Max Minghella on Nostalgic Homage Horror ‘Shell’

Director Max Minghella (Spiral: From the Book of Saw, Horns) wears his cinematic influences on his sleeves with sophomore feature effort Shell, a body horror dark comedy written by Jack Stanley (The Passenger).

Elisabeth Moss (The Invisible Man) finds herself embarking on a scary new beauty treatment as aging actor Samantha Lake. She quickly befriends Zoe Shannon (Kate Hudson), CEO of health & wellness company Shell. When their patients start to go missing, including starlet Chloe Benson (Kaia Gerber), Samantha realizes Shell may be protecting a monstrous secret.

The escapist love letter to ’90s cinema leans into dark comedy, but embraces everything from Paul Verhoeven to Soapdish, Species, and Sliver, if that’s any indicator of genre range here. Bloody Disgusting spoke with Minghella, who made his feature directorial debut with 2018’s Teen Spirit, about the genre-bender out of TIFF, where the film had its World Premiere.

The filmmaker revealed more about his influences, but mores o his salute to the quickly disappearing middle ground in film.

Between the body horror turned full-blown horror, Hudson’s femme fatale, and the ’90s style humor, Shell exists at a distinct intersection of genres that don’t typically mix. Minghella uses the perils of aging plot as a vehicle to pay tribute to the films that shaped him as a filmmaker.

“Jack’s script was really inspiring to my imagination, and yet I think the film that we’ve made probably bears quite little resemblance to that original draft,” Minghella says when asked how much of the eclectic genre mix and tone was in the script. “But all of those things you’re speaking to, I think were triggered in my brain as I started to read it. I thought a lot about a moment in film history that I feel like is lost a little bit. I think nowadays we tend to make movies either on a giant tent pole scale to sell toys or we make these much smaller movies for prestige audiences. And the middle ground, it has almost completely disappeared.

“So, while you just mentioned quite a wide variety of genres in Soapdish and Species and Sliver, they all stem from a period of time when there were these movie star-driven genre movies, which were really also designed as popcorn entertainment. Yet if you look at the credits on those films, they were shot by some of the greatest cinematographers in the world and greatest craftsmen in the world. Our ambition with Shell was to deliver something that is completely unpretentious but made by, I’m completely excluding myself from this, but made by some people who know what they’re doing and have put some thought and care into it.”

Shell cycles through genres with ease, largely due to the heavy emphasis on comedy as a grounding force.

Max Minghella and Elisabeth Moss on the set of ‘Shell’ Courtesy of Range, Blank Tape, Love & Squalor and Dark Castle Entertainment

Minghella explains how he found the balance between horror and comedy. “Honestly, with hopefully a sense of fun and playfulness. Drew Daniels, my cinematographer, and I really were determined to make the movie as practically as possible, to limit ourselves to the resources we would’ve had 30 or 40 years ago and not go beyond them. That just required a lot of inventiveness and almost Roger Corman-like approach to certain things. We just had a lot of fun.

He continues, “We really did want the film to feel mischievous. And the balance of comedy and horror was innate actually just to the agenda of the film and how we all saw it. I had to do remarkably little explaining to people of what the film might look like or what the tone of the film was. It seemed that people understood quite quickly what we were going for just from reading the script. I always felt like we were all making the same movie, which is not to do with me, that’s just to do with I think how maybe loud some of the intentionality is on the page.”

Also contributing to the infectious sense of fun is a vampy performance by Kate Hudson, channeling Death Becomes Her‘s Isabella Rossellini and Basic Instinct‘s Sharon Stone for her villainous role. Hudson understood what Minghella was going for here, and the director credits her for pulling off a Herculean task.

“It’s so important to me in all movies that the villain, it speaks truths because it’s so much more interesting and compelling to me if there’s real conflict for the protagonist of the story,” he reflects. “I agree that Zoe is incredibly cynical, and much more cynical than I am, but there is painful truth sometimes in what she says. The reality is that Zoe Shannon is a task for an actor, it’s a massive part, and it requires a level of magnetism and charisma and most of all I think self-confidence that I’m not really convinced you can teach somebody. I think you have to innately have those qualities. Kate’s the only person I’ve met actually who has that level of self-possession and ease in her own body.

“I couldn’t really think of anybody else that would seem quite as fun. I’m so relieved that she said yes. I don’t think the movie would work without her. I think no matter how hard we all tried. That performance is so central to the story making sense. She delivers something quite extraordinary. And Zoe also speaks in her own melody and cadence. There’s almost a musicality to how she speaks. Kate understood that inherently, it was never something we actually talked about. She just really knew how to say it all. It’s a thrill to watch her play this part.”

With Verhoeven’s output at the forefront of Minghella’s influences, among a few aforementioned ’90s titles, were there any deeper cuts or less obvious film references for Minghella? The filmmaker’s answer was surprising.

“No, there isn’t, although I will mention a very surreal thing that happened,” Minghella tells us, “which is that about three or four years into working on this project, I discovered a Michael Crichton film called Looker. I’d never seen Looker before. But there are quite a lot of parallels between these two films, especially in the aesthetics of these two movies. So, that was quite a surreal discovery for me. In fact, the opening sequence of our movie is almost identical to a sequence that happens in Looker. Yet, I was not conscious of the other movie when I wrote it. So that is one of those beautiful discoveries, and a rather fun one.”

He continues, “Then there’s a movie called Look Who’s Talking, which was a pivotal movie to me when I was growing up. It’s not a horror film, but the Este Haim character in Shell is almost directly lifted from Look Who’s Talking. Actually, quite a lot of the framing in especially the first act of Shell is pulled directly from the Amy Heckerling movie. So there’s probably 50 to 60 things that I looked at, and it really is, I mean, I know people hate this sometimes, but it is a shamelessly nostalgic homage film.”