The Guest is the modern answer to the ’80s blockbuster you didn’t know you were waiting for. And in it, Dan Stevens proves he is much more than just Matthew Crawley.
Dan Stevens in The Guest.
Picturehouse
Director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett could have done anything after last year's subversive slasher hit You're Next. Well, almost anything.
"Simon wrote one of the best action scenes ever," Wingard said of the high-intensity follow-up film that they ended up scrapping after making plans to shoot in South Korea. He hopes they'll salvage what he described as a 30- to 50-page car chase, but admitted that "we could have never pulled it off with the resources at the time."
Instead, the pair made The Guest, opening in limited release on Sept. 17 and wider the week after, a thriller starring Downton Abbey's Dan Stevens as "David," a soldier who turns up on the doorstep of the Peterson family, claiming to have served in the Middle East with their son Caleb, who was killed in action. David is polite, handsome, and helpful, but there's something a little off about him — about the way his face can go blank, like a glitching cyborg. There's also a sinister edge to the aid he offers each member of the family, though only the 20-year-old daughter Anna (Maika Monroe) seems to spot it.
The Guest feels like an '80s movie in a way that has nothing to do with parody — it has the aura of a forgotten blockbuster you'd rent over and over from the video store because it's so much fun. It's nostalgic without being kitsch, because, as Wingard said, "I really started appreciating cinema as a kid during the late '80s. It was important to do something that says 'this is where we come from' and to take a postmodern approach." Wingard and Barrett guided BuzzFeed News through five of the movies that influenced their latest collaboration.
The Stepfather (1987)
Like the 1987 cult favorite starring Terry O'Quinn as a serial killer who marries into and then murders families, The Guest is about a kind of slow-motion home invasion. "It opens with him having killed his previous family," Barrett noted admiringly. "There's no mystery. The movie doesn't insult your intelligence by being like, 'We're calling it The Stepfather, but it's going to be 45 minutes before you see him do anything creepy.' The suspense is going to come from how interesting it is watching him in these insane dynamics."
Barrett wanted the same dynamic for The Guest: "It couldn't be 'is he or is he not evil?' He's a violent person and has a sinister agenda — we put that right up front. The fun is exploring the details of that. Once you create a character who's unhinged and potentially homicidal at any moment, watching him buy a pack of gum at the supermarket becomes inherently fascinating, because you don't know how he's going to react."
The character of Anna also has some similarities to the suspicious teenage daughter in The Stepfather, played by Jill Schoelen. "One of the things about the movies of the '80s that we both love," said Barrett, is that "in all those movies, the kids are smart and the parents are stupid. The '80s had that rebellious aspect to them — particularly films like Nightmare on Elm Street, where the parents are literally drugging their kids because they don't believe them."
Shout! Factory
The Terminator (1984)
The Guest was born from the combination of one of Barrett's abandoned screenplays and Wingard watching a double feature of The Terminator and Halloween. Wingard called the James Cameron classic "more of an aesthetic influence," saying it "was the inspiration of doing a hybridization of horror, sci-fi and action."
"I love the relentlessness of The Terminator," Wingard said. "Terminator 2 would be up there as well. We always talk about the '80s, but I think that turning point where it awkwardly turned into the '90s is really interesting too. Terminator 2 really personified that, building the characterization and softening even the Terminator himself."
"My least favorite thing in Terminator 2 is Edward Furlong whining that Arnold Schwarzenegger can't just go around killing people," added Barrett. "You'll notice we went in a different direction with that in The Guest."
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
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