own thoughts or perspective on, until you start writing,” continues Devlin. The writing, to him, is a process of discovery. The screenwriter prefers to address complex social issues through a genre lens to make his point. He also loves the aesthetics of horror – deep shadows and monsters.
Genesis Of The Idea
Cobweb had been percolating in Chris Devlin’s mind for several years before he sat down to write the screenplay. “The initial idea came from his childhood. I’ve never been more scared than when I was a kid in bed in the dark listening to every creek and groan and tap that our settling house was making and allowing my imagination to wonder,” he recalls.
The initial drafts of his script, “didn’t really have any kind of direction. It was pretty wild. It went to some dark places.”
Devlin was also on the coveted Black List with a script called The Wretched Emily Derringer. Even so, success didn’t easily come to him. He was unfulfilled creatively in his career as an assistant. Then, Cobweb started gnawing at his writing muse once again. The primal image of a terrified child lying in bed in the dark seemed universal.
“I had an idea in my head and wondered how I could convey the very specific tone that I was going for in a screenplay. It’s very childlike… a fairy tale bedtime story… very simple. And I had to write it in a very poetic way,” adds Devlin.
Prior to writing the screenplay, he wrote a test scene about a mother trying to get her child to go to bed, and that child doing anything they could to convince her not to make them because they’ve been hearing something in their wall that the mother insists isn’t there. Cobweb was still a germ of an idea at that time and got Devlin excited about the story possibilities.
Cobweb has drawn comparisons to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story called The Telltale Heart which is about a man driven to insanity after hearing never-ending noises beneath his floorboards. Chris Thomas Devlin welcomes the literary comparisons, but insists he didn’t use it as a blueprint for his story. He does confess to being a huge Poe fan and his attraction to the “things that go bump in the night” horror trope. He recalls a past incident of memorizing The Raven during high school and reciting it to impress his English teacher who lamented that not enough people recited poetry.
Chris Thomas Devlin
Developing the screenplay for Cobweb was a very collaborative process according to Devlin. “It was the idea of a child being very aware that something was wrong in his house and his parents denying it. I had this idea for a scene at a dinner table scene of a mother Carol (Lizzy Caplan) and father Mark (Antony Starr) berating their son Peter (Woody Norman) even when they blatantly hear noises while they’re eating dinner.” In an early draft, Devlin even had the trapped girl specifically calling for help and explored the psychological gaslighting during this dinner scene.
Many horror movies use children in their narratives. “I’m attracted to horror stories about children because of how powerless they are in their environments. I thought there was something interesting in a coming of age tale for this boy who’s been living in a hermetically-sealed environment his parents have created for him. He doesn’t have a lot of friends, he doesn’t have a lot of influence. He obviously goes to school, but beyond that, he’s such a weird child and can’t poke holes in this reality.” But he knows something’s wrong.
Devlin subverts the traditional role of parents in Cobweb “because parents are the archetypal caregivers. They’re the ones who are supposed to keep their children safe from monsters.” They aren’t supposed to be the monsters. The caregiver’s role has shifted to Peter’s teacher Miss Devine (Cleopatra Coleman).
The psychological horror in Cobweb depends on drip feeding the anticipation of a scare and eventually culminating to a big reveal. It’s influenced by strange and surreal movies. Such horror films don’t necessarily have to make complete logical sense. The scares can come from the subconscious. Cobwes is heavily influenced by arthouse films including David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and the recent Skinamarink.
[More: Kyle Edward Ball On Childhood Fears In “Skinamarink”]
The pacing of Cobweb relies on the week-long timeline. There is a natural structure of night time, daytime, night time, daytime with an increasing level of threat with each day that passes.
The denouement in Cobweb was inspired by the films of Val Lewton in terms of burying and eventually releasing a secret at the latest possible moment. “There are a lot of very subtle references to Cat People, I walked With A Zombie and Leopard Man,” says the screenwriter. In Devlin’s original script, the girl was never shown. Eventually, she was shown in the final version. “I personally am very much of the opinion that what happens in the the corners of your imagination and allowing your mind’s eye to fill in the details is always going to be a lot more effective than the literal depiction of a monster,” states Devlin.
High art films often suffer the problem of trying to contain their undefinable, experimental sensibility into a more traditional three-act structure.
Cobweb is a spooky, mysterious, creepy film that flips the “monsters under your bed are all in your head” trope on its head. Chris Devlin harnesses the fear and anxiety of ghost movies which feature an imagined monster that you cannot see to construct its scares.
