Interview: Lin Shaye Discusses Her Poetic Role of Allie in ABATTOIR

Both a horror film and a throwback to hard-boiled noir from the ’50s, Abattoir is now out in theaters and on VOD and Digital HD from Momentum Pictures. To celebrate the latest film from Darren Lynn Bousman, Daily Dead recently had the great pleasure of speaking with co-star Lin Shaye about playing the poetic part of Allie, filming in a potentially real-life haunted house, and much more.

Your performance in Abattoir was a scene-stealer, and Allie is such a great character for you, so I was really happy to see you get a role like that. When you first read the script for Abattoir, what was it about Allie that jumped out at you and made you want to play that character?

Lin Shaye: Well, the script had a journey. There were several rewrites, and the first time I read it, I was somewhere shooting something, and Darren sent it to me. I felt that she was somewhat the poet in the film. She's the secret-teller. She's the muse. She's the one that when you think about classic literature, the one who's peripheral to the story on some level, but is the one who has all the answers for the story, who asks the right questions and provides the mysterious answers.

That was very appealing to me, and I loved that she is the secret-teller. There was something very appealing about that. The script went through several incarnations and actually was slated to shoot twice. The first time, I'm not sure what happened. The second time, they were in New Orleans already setting up the film, and one of the producers passed away. I just remember Darren calling and saying, "It's off. We're all coming back from New Orleans."

Then it went into turbo-spin, basically, and there was another re-write done, and there were some questions at the very end. From my perspective, they had taken some of the heart out of the character. They had re-written the lines, simplified the way she described things. If you recall, there's some slightly poetic passages that she has where she describes what the secrets are. I felt the heart had been taken out of it a little bit, and I asked Darren if there was any way to put back the original content, because I felt it was stronger.

We did, and there was also an important element about the character and her relationship to Jessica [Lowndes]' character that we put in at the very end, Darren and I. We collaborated a little bit on the character elements, and that was really, really fun for me. I hope people like her and hate her at the same time.

Yeah, she's such a complex character, and like you said, she's almost a voice for the town of New English, and she has very poetic dialogue that Christopher [Monfette] wrote for her. I mean, it's just fantastic. In addition to being a horror movie, this film also feels like a noir. It's a throwback to hard-boiled films from the ’50s in a way. Did you also see it as a noir in addition to being a horror film?

Lin Shaye: I totally did. Julia Talben [Jessica Lowndes] and Joe Anderson's character, Declan Grady, at the very beginning had that gumshoe Bogart, almost Bogart-Hepburn feeling to [them].

I love that he [Darren] did that. Some people may take exception with it because they don't know how it fits into the final story on some level, but it sets up a mood of where we go with the story, which is unusual and very powerful. Darren comes up with very creative thoughts that you feel like he gets them right before he falls asleep, that kind of creation. That was a very offbeat and unusual element to add to the story, and I thought it was great.

Yeah, and I loved Allie's house and the whole atmosphere that it brought to the table. Did you actually film in that house in New Orleans? Can you talk about the atmosphere of shooting in an older environment like that because it really was a nice touch to the story.

Lin Shaye: Totally, and the house very weird. It really was. It was placed in this rural, offbeat area. I don't know the history of the house, but it had some really creepy rooms in it. People ask me all the time, "Do I believe in spirits?" I believe in everything because there's so much we know nothing about. I think that elements like wood absorb energy. It absorbs things, and old wood has a sense to it.

If you're sensitive to your surroundings, I think you walk into a place, and you immediately have some sense of something. Now with brand new, modern blah-blah-blah, it has no sense of anything. A) it has no history, and b), most of them have no heart. They've got design, but no heart in my opinion. A house like this was just filled with memory of some kind, and there were places downstairs that were weird. It was a very weird place. I wouldn't have wanted to be in there a whole, long time by myself. I guess that's my barometer for, "Is this scary or not?" It was good to have the film crew around. It also added to the atmosphere tremendously of what we were creating.

It almost had its own personality. It's one of those films where the house is a character itself, so that really came across.

Lin Shaye: A character unto itself. Exactly. That's a great way to put it, and you're a hundred percent right. It was another character in the film.

Just out of curiosity, do you have any favorite haunted house films that you like to go back to when you have some downtime in between all of your projects?

Lin Shaye: All I can think of right now is Insidious [laughs]. The interesting thing about my taste and my past is that I was never really a horror fan, particularly. I didn't seek out scary stuff. I thought the world was scary enough [laughs]. I didn't really need to embellish it. I was a big Hitchcock fan, of course, but his fear was not really out of places. It was more out of people. But I really think Insidious has done an amazing job at creating the haunts in a home and houses.

—————

In case you missed it, check out the other part of our interview with Lin Shaye, in which she discusses what to expect from Insidious: Chapter 4, and read Heather's Los Angeles Film Festival interview with director Darren Lynn Bousman.