HIDDEN DEPTHS
Blumhouse used to be a bank. The building housing the offices of the horror production company, on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles, does not bring attention to itself. The inside, where the films are edited, is even more nondescript. And in one little hovel, at the end of a staggeringly unassuming corridor, sit director Leigh Whannell and editor Andy Canny, giving Empire an unglamorous welcome.
“This room has all the ambience of a Chechnyan coroner’s office,” deadpans Whannell. “Big Hollywood movies starring impossibly beautiful people are always put together in rooms that look like morgues.”
Indeed, it’s the sort of shadowy hideout that, in a film, might suggest something awful is about to occur. And in a way, it is.
For on the many monitors on the desk, there is terror. It is early November, and for the past two months Whannell and Canny have been holed up in here editing The Invisible Man . The sequence they’re working on today involves Elisabeth Moss’ character Cecilia being stalked by the Invisible Man — more of whom later — and she’s panicked, shooting her gun at, seemingly, nothing as she frantically scans a car park. It’s tense, but Whannell wants it tenser. If he gets it right, the film could be one of the boldest and freshest reinventions in years.
THIS FILM WAS NEVER MEANT to exist at all. 2017’s , starring Tom Cruise and Sofiawas more bloated action than horror, and despite making $409 million worldwide, it felt like a creative misstep, and the universe was jettisoned in favour of unconnected one-offs. For , Universal approached Whannell, a move in itself signifying a U-turn from the aborted tentpole direction.
