The Flesh Itself emerged as a surefire festival highlight this year. During its screening at Fantastic Fest in September, scriptwriter Alexandre Ottoni hopped on a Zoom call to discuss the film’s dark, thematic threads, creating the hypnotic period piece, what war says about human nature, and the suffocatingly brutal violence toward the Black male character. In Horror in Frame, Ottoni also discusses the film’s best aspects and questioning authority.
The film is set during the Paraguayan War when it ended in 1870. What was the significance of setting the story then?
Doing a small budget horror film meant that we wanted to keep the camera close to everyone and isolate the characters in a setting. The first idea that came up from Ian’s perspective in his screenplay is that this war represents the setting that we wanted for the characters coming out from war and heading into a much worse nightmare. For Brazilians, especially, this period is something that we barely study in school, or there’s so many mixed up misunderstandings of this conflict. There’s just a lack of historical documents in many aspects. Everything is pieced together. We know that because this is such a horrible period; it’s the worst war in Latin America. So, it’s a subject that is barely touched in our society. There are so many subplots and things going on in the setting. For instance, Gustavo is our main character who is a freed slave. That was something that the plantation farmers would do to join the war effort… contribute with enslaved people of their own to the war effort. If they would survive, they will be free men.
They were coming into a society that was just marginalizing them. For us, it’s such a powerful message to touch on, on subjects that are still present today in our society. We can tap into the roots of how everything that we have today in terms of inequality and everything that happened in Brazil is quite similar to what happened in the United States. The enslaved population was free, but they weren’t included in society.
Wartime continues to be a normal part of humanity’s story, since the very beginning of time.
Yes. The way that the societies relate its population to war is part of what we were trying to reach. It’s like the three soldiers are trying to run, which happens a lot by the beginning of the war especially, and they would say that, because this was the middle of the forest in the jungles, that ‘God is great, but the jungle is greater.’ They’d hope that they could find a path out of this terrible conflict because they didn’t have maps or compasses or anything. Most of them didn’t die in battle. They would die from diseases because they would camp downstream from a battlefield. Imagine the dead corpses rotting, and then the river is bringing contaminated water. It’s something that was a great motivation for our characters to be in.
The film is so effective in that it does focus on the cruelty of humanity, regarding the farmer and what he believes to be true.
We had discussions about how to approach the end of this story. Should we explain more or less? Everything is a slow burn for you to understand that these people. They are full PTSD from the war, and they are so helpless in this situation and trying go along and dance to the music. One of them is wounded, so they can’t just run. The question is: are they experiencing something supernatural or not? We brought in Lovecraftian vibes that we love so much. Then, we wanted to present this as a doubt. Are they just hallucinating? Is this real or not? Can they trust their senses and their understanding of the situation they’re in? The discussion was – should we reveal if that was something on their on their own or not? But at the end, we understood that there was a payoff for the slow burn. Everything is slowly getting tense and more tense.
By the middle of the movie, they are discussing the sounds of war. It’s like the war is closing into their own situation. You see that they are constantly in a state of oppression where they project their fears. They can’t find any peace until they escape that place.
The film also presents questioning authority. They are deserting soldiers, and the story sees them questioning the war.
It’s a lot of is in the subtext. We don’t have to explain everything. You see that they all carry baggage of their past. They are intertwined somehow. There’s a promise from one to the other. But you don’t know exactly what happened because it’s a story that is pretty universal. You don’t have to understand this aspect of Brazilian culture or anything for you to understand the situation there. This is pretty universal in any conflict that a human being that is oblivious of everything that is happening. Gustavo, the formerly enslaved character, he’s saying, ‘I’m always running from something.’ That is very important phrases to say because it’s not about monsters or war. It’s about being Black in the world that he was a second or third class class citizen. It’s pure racism.
Gustavo’s his fellow soldiers have such camaraderie, and they are kind of protecting him. They’re on the front lines with him as they come back, because the farmer brings that up because he asks Gustavo why he’s with them. He’s trying to understand from his perspective, on his racist perspective. He’s trying to understand the social dynamics. He only understands top to bottom authority. It also talks about the social fabric of the time. He feels completely justified to say that ‘I have nothing against slaves. If I could, I would have some here with me,’ and as a complement. It’s completely distorted… the understanding of reality on this character.
Where did you film?
We shot in the south of Brazil. There’s a tree that you can see sometimes in the background that is such a beautiful tree. And it’s very typical from this region. We were so glad that it’s there. It was a really authentic scenario. The house is a one hundred year old house and belongs to a family who rents it out to movie and TV productions. Our basement scene was was filmed in the actual basement. Things that are happening in the living room upstairs, they were exactly there on the living room upstairs. Imagine that. The house was obviously empty, and our production created all the settings and everything. But the farm, everything around it, and the outside location were in the same place, which for us being a small budget film was awesome.
We drove the truck with everything to one place, and we stayed there for three weeks straight. Ian wanted four, and we said, ‘We don’t have money for four weeks.’ [laughs] It was just a blessing that we could find everything on the same place. The only different location was the forest at the very beginning of the film when the soldiers are running. That was in front of our hotel, which was pretty easy for us to set everything up. When we scouted the location for the first time, our jaws dropped. We wrote the script after visiting the location, and everything just fell into place right away. It was a blessing to find this place.
There was something that was super cool that we did with the with the owners. They have a small waterfall right beside the main house. We wanted to capture sound on location. We didn’t want to add in ADR afterwards. We wanted the authentic performances to be preserved. But the waterfall was a problem. You could hear it in every scene, so we came into agreement with the farmers and built a small dam that we could shut off the waterfall for about 45 minutes. Once it, the water was going over the small dam, we had to just release the water and do it again. We had all these windows of 45 minutes to shoot.
We were worried about if we were messing with the local ecosystem or not. But they said not to worry because when it’s raining hard, the river will go way up and will be way stronger than the level that we’re looking for. There was not a problem for them and for the environment. Everything just worked.
Gustavo gets the brunt of the farmer’s cruelty with a pretty graphic torture scene.
We were worried about just being sensitive with the crew and just going over the top just because he is Black. Why should he face the harshest cruelty of the script? George, our actor, was also super focused on understanding us – if the script was going to a superficial place of creating cruelty for the sake of cruelty. He understood, as we were very careful in writing of the understanding that the focus and the main character is leaning towards Gustavo. You don’t know at the beginning who is the main character. It’s all three of them; they all have their stories. But as the story develops, Gustavo is singled out as the interest of the farmer, and everything felt that it fit the narrative.
The path is that the main character, the hero of the story, goes into suffering until he can flip things around and be victorious. It was a very sensitive subject because we didn’t want to just keep tapping into the cruelty of slavery. He has some flashbacks, but they’re all talking about how he made his way into getting out of bondage. George also understood this way that the cruelty is human, And we got his blessing.
