During one of the darkest moments of his life, writer/director Ian Tuason was preparing for the low-budget horror movie he’d make on the other side.
“I was always writing undertone to be set at my family home”, the filmmaker told Zavvi. “The plan was to shoot it with my buddy, an actress and just two other crew members for very little money, as that’s how much I had, and I already had the house.
“I was back home caregiving for my parents, and I knew that when it was time, the house would be empty as I’d have to empty out their belongings anyway. The intention was to make any movie using the bare resources I had, but because I ended up caregiving for so long, I had a lot of time to work out what would work best in this small space.
“The big theme that ended up getting incorporated into the script was isolation, the feeling of being trapped in your own head without anybody else to talk to, the only person you see being the one in the mirror. With only yourself to look at, you can go down a ruinous spiral or get stuck in a depressed infinity loop.”
Shot for $500,000 in his Toronto childhood home, undertone follows Evy (The Handmaid’s Tale star Nina Kiri), co-host of the titular paranormal podcast, whose role is being the sceptic that shuts down every ghost story fellow presenter Justin (Adam DiMarco) brings to her. One day, they receive an email with ten anonymous audio files which initially document one half of a couple trying to prove to the other that she’s been talking and singing in her sleep – innocent enough, were it not for the Satanic messages Justin is convinced are hidden if you play each sleepy lullaby backwards.
With Evy caregiving for her own comatose mother (Michèle Duquet), a devout catholic, this isolated protagonist gradually becomes more susceptible to the idea that the Satanic curse which befalls the family on the tapes is a real one.
Kiri is one of only two faces we see onscreen - the other being an entirely mute and immobile performance from Duquet – meaning that its success relies on her ability to wordlessly communicate her mental journey whenever she’s away from the podcast mic.
“I think if I knew that everything would rely on my performance when filming, I’d be terrified”, she told Zavvi. “I really didn’t feel like that when making it, because the atmosphere on set was a really positive and collaborative one.
“It was an exchange of energy that began with Ian writing something so open about his own life, that filled me with an energy that I could transmute in a different way. I think I was scared before we started, but when we began working together, there was so much support that made this challenge easier.
“It wasn’t until I saw the movie that I realised how much of it was on my face, which never occurred to me when we shot it. I’m happy that I never considered that, because it meant my performance could come from an internal place - it's true to who I think Evie is as a character, not being played to how I assume it would appear onscreen.”
The look of undertone is a distinct second to the sound design, building on from Tuason’s recent virtual reality horror projects that utilised 3D soundscapes. The marketing is billing the movie as the “scariest you’ll ever hear” for a reason, but that’s only part of the story - the filmmaker sees this as his latest attempt to continually evolve the found footage genre.
He explained: “There was more audio direction than camera direction in the script, which I wrote with creating a 3D soundscape in mind, something I brought from my 360-degree VR horror shorts. Conceptually, the found audio came from my ideas of how to adapt the found footage genre into other mediums; I’d previously published podcasts narrating found blog posts, for example, where the creepiness came from how hard it was to distinguish what was real.
“That was tied to a novel I wrote which shared that found blog post concept, and I created a website for it called everyoneandnoone.org; if you visit it it’ll take you to a page saying the domain was seized by the Toronto Police. That was a mystery novel told in a series of blog posts about a serial killer, imagining what his social media presence would look like, and for the audiobook I bought a mic, went to my basement, put up noise cancelling squares around the walls and read it – it's more like a radio play than an audiobook.”
Tuason’s history of experiments with horror storytelling stem from an ongoing fascination with online Creepypasta, and the new ways stories are told in the digital world. This wasn’t a world his lead actress became familiar with in preparation to star in this unique horror.
“My instinct was that I should be more immersing myself in the personal aspects of the story, as that was really what pulled me in when reading the script”, Kiri continued. “I’m glad I did that, because when you’re making a horror movie, what’s happening around you is people trying to find the perfect shot that will be the creepiest, and I got to approach this from an angle where I wasn’t thinking about what will be scary.
“I was attempting to approach this character as truthfully as possible and bring something of me to it. However, I did start to look at other paranormal podcasts, until I began thinking that I didn’t want to unintentionally copy their styles – I wanted this to be its own singular thing, from a place that feels realistic from the personal side.”
