Interview: Director Chad Archibald Talks Body Horror and More for BITE

On May 6th, Scream Factory will unleash their gooey excursion into body horror, Bite, which was directed by Chad Archibald, who recently helmed two other notable indie genre efforts, The Drownsman and Ejecta. His latest film stars Elma Begovic as Casey, a young woman who is terrified of her impending adulthood; she’s about to get married and her fiancé is already chatting up his betrothed about babies and all sorts of grown-up matters. While on her bachelorette getaway in the tropics, Casey is bitten by an unknown organism and after she returns home, she realizes her bite is transforming her into something monstrous and beyond anything she could have ever imagined.

Daily Dead recently had the opportunity to speak with Archibald about what inspired the story of Bite, the challenges of keeping his body horror project feeling unexpected and unique, collaborating with newcomer Begovic on the film, and much more. Read on for our interview with Archibald and be sure to look for Bite in theaters on May 6th.

Great job on the film, Chad. There's a lot that I definitely related to in this movie, just thinking back on my experience as a 20-something and going through the whole marriage thing and contemplating having kids. I loved how this story becomes an allegory for how those decisions and that impending adulthood consumes your life. I'm curious, what was the inspiration behind your story for this?

Chad Archibald: That's totally what it was. The idea of this woman who's not really ready to have kids and she gets bit by this bug and ends up having a million babies, basically. She starts laying these eggs of all these creatures and she gets that motherly instinct and starts protecting them and they become her world. That's where that came in, as it mixes together with this idea that she's having cold feet and she's not really ready to make this adjustment. It worked well with the story of her becoming a recluse and pushing everyone away and definitely a major factor of it was the idea of children and that motherly instinct.

A lot of that is just in nature. I sat and watched endless documentaries on insects around the world. It's amazing when you look at how creatures exist and their natural instincts to reproduce and how they protect their children. A lot of it was just doing research on that. I had the initial idea, “What if a girl got bit by a bug and it started getting worse and worse and worse?” And then, after doing research and seeing how interesting the motherly instincts of insects are, it worked really well as a parallel.

As horror fans, we've seen everything before and it takes a lot to catch our attention. But there are some really interesting ways that you handle the idea of body horror that changes things up. Were there certain things you had to be conscious of when approaching the horror elements of the story to make sure that it felt different than what horror fans are used to seeing?

Chad Archibald: Yes, one of the major things that I wanted to do was create a body horror movie with no blood in it. There's goo and everything else, but body horror is generally about getting bloody and gruesome. There's no real blood in it [Bite], per say, it's all eggs and goo. It wasn't meant to be a body horror film, actually. The initial idea came from something that was a bit more organic. My sister-in-law came back from Guatemala, she was doing some animal rescue stuff down there and she was covered in bug bites. We got talking and I was like, "Wow, some of those are pretty huge and look infected." She was saying that she has no idea—they'd sleep in nets every night and wake up and there'd be insects she'd never seen before on all these nets. So it was just this idea, if you don't know what bit you, what if that got worse and worse and worse and worse? That's where the idea originated from and, of course, body horror is a subgenre that really worked with it.

Again, there are so many body horror films out there and that's why we really wanted to make some of the parallels with her [Elma Begovic’s character, Casey] going through the struggles that she has, so it all worked together and it wasn't just about a girl who was turning into a bug.

There's a lot of ambition on-screen in this movie, especially with what we see Casey go through and her apartment’s transformation as well. There's always movement and this tangibility to the eggs and how they invade that space. I'm a geek for those kinds of details and I really, really appreciated that about Bite. Could you talk about how you guys approached the metamorphosis of her nest and creating all those eggs, because it adds so much to the overall film.

Chad Archibald: Yes, that was one of the issues when we brought the script to the studio and said, "This is the movie that we're looking to make." They really loved the idea, they really loved the concept, but they were like, "How are you going to actually do this?" We had a very, very tight budget on this movie. It would be considered a micro-budget for sure, and they were concerned with how we were going to actually fill an apartment full of eggs. We went everywhere looking for different ideas of what we could get in a massive bulk of eggs.

Then, I found these little things called Spit Balls. They're basically these little pebbles that you put into water and they grow into balls. They absorb the water, they absorb whatever you put them in. We got some of those and started putting them in coffee and milk and weird different liquids and testing out how they looked, and they just looked amazing, so we ordered 30,000 of them. We started filling up buckets with weird liquids and we created all these different styles of eggs. There were yellow ones, there were progressed ones, and then there were the ones that looked more like bodily fluids.

As far as keeping everything moving, we wanted to make sure that these things were growing. If there's one little ball and it's growing, you wouldn't really see any movement, but if you put a ton of little eggs growing all at once, they would always be pushing each other out of the way. We'd have everyone on the set that wasn't in the scene run up to tables and stuff and pile up these eggs, and then we'd roll the camera and everyone would let go and run away. All of these eggs were always slowly drifting and moving and that was really important for us. It just felt like it was always growing. Obviously, this happens over a couple of days, so the evolution of this apartment has to be fairly quick. We just wanted to make sure that people were seeing it happen.

I want to address the prologue and epilogue of the movie. I thought it was really clever how Bite starts off in one direction, using found footage, and then goes completely not the way you think it's going to go. The epilogue also has a bit of fun with viewers too, which I appreciated, and while I would never ruin anything for viewers in terms of specifics, I was curious if you could talk about having a little fun subverting certain expectations while doing Bite?

Chad Archibald: Yes, absolutely. We went out and we were never planning on doing any found footage stuff, because there are a hundred thousand found footage movies getting made every year now. Some of them are really scary and great, but there are a lot that aren’t. With Bite, we used found footage elements only because it really worked with the concept that we were going for. The idea that she's down in a foreign land at her bachelorette party, it's something that you would actually film. Everything that they're actually filming is stuff that people would go and film. There isn't footage of them running away from zombies and turning the camera around to catch them as they’re running. There is a place for found footage and this is just a movie that it worked with. It gave us the opportunity to create this other story that we could keep going back to without flashbacks or long lines of dialogue or anything like that.

It's nice even going from the end—the contrast between this apartment that's turned into this horrible hive and it cuts to them all dancing. It's like a memory of how things were before. It was fun seeing that stuff, them all dancing in Costa Rica and enjoying themselves and obviously, there's the plot that keeps going through the entire movie. That was an important theme as well. When we were doing a body horror film, we wanted to make sure that if we took out all of the body horror in this movie, you would still have a movie. It would just be a drama about friends going down to a bachelorette party and some getting a little drunk and screwing up. There's a whole story there aside from the body horror, which I think is important.

Elma, who plays Casey, is so integral to this film. She's almost in every single scene and there's a lot that rests on her very capable shoulders. Could you talk about the casting process of finding her and working with her to take this character through her metamorphosis?

Chad Archibald: Elma's amazing. It's funny, because I was just going through footage this morning, and I actually found the first audition of Elma. It's the first time I'd ever seen her or met her and now we've traveled all over the world with Elma. We've gone to festivals, we went to the Dominican Republic, we were all over the place with her and she's become a pretty good friend through all of this.

But she had come in to audition and it was the first film that she had ever done. She had done some small projects, so she was a pretty new face. She had something about her that was really exciting. She came in, we were auditioning all these people, and basically the script was them coming in with their own take on being this bug creature. It was actually the scene where her friend is tied up in the chair, so it was us seeing all these actresses come in and do their own vision of this bug creature. Elma came in and she did such a good job and she had such a great look, too; sometimes you see someone and you get really excited about them.

We went ahead and cast her, but we had a little sit-down with her and said, "Okay, now before you take this role, I really have to warn you. This is not something that's your average role. You will be covered in goo and muck and makeup. It'll be gross, sticky, and uncomfortable, and it's going to be amazing, but I'm sure it's not going to be that comfortable."

It's just so important to work with someone who is aware and excited to be in that position, because working with someone who's not into it could be a bit of a nightmare. But she was so excited and was so much fun on set everyday. She'd be this horrible, evil bug creature and then we'd cut and she'd be dancing around, singing Beyoncé and doing her thing. She actually helped keep everyone else's spirits really high on the movie. We were so lucky to find her.