Director's Statement

I always wanted to make a horror-thriller movie for one reason and one reason alone: because I love them. I often wonder why I gravitate toward dark, spooky, edge-of-your-seat movies. I couldn't even endure the commercial for The Shining when I was a kid. In the crazy juxtapositions of television advertising it would stalk me. I mean, who would ever expect a frightening between McDonalds and Carvel commercials? But there it was, and I would have to close my eyes and cover my ears or it would be nightmares galore.

I don't recall where or when I discovered my love for scary movies but I've grown to love them all: ghost stories, slasher movies, splatterpunks, gothics, survival horror, monster movies, horror-slapstick, you name it. But what I love most of all is a good horror-thriller.

THE WIND director Michael Mongillo on location in the Mojave Desert.

With that in mind, I defined the film that I wanted to make by the kind of film that I didn’t want to make. I did not want to make a fashionably satirical genre commentary. I wanted to play it straight. Self-aware, but straight: like Hitchcock and the few innovative directors who have made inspired, original films from his model.

Keep your audience guessing about what will happen next to reveal a mystery. Chill your audience by addressing our collective fears. Let your audience know more than your characters when it heightens the suspense. Thrill your audience through your characters’ dangerous misadventures. Horrify your audience with what you let them imagine. And infuse it all with humor and emotion to keep it human. Now make it original...

True originality is nearly impossible, but a well told, good story isn't. In fact, to make a good story, I found that I had to embrace archetype: good versus evil; innocence and corruption; rites of passage; conspiracy and randomness; in short, the universal story. Retracing my steps, it seems unremarkable to me that The Wind became all that is universal: a myth  (Billy's retelling of his grandfather's explanation of the wind)  within a fairy tale  (the central narrative of betrayals and murders)  within a legend  (the opening story told by the future Vanessa of a post-apocalyptic world that ends with a whimper, not with a bang).

What is both remarkable and gratifying to me is that audiences are responding to The Wind the way I had hoped (and then some). I am pleased that I've made a movie that sparks a strong reaction and further urges impassioned discussion and debate.

Consider the words of horror-thriller writer Joe R. Lansdale:

"The low-budget horror movie stands on the line of good taste and bad taste, and like a scarecrow in a high wind, flaps its arms and leans first in one direction, then the other. What gives the good film its power is its bravery, its willingness to let the wind blow it across the line of good taste, into that part of the field that is less mannerly and sometimes downright rude. What the good low-budget horror movie does is attract through exploitation, then, with imagination, cleverness, and greater intent than to appeal to the lowest common denominator, or through a desire to manipulate that low denominator with irony or satire or archetypal imagery, it becomes artistic or shows artistic bents, which is not necessarily the same as becoming art, though at its very best, it can be that, too."

This quote prefaced the business plan that I gave to potential investors while I was raising money to produce The Wind. It applied to the screenplay then as it applies to the finished film now. So take The Wind as you will, but know that love brought this film to the screen and love comes in many forms.

 

Defenselessly,

Michael Mongillo

Filmmaker