The Moogai is the story of Sarah and Fergus, a hopeful young Aboriginal couple, give birth to their second baby. But what should be a joyous time of their lives becomes sinister when Sarah starts seeing a malevolent spirit she is convinced is trying to take her baby. Fergus, who can’t see it but desperately wants to believe her, grows increasingly worried as she becomes more unbalanced. Is the child-stealing spirit real or is she in fact the biggest threat to the safety of their family?
With The Moogai hitting Australian cinemas in time for Halloween, Nick L’Barrow spoke with the film’s writer and director Jon Bell about expanding the world of his short film, the emotional exploration of art, and the importance of great horror sound design.
Nick: Jon, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Thanks for taking the time to chat.
Jon Bell: No worries, bro. It’s a pleasure to meet you, too.
Nick: I’m a huge horror fan, and I’m always curious to ask filmmakers what makes this genre such a great vessel to explore some really intense, human themes, like you do in The Moogai. I’m curious to know at what point you felt that the horror genre was the best genre to tell this story?
Jon Bell: Well, I’ve always been a fan of the genres horror and sci-fi. I have always been, sort of, enlightened by those kinds of worlds. This story was probably always going to be in the horror genre. That’s just where it belonged. And that probably also came from probably, like yourself, being a lifelong lover of those sorts of films.
Nick: With your screenwriting process, do you create the central idea and concept, then work your characters into that world? Or do you create characters who then influence the decisions you make about the story as their journey goes on?
Jon Bell: I mean, on different projects, I do both. For me, it’s just always like, what thing is going to jump out at me in the moment, a character or a situation? But on this one in particular, it was more about the story.
I wasn’t sure the ending was where I wanted to leave it. At one point, it was going to be that they were just on the run and that there, you know, wasn’t that real resolution. Which is not quite like the short, but it’s a similar sort of downer ending like the short film.
With this subject matter, and the deeper themes that are pretty full on, it couldn’t just be a horror film where you watch the downward spiral of somebody, and their sort of disintegration or something. It had to be something a little bit more. And not necessarily following a traditional hero’s journey, but it had to have something that was slightly more uplifting.
When I was doing Redfern Now a few years ago with Jimmy McGovern, who is a genre himself, we had a few conversations about the hopelessness of the narrative. And when you’re watching a character go through and confront certain situations, the strategies and tactics they use to deal with those things become the human things that move the narrative.
Even when you’re talking with mates, or your parents, or mentors, whoever you talk to, we just relate things through analogy. We’re not all scientific thinkers who can talk in objective terms. Most of us talk through our subjective experiences, and that’s what stories are.
Nick: How did that process then work in adapting and expanding from the short film of The Moogai?
Jon Bell: It was interesting for this film because it was almost like a reverse journey. I already sort of had a map for the feature in my head, and then when we talked about doing a short as a proof of concept, it became about condensing down the journey to the short story. And I think that gave the short a bit more narrative clarity. A little bit more urgency in a way.
Even if elements of the short felt slow, the storytelling was always moving and that’s because I knew everything about it outside the timeline. I knew everything about the world. I had a bigger sense of the world.
There was a similar thing I did with my first TV series I created called Gods of Wheat Street, I’d sort of written 10 episodes, then brought it down to 6. If you explore the world and colour outside of the lines, when you come back in, you have all the answers. You don’t have to think about what might happen outside of this. It’s a lot of work, but the process works.
Nick: There’s a line of dialogue that Sarah says in the film just after the incident at the school. And she says, “I just need to feel this way until I don’t feel this way anymore”. And I think that’s a powerful line that a lot of audience members will relate to when it comes to processing emotions and feelings about a situation. I’m curious to know what role art plays in your understanding and processing of feelings? Does writing a story like The Moogai help bring some form of catharsis about the full on themes you’re exploring?
Jon Bell: In general, I think it’s therapeutic to, you know, get things out in an artistic endeavour, if you can. Especially because there is discovery in that. Actually picking up a paintbrush and painting, then a couple of days later going, “Wow, where was I emotionally doing that?”
The act of creation and the act of examination are two different things. If you can come back and examine your work with any sort of clarity a few days after creating it, that really reveals a lot. And in a lot of ways, it’s cheaper than going to psychiatrists.
Nick: I’d love to wrap up on something I love about the horror genre, and something you do in The Moogai, and that’s the importance of sound design. What was the process in creating something so visceral like the sound of the creature itself?
Jon Bell: Oh man, that was all Emma Bortignon. Man, she’s a bit of a crazy genius. I mean, she’s not crazy! But she is a genius in her own way. It’s something we worked on during the short too, trying to take sounds from different sources and manipulating them in a way that they felt familiar enough, but through the manipulation, there is something that creeps you out.
I think that’s the source of creepiness. It’s that uncanny valley sort of effect. That’s the thing that scares us on a basic, sort of, mammalian kind of level. The thing looks human, but it’s not human. It looks humanoid, and you don’t know what to make of that.
But sound is such a big part of horror. All of Emma’s stuff enhanced everything we were going for, which “creepy” was the word we were using from the start. That word was just stuck up on our wall. It’s the feeling that this movie is kind of chasing you, and the creepy sound design is there to put you even more on edge. And we just wanted to keep pushing that further and further towards the edge.
Thank you to Jon for his time, and to Maslow Entertainment, Umbrella Entertainment, and NixCo PR for organising the interview. The Moogai is in Australian cinemas October 31.
