Justin G. Dyck Would Do Anything for Jackson

"When we decided to make it grandparents, all sorts of other things fell in place." Director Justin G. Dyck on casting Julian Richings and Sheila McCarthy as grieving grandparents with a diabolical plan in Anything for Jackson.

Any niche can be very inward-looking. It's as true for horror as any other genre, so when Justin G. Dyck unleased his chilly supernatural thriller Anything for Jackson, because it was his first horror film a lot of people thought it was his first feature. "It feels like my first film," the director laughed, but that's not the whole story.

Dyck has been planning to make a horror film for his entire filmmaking career, and finally fulfills that ambition with the story of a pleasant older couple - veteran character actors Sheila McCarthy and Julian Richings as Audrey and Henry Walsh - kidnapping a pregnant woman (Konstantina Mantelos). Their aim is not malevolent: they just want to use a black magic ritual to put the soul of their dead grandson into her unborn baby's body. Isn't that what any doting grandparent would do?

The story is a far remove from Dyck's other films, with titles like A Very Country Wedding, Christmas Catch, and A Christmas Village. Let's just say he got diverted in route to set for a few years. Around 2014, he was doing what so many hopeful indie filmmakers do to pay the bills: directing music and corporate videos, and picking up editing and cinematography gigs. He was prepared to rough it to make his first feature, (all he needed, he said, was "$10 and a camera and five people and a wood somewhere") but a little financing goes a long way, so he reached out to one of the producers with whom he worked regularly, He had a stack of horror ideas, and asked if she could put together the backers. She agreed, organized some meetings, and came back with an answer of sorts. Dyck said, "She said, 'OK, I've financed a movie, but it's about a kid who plays soccer with a monkey. What do you think?'" So that's how his first feature directing credit ended up being Monkey in the Middle, about a boy and his soccer-playing simian pal.

With a credit under his belt, Dyck was sure he'd get to make that $10 indie horror, but "the monkey movie turned into another animal movie, but this time they were talking, and then it just spiraled, and I got into the Christmas movies." That's how Dyck has racked up 29 feature director credits in six years, plus 11 episodes of Ponysitters Club, and built a reputation as a run-and-gun filmmaker.

Yet if those films seem like a digression from his original aim of making indie horror, they turned out to be stepping stones to Anything for Jackson. Even if the topic had changed, he said, "People knew I could run a set and work with a crew."

Sheila McCarthy and Julian Richings in Anything for Jackson, now streaming on Shudder

Austin Chronicle: So where did the idea of a heartfelt possession drama come from?

Justin G. Dyck: I built my career around doing these romances and family entertainment films, but we kept pushing and trying to come up with that horror concept that someone's going to give us financing for. We were shopping about four or five ideas around, and when we got a meeting they said, "What do you have in the supernatural space?" "Oh, yeah, we've got a few of those. Let us put them together and send them to you." On the car ride home we went, "Well, we need some ghost movies."

But ghost movies are a pretty popular subgenre, so we had to come up with a way to make it different. What's within a ghost movie? Well, there's the exorcism? What's the opposite of an exorcism? I guess the soul put into a body. Well, what does that look like? Why would someone want to do that?

And like I said, we wanted to make a movie where the protagonist and antagonist were a bit of a blurred line. Who do you really cheer for? So it all came from there.

AC: It's easy for a filmmaker to get pigeonholed. I talked with Robert Rodriguez recently about how he was unusual because he can make kids' movies, and so few of his peers are given that chance even if they'd love to. Did you have any pushback, being the Christmas guy who wants to make horror movies?

JGD: I wouldn't say we got a lot of pushback from producers and people we met with, but I've also heard that everyone is going to be nice to you at the table. People were nice and enjoyed the pitches, but it certainly took us a long time to get it made. So maybe there was some, behind closed doors. "You can't give the Christmas guy a movie!"

But I think it comes from social media more than producers. People who work on a film every day, they know how hard it is. We all say, "Yeah, you're doing that, but we all do what have to do to put food on the table."

JGD: They say, especially with writing, you have to learn the rules before you can break them, and I have made 30 films with a classic three-act structure: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. I've made so many of those films that I really do have a good handle on what it is. So when we came to make Anything for Jackson, our first rule was "we've got to break all the rules." From a story standpoint we had to go as far against expectation as possible, just to claw our way out of the predictable entertainment space.

On set, it was certainly quite different but our experience over the years certainly went in our favor. It never felt out of control. I came up working on horror sets. My longest day was a 27-hour-day. So I've been there. I've been in the woods when it was cold and I'm trying to get one shot and we're lighting it with car headlights. But my experience making a Christmas movie with a hundred background actors, and Christmas trees everywhere, and the most romantic gifts, that comes in to play when I have three ghosts and two actors covered in blood. I think I can bring some of the organization from my day job into the indie horror world.

AC: A 27-hour day sounds like someone was trying to re-rig a complicated practical effect.

JGD: There was snow involved, and we had a whole group of background actors that had to go home, and we had to ship in a whole new set of background actors. It was crazy.

AC: And you said you wanted to do something different with the ghost story, and you do that by making the antagonists grandparents. We've seen films with grieving parents and ghostly kids, with the story being about second chances, but for Audrey and Henry, this is the last act of their lives.

JGD: It's not of this generation, it's of the next generation up. If you went with parents, you've got a couple in their mid-30s, you make the guy big and brawny so the kidnapping is a bit easier. But we kept leaning towards what's expected and how do you go against that. When we decided to make it grandparents, all sorts of other things fell in place. There's a class component: that generation, its privilege, what they feel they deserve versus what world young people today are inheriting. Whose life is more valuable? So when we talked about making it grandparents, all these new things fell into place and we just thought, this is something special.

AC: There's a description of noir that I love, which is that it's bad people doing bad things for a good reason. It's all about intention, and that's what you have here. The grandparents have a horrible plan, but you understand why they would do it.

JGD: That's definitely something that we set out to do. I worked with [scriptwriter Keith Cooper] for a long time, and something we often talk about is that it's easy to feel bad for the little kid who loses their puppy, but it's hard to feel bad for somebody doing something awful, and what an incredible exercise to - if not sympathize, at least empathize with somebody doing something horrible.

Anything for Jackson is available now on Shudder. Read our review here.