Author Craig Davidson, writing under the pen name Nick Cutter, is making waves in the horror world. His 2014 novel The Troop received rave reviews and has been compared to “Lord of the Flies combined with 28 Days Later.” James Wan’s Atomic Monster acquired the film rights, while his 2015 novel The Deep is being adapted for a Prime Video series. His newest novel, The Handyman Method, co-written with Andrew F. Sullivan, will be released on August 8th.
Davidson has written his debut feature, The Breach, with co-writer Ian Weir. The film, directed by Rodrigo Gudio (founder of Rue Morgue Magazine) and featuring music by Slash of Guns N’ Roses, who also served as executive producer, will be released on Digital and VOD on July 11th. It follows a small-town chief of police who “must investigate one last case when a mangled body with uncanny wounds washes up on the shores of the Porcupine River.”
We spoke with Davidson, referred to as “Nick Cutter” below, about his new film, upcoming book, body horror, and the impressive world of low-budget filmmaking.
Horror Geek Life: I recently started The Troop but had to put it down to check out your upcoming book, The Handyman Method, which just arrived.
Nick Cutter: It’s like a backlog of Cutter-type stuff. The Troop is what I’m most well-known for on the horror side of it. Probably overall, actually. Opinions vary on that book and pretty much all of my output. So hopefully you enjoy it.
Horror Geek Life: You have a particular style, heavy on body horror and unsettling gore. It definitely isn’t for everyone, but it’s for me.
Nick Cutter: Oh, good. Yeah, that’s absolutely right. I mean, there are so many different aesthetics in horror. Any genre has different levels and granularities. And certainly, I’m influenced a lot by my fellow countrymen. David Cronenberg, and now Brandon, and Carpenter on top of Stephen King and Clive Barker, and the people from the book side of things.
But yeah, in terms of body horror, Cronenbergian is probably a good term, like I’m an apple off that particular tree.
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Horror Geek Life: I can see that. One movie that came to mind with The Breach is The Void.
Nick Cutter: Yes. Oh, another couple of Canadians, right? And they [Steven Kostanski and Jeremy Gillespie] did Psycho Goreman. So that’s good. That’s a good equivalency. I really loved The Void. That was an excellent movie.
I’m not really clued into the film side here too much. It’s more the book side. But I do know in my small way that here in Canada, it’s an insular, in a good way, kind of community, and the people behind The Breach, like from the production side of it, worked on distributing Psycho Goreman. But he [Kostanski] is very difficult to get; he’s busy doing his own filming.
And in The Void, I love the practical effects. There were some scenes in the hospital where it felt like you were in a Carpenter movie in the ‘70s. I really love that aesthetic. I think we did look at him to see if he could help out with some of the stuff. But A, it was the pandemic and B, he’s simply too busy and too popular now. I love the people who did The Breach; I think they did a bang-up job. It’s a skill in high demand.
Horror Geek Life: Absolutely. The Breach had impressive practical effects. Especially in the second half, as things ramped way up. It was so gross, and I loved it. Seeing those effects come to life on screen, is that how you envisioned it when writing the film?
Nick Cutter: Well, yes, and no. I remember getting developmental shots as they were putting it together. And, you’d see sort of a head or something, and it hadn’t been colored, but I was like, oh, that’s not what I had envisioned, but in a wonderful way. Some of the stuff that they had come up with was outside of my conception of how I had necessarily seen it happening. But it’s one of those things when you actually do see what the effects artists have come up with, you think, oh, I’m glad it actually wasn’t my vision. I’m glad it was something that these guys came up with.
And you mentioned in the second half that the effects start going up. Because it was a low-budget film, I think they had to really be careful how to amortize the budget towards obviously paying the actors, getting the sets put up, and for the practical effects. I think there are maybe two or three key shots. And I’m like, well, you really got your money’s worth on that.
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Talking to Rodrigo [Rodrigo Gudiño, director] and some of the producers, it was shot during COVID. They got a key grant from a Canadian government body up here. And that was what funded the whole thing. But they really had to run on a tight budget. So we watched it, and they told me, well, this was shot in the parking lot. I’m like, that’s a river scene. It’s like, yeah, no, we put the boat on the back of a truck and just towed it around. It’s just amazing, the kind of real creativity that especially low-budget films need to enact in order to just get the production finished. I was really enlightened.
Horror Geek Life: That is one of the main reasons I love the horror genre, indie films, and practical effects. They can do so much with so little. Some of these artists can MacGyver dental floss and chewing gum into an impressive creature feature. Early Tom Savini is an excellent example of this.
Nick Cutter: The money people or the powers that be are not particularly interested in investing any kind of sizable capital in horror films, even though it’s a good thing just from a money-making perspective. Genre film viewers and readers are really loyal. More so than, I think, in other genres.
I think horror films generally tend to do well. They don’t really need big budgets. As you said, some of the best ones, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the Romero stuff that Savini worked on, it’s actually better, grungier, and grittier to have it at that low level. Even some of the early Cronenberg stuff was clearly very low-budget. And it benefits from that aesthetic.
Horror Geek Life: For sure. There are so many classics today that should have never been made. So you have a few adaptations in the works right now, and “Nick Cutter” is getting mentioned quite a bit with horror fans due to The Troop and The Deep. When you sit down to write, do you think, “Could this be adapted?” Or do you try to keep that out of your mind and focus on what you want to write?
Nick Cutter: You know, Melissa, I do try to. I certainly wasn’t when I first started writing. I think most of us write a book, and then it gets published, and someone says, oh, what about film rights? And you’re like, how do even movies get made? How does any of this work? And then you get clued into the system. It can potentially have an insidious way of influencing the way that you write your books. It’s like a door that is shut the whole time; you don’t really pay attention to its existence. But once it’s open, you can’t help but potentially be a little influenced by that siren song over there. So I do my best to conceptually come up with an idea that I find interesting and some characters that I feel I can follow and suit my aesthetic.
I think some people just have a somewhat cinematic writing style. And I suppose that’s because growing up, as much as I read books, I also watched a lot of movies. So it’s a synthesis of those two loves.
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Horror Geek Life: With The Breach, is there anything you didn’t include because of budget or concerns about it adapting well on screen?
Nick Cutter: I co-wrote this with my friend, Ian Weir, who has been a long-term screenwriter. So a lot of stuff, me as a writer and very much a neophyte screenwriter, I didn’t understand why something was unfeasible on a budget level. Like, why can’t we just have all these things explode? And he would very wisely and very thoughtfully say, “Craig, we’re going to need to find a different way to do this.” Because it did have such a tight budget, they had to make a lot of really thoughtful, clever changes on the fly. If this scene was a $100,000 scene, and they’re like, well, it needs to be a $20,000 scene, they would sort that out.
Rodrigo and the producers and everybody were really good at doing that. So yeah, there wasn’t anything I didn’t consider putting in, and certainly, in the first draft, I probably did. But over time, you comb that out. It was a learning experience. I learned a lot about how to write a film and think about the budget.
Horror Geek Life: I’m glad you got this experience, and I have no doubt those lessons will benefit you in the future.
Nick Cutter: I’m grateful to the producers and Rodrigo and everyone for helping me through it as much as possible and for the opportunity. And you’re right; it is s a learning experience and a way to move forward if I decide to write more screenplays. It’s not really on the horizon, but should it be, at least I’ll have some background in it now.
Horror Geek Life: Before we wrap, I want to touch on The Handyman Method. It comes out on August 8th; can you talk a bit about the book and what readers can expect?
Nick Cutter: It was me and my buddy Andrew [Andrew F. Sullivan]. It’s another co-written thing, which I’ve never done. It seems to be a pandemic thing. Reaching out to people when you’re the most isolated, like, let’s do something together.
We decided to write what is essentially that durable kind of notion of the haunted house. It’s our take on it; hopefully, a modern look at it—sort of like The Shining or Burnt Offerings. So there’s a little bit of that. And it’s harnessed in a modern take on YouTube obsession and the way that men especially can be beguiled in bad ways by needing to feel manly and going the worst, most objectifying, and soul-destroying routes of getting there.
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Horror Geek Life: I’m excited to dive in and review it. And I love that you mentioned Burnt Offerings because the film is criminally underrated.
Nick Cutter: It’s a great book, too, Robert Marasco having written it. And I love them both. Robert would say they didn’t change it very much. Obviously, King has made it known that Kubrick’s The Shining was not to his taste, even though it’s a classic of the cinema. But I think Robert was quite pleased with what they did with Burnt Offerings. And I loved it, too.
