SCARED OF THE DARK

WHEN DAVID BRUCKNER TAKES YOU DOWN TO THE WOODS, YOU’RE SURE OF A BIG SURPRISE IN THE NIGHT HOUSE

- DARREN SCOTT

MODERN-DAY MASTER of horror David Bruckner – responsible for The Signal, V/H/S and The Ritual – is about to cause sleepless nights with his latest movie The Night House. But really, he’s just paying forward his own experiences. “I was just terrified of horror films as a kid,” he admits. “I don’t think that I could really handle them. My father would watch them, my mother worked nights as a nurse, so I would try to hide from the TV. I couldn’t escape the sound of the film – the ideas of whatever he was exploring were still in my head in some ways or another.”

EAR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW

Bruckner has at least two that stayed with him for different reasons. “Poltergeist did a number on me when I was young. I saw that one before I was ready to,” he recalls. “Cronenberg’s The Fly reboot really, really disrupted me for a while. I couldn’t watch a Jeff Goldblum movie for about 10 years – even Jurassic Park. Just seeing Goldblum on screen made me intensely uncomfortable, I was just terrified his ear would fall off, rather casually. It scarred me in the best ways.”