Photographer/commercials director turned filmmaker Carter Smith first broke out on the horror scene with his award-winning 2006 short Bugcrush, and from there, jumped straight into studio waters with 2008’s The Ruins. He followed up with the 2014 ghost story Jamie Marks is Dead and the 2019 Midnight Kiss installment of the Blumhouse/Hulu horror anthology Into the Dark. Now he’s back with arguably his most extreme genre work, Swallowed.
Coming to VOD and digital platforms on February 14 from Momentum Pictures, Swallowed stars Cooper Koch as Benjamin, a young man on the verge of leaving his small hometown to become a gay porn star in Los Angeles. His friend Dom (Jose Colon), on whom Benjamin has a crush, convinces Benjamin to accompany him on a drug-smuggling run that will nab him some quick traveling money. The situation quickly goes south when Dom’s ruthless contact Alice (The Ruins’ Jena Malone) insists that both of them swallow the condom-wrapped contraband, which proves to be very different from the usual drugs—for one thing, they’re alive. Circumstances take the two to a remote cabin (owned in real life by Smith’s parents), where they are victimized by Alice’s brother Rich, played by A Nightmare on Elm Street 2/Scream, Queen! gay horror icon Mark Patton. Swallowed is a distinctive blend of psychological and body horror, full of unexpected turns and unsettling moments. Fango spoke to Smith following the movie’s international premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival.
Where did the basic concept come from, and did it start with the story of the two guys or the living-drugs concept?
It was the two guys; it actually began with me meeting Jose and photographing him. I knew I wanted to start working on this script, and I wasn’t quite sure what form it was going to take. Then this Dom character, who works in a car shop and has a gay best friend who’s in love with him, emerged, and the whole thing grew from there. From the beginning, I wanted to be sure it was a movie I could make without needing a huge investment or big producers or an A-list cast or lots of financing from outside people. My goal was to do it with a ragtag group of friends, because that’s always how I’ve wanted to make movies from the beginning; I just haven’t had the opportunity to do that. With The Ruins, I never would have expected that my first movie would be a studio production. I always imagined it would be a film like Swallowed. So I kind of went in reverse order, starting big and then going smaller and smaller, and it was exciting for me to work within those limitations.
Did you look for outside financing for Swallowed?
Absolutely, and everybody was like, “We love this script so much; it’s tender and it’s scary and it’s gross. But maybe bring it to us when you have a finished film. We can’t really invest right now.”
Were there potential backers who said, “But do they have to be gay?”
I didn’t get that. I mean, who knows, maybe that was part of why they chose not to invest, because they thought the movie might have a limited audience because of that, but no one ever came out and said it.
Is it important to you, in terms of the projects you develop in general, to have that representation?
Yeah, I’ve always been a genre fan and I’ve always been queer, and those two things always kind of ran parallel to each other and never intersected. I mean, there was that one moment in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 where they did, and there have been a couple of other places. But I just felt like if I was going to make a movie that’s mine, something that is one hundred percent from me—and of course, it’s also for audiences and other people—but I’m gonna tell the story with the sort of characters I’m interested in exploring, who are going through the kind of stuff that either I’ve gone through or people I know have gone through, and not having to “straight it up” or tone things down.
There’s a lot of interesting playing with gender in Swallowed; Jena Malone plays a character who, in a typical movie, would be portrayed by a man. Was that role written to upset that stereotype?
Well, I wasn’t actually thinking about that specifically. I was just thinking about the idea that she’s the toughest, most bad-ass character. Because to me, yes, that probably is a man, but Alice is the most intimidating person in the film. She makes me nervous, she makes me uncomfortable, and I think that’s interesting; in a movie with a lot of testosterone, it was great to have that element mixed in.
I wrote it with Jena in mind. We had stayed friends after The Ruins, and always talked about finding something else to do together. She’s been up to visit me in Maine, so she knows the place, and I was like, “You want to come back to Maine? I’ll cook some really good food for us, and we’ll make a little movie. We might not have all the trappings, but it’ll be fun!”
Did you always have Mark Patton in mind for Rich?
I did. After I saw Scream, Queen!, I became fascinated with Mark. I had always known about him, ever since I saw A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, which was the first time I saw someone I identified with when I was a kid. He wore that shirt that I wanted to wear, but I wasn’t brave enough to wear it because I thought I’d get beaten up for it in my high school. So I always connected with him, and then seeing Scream, Queen!, I was like, that guy belongs in a movie being closer to himself, who he is now. So I wrote Rich with him in mind, and sent him a DM on Instagram, and started the whole conversation that way. It was all done through Instagram messaging.
Quite a bit of his dialogue plays like he’s improvising; was that the case?
A bunch of it was improv, and a bunch of it was scripted. It’s a good mix. One of my favorite lines in the movie, “You’ve done dick-teased the wrong queen, bitch!”—that was one hundred percent Mark. When he said that while we were shooting, I was like, “Yes! Oh my God, I worship you, Mark Patton! You’re the best!”
There’s always a risk when you’re presenting a gay villain that it can tip over into a camp stereotype, so how did you and Patton work together to avoid that?
Well, I think some stereotypes are in place because there are things that are stereotypes because they’re true, you know? There’s truth in them. With Rich specifically, I wanted to make sure he wasn’t a black-and-white character. I mean, yes, it’s easy to hate him, but I also wanted him to have a humanity, where you can understand that he hasn’t had things easy, and he maybe grew up in a different time and has gone through shit. Not to excuse anything he does in the film, but morally, it’s kind of a grey area when you’re dealing with some of the choices he makes and the things he instigates.
And also, Rich is such a self-posturing guy. For him, everything he does is a performance. In a way, he’s used to being this backwoods flamboyant badass, and a big part of his life is performative. He’s kind of putting something on—a character he’s created to survive where he does.
Were there any issues with the nudity the lead roles required?
No. I just made sure in casting that it was very clear from the beginning that it was involved. In fact, in the original script, after Benjamin gets out of the bath at the end of the movie, he never puts his clothes back on; he’s naked for the last twenty minutes. I think part of me put that in the script just so that any actor who was not comfortable with it would be scared off! In the end, we changed it because shooting in the woods in Maine with ticks and mosquitoes and so on was problematic. And same thing with Dom; it was very clear from the beginning what it involved. And also, none of the nudity is sexual; you’re either watching it feeling uncomfortable for them or in horror of what’s happening. It’s not traditional nudity.
The animatronics in SWALLOWED are especially impressive for being so small yet articulated. Can you talk about how those were created?
Yeah, they were tiny, and it was just a series of wires and levers. None of us had ever done anything with animatronics before, and [effects creator] Dan Martin wasn’t on set; he built them in his studio in London and sent them over, and we did a Zoom call so he could teach us how to puppeteer them. We had no special effects crew, so it was just the costume designer and myself underneath the table. We figured out what looked good and what angles worked, and our crew was lean enough that we could change things quickly and shoot them how they looked best.
How was the experience of shooting so much of the movie in such a confined space, especially some of the more grueling scenes in the later parts of the film?
Poor Jose; it was always like, “OK, you have to get back under that blanket!” The thing was, that cabin is in the middle of the northern Maine woods. It’s probably a seven-mile drive from there on a dirt road to get to the paved road, and once you get to that, it’s a 45-minute drive to the nearest town. No cell service, no Internet, no electricity, no plumbing; I mean, that outhouse was our bathroom. So when we were there, we were there; we were inside that cabin, which was such a tiny space. But we had a small crew, so it never felt that crowded. And you could step right outside, and it was beautiful Maine nature. So it wasn’t as horrific as it could have been. It’s built on this plot of land my parents leased from a paper company, and the entire thousands and thousands of acres are all fenced off, and we just had the key to the one gate you see in the movie.
We stayed in a bear-hunting camp that’s close by, in conditions that were horrible and functional, because otherwise, we’d be driving an hour to the nearest hotel. We slept six or seven to a room in bunk beds and had non-flushing toilets; it was definitely movie camp. We got very close! And the downstairs was filled with taxidermied bears. So all of our breakfasts and dinners, we’d eat surrounded by, I believe it was seventeen bears—big ones, baby ones, all kinds!
So, bear hunting in the Maine woods near a paper company; it sounds like you should remake Prophecy up there!
Yeah, Prophecy does deserve a remake!
You shot the movie in the 4:3 aspect ratio; what was the rationale behind that?
I wanted to film it that way because I knew that specifically for the…extraction scene, shall we say, I wanted to be in really tight close-ups for a lot of it. I love it when a face fills a frame, as opposed to widescreen, where a face fills a third of the frame, and then there are two-thirds that are empty. And the cabin was a square box, so it felt right to shoot in 4:3. I wanted the movie to be claustrophobic, to feel like there’s nowhere else to go, and there’s nowhere else for your eye to go; you have to watch what these characters are going through.
