SPOILER ALERT: This article contains minor spoilers for “Cuckoo,” now playing in theaters.
Roughly 40% of cuckoo bird species are “brood parasites.”
Instead of building its own nest, the cuckoo infiltrates the roosts of other birds and hides its egg among those of the host. Because of the cuckoo’s rapid development cycle, the chick hatches faster than the rest of the clutch, and once out of its egg, it will instinctually push the host’s offspring out of the perch. The newborn then uses its unrelenting call to coerce the host species into feeding it until maturity, often growing much larger than its pseudo-guardian.
It was this gruesome evolutionary trait that inspired Tilman Singer to write and direct the new horror mystery “Cuckoo.” The film follows 17-year-old Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), who after reluctantly moving to a remote resort community with her father (Marton Csokas), becomes prey to a mysterious humanoid bird.
With “Cuckoo” now screening nationwide, Singer sat down with Variety to discuss subconscious cinematic influences, his love for wide-angle lenses and why mystery and horror make the perfect genre pairing.
You said you were familiar with the cuckoo’s parasitic nature through your German heritage and later saw a documentary that re-introduced you to the bird. What made you confident the themes surrounding the cuckoo’s egg-laying habits would make for an effective horror?
I don’t know if I was confident yet. It was so fresh still. The cuckoo bird lays its egg into the nests of different bird species and then lets them raise their offspring. And so what ends up happening is these host parents, usually smaller birds, feed this gigantic cuckoo chick after their offspring already died because their eggs get thrown out of the nest. But they keep on feeding that chick, and they don’t abandon the nests. And there was something beautiful in the horror, you know, there was something existentially sad and beautiful at the same time. And that I couldn’t let go. So [thinking] on that unconsciously for a while, at some point I understood like, “Oh, that’s a family story about to happen.” If I can follow that and think about this concept, there are things that I can get out of it for the story. And confidence came in a little later.
“Cuckoo” comes from a place of teenage angst, with adolescent anxiety being a prominent theme throughout the film. Does that come from personal experience? Were you ever trapped somewhere beautiful you didn’t want to be as a teen?
In an abstract and existential way. I had a really good childhood and youth and nothing horrific like that happened to me, you know? Still, every person has to find their place in the world, has existential angst, has pressure, has fears, has anxieties. I think I’m personally more prone to it. I’m a little bit more neurotic than other people and tend to be anxious at times and feel existential dread. And I think a lot of that made it into the story.
How did you design the look of the Hooded Woman?
I wanted to have a form of female beauty, a female beauty standard from a bygone era, right? That was important. [“Dressed to Kill”] came to mind. Another one was a movie called “Charade,” where Audrey Hepburn is dressed in big sunglasses and a trench coat and a scarf. These were inspirations for [the look]. And then we tried wigs for her. We had these ’70s long-haired wigs, and they didn’t really work out. At some point, they put a sort of Marilyn Monroe-type wig onto her and then it just clicked. That was it. That’s the look.
It’s pretty typical in horror films to hide the monster until the end, but you don’t do that in “Cuckoo.” From early on, we get a good look at what the Hooded Woman looks like. What was the thinking behind that decision?
I think her presence was more important than the mystery. Like, the presence of this ghostly woman character with our main character, who has lost a mother recently, and she’s being haunted now by this thing, right? I felt the closeness to this ghostly woman character was way more important than hiding her away. It was clear that at the midpoint of the movie, we should have a real good look at her.
How did you land on the time loop effect as a symptom of the “bird call?“
I wanted to have some entrapment that the humans can find themselves in, and it had to be sort of psychological. And I thought, like, “Oh, they’re being sort of hypnotized in a way. What could that be?” And you know, thinking about the cycles, there are so many of them in the movie in different forms. Familial, and natural and stuff like this. Just thinking about this, the loop visuals were very near. And on top of that, I always wanted to have a movie where I’m able to show the same take, or almost the same take or two takes of the same shot [in the same scene], and I never knew how to do that. But when you’re editing movies, that happens sometimes, where you have a different take twice in the timeline or something like that. It’s kind of cool, you know?
The woods are such an iconic horror setting, and the lenses you use make the locations look so soft and dreamy. Can you break down how you approached the cinematography for “Cuckoo”?
I think lenses are a good point. I really like wide lenses. If you’re talking CinemaScope lenses, widescreen lenses, anamorphic lenses, I really love when they’re wide. Nowadays, it’s kind of popular to use telephoto lenses, which for me, always gives me a feeling of being removed and a little bit distant. But what was very popular in the ’80s and ’90s was having wide-angle lenses that if you watch it on the big screen, you really feel like you’re in there because it feels like the screen wraps around you. That’s what we were going after. And many of these shots we were always using a little bit of a wider lens. I think that gives you an immersive experience.
Your first two feature films, “Luz” and “Cuckoo,” are both horror mysteries. What about the blending of those genres inspires you as a director?
I don’t know. They go so well together. It’s like vanilla and chocolate ice cream. It’s just two really good tastes. Horror is always about death in some way. It’s always about like, life ending, our existence is limited and things will end. And a mystery is…I forgot who made that joke, but a comedian, maybe Demetri Martin, made a joke that a mystery is never about uncovering a good thing. It’s always about like, who’s the murderer? It’s never about like, oh, who made cookies? These things, they just go together, right? It’s always about like, okay, where does the danger lurk? What is it I need to find out?
You’ve said before that you saw “Lost Highway” and “Repo Man” at a young age, which are clear influences for this film. What other cinematic influences did you pull from for “Cuckoo?”
I don’t have too many concrete ones. It’s more like this big, big mess of movie appreciation. But of course, you know, the masters like [David Lynch] or [Brian] De Palma. But also I personally have [Federico] Fellini and [Michelangelo] Antonioni in there, in terms of how to operate with the camera and holding the mystery. A lot of times, I don’t really know what the references are when I do them. It’s almost like I forgot and they just come out in an unconscious way. And then lots of times, I’m getting reminded when I talk to an audience after screening or in an interview, and they’re like, “Is that not a reference to that?” And I’m like, “Oh, yeah, it could be. I guess it is.” You just learn to accept that, yeah, of course, I got something from somewhere mixed with something else.
This is only your second feature film, and you were able to partner with Neon and Hunter Schafer to make it happen. What, from your perspective, is the film all about? What were you trying to achieve with “Cuckoo?”
I wanted to talk, in this fever dream-like state, about acceptance. It’s a movie about accepting the place you’re in. It talks a lot about, in different ways, family structure, generational conflict and violence people do to each other, and how violence circles around, comes back and feeds the next loop of violence. And that is a pretty horrific thing, but we all have to find a certain way to deal with it. That doesn’t mean accepting it and thinking, “Oh, this is great,” but we’re always, in part, people who pass the violence on and receive the violence. And I wanted to talk about this and have a story that is in one way, really loving in what the characters do, how they protect each other and how they deal with it, while at the same time also accepting that the horrific stuff is part of them.
