Cuckoo Interview: Director Tilman Singer on Jump Scares, Contained Thrillers

ComingSoon’s Jonathan Sim recently spoke with writer/director Tilman Singer on his new horror movie Cuckoo. They discussed shooting the film on 35mm, writing a contained thriller, and the key to a good jump scare. It releases in theaters on August 9, 2024.

“Seventeen-year-old Gretchen reluctantly leaves America to live with her father at a resort in the German Alps,” reads the official synopsis. “Plagued by strange noises and bloody visions, she soon discovers a shocking secret that concerns her own family.”

Jonathan Sim: When I was watching this movie, I felt like I was watching a horror movie that was made decades ago. Can you walk me through what you wanted to achieve with your visual style and how you achieved it with your cinematographer?

Tilman Singer: Sure. I think what you felt is due to the fact that we shot on 35 mm, but not only because of the format, it has a certain quality of look to itself, but also, the camera is just gigantic. It’s very, very heavy. So moving it around naturally sort of ends up [leading to] more grounded slow camera movements.

And I think another key thing is that I really like wide lenses. I love a wide-angle lens, and I think a more modern style is going a little bit more telephoto. Which has a feeling of, to me, a feeling of distance that I don’t like that much. You know, back in the ’80s and ’90s too, you know, Cinemascope films, they were shot way wider. And I think it’s so much more beautiful because it puts you into the space when you watch it. It creates that illusion of you being there. I think that maybe is a key element to this, what you felt.

I think that makes a lot of sense. And this is a movie that doesn’t have a lot of locations. It’s a pretty contained thriller. So, as a writer, what are the challenges that you find when crafting a thriller like this, and how do you avoid falling into certain plot holes?

I always fall into plot holes. I don’t avoid it. I just have to figure out how to solve them later. But actually limiting your location is a very good thing. It’s a very, very thankful thing to write because you have the pressure cooker effect. You know, your characters can organically come back, meet, you know, all these mechanics. They’re very thankful if you limit yourself to a few locations. Actually, if you’re doing something like a road movie, it’s extremely hard to have your reoccurring characters interact. Because you are at different places all the time. So I love having few locations.

And I think it worked really well for this film. There are incredible scares in this movie. For example, there’s this scene where one character shows up, and it’s probably the scariest thing I’ve seen in a movie all year. I want to talk about the jump scare because I’ve seen a lot of horror movies that don’t do them. Right. And I think Cuckoo is a rare movie that does. So as a director, what is the key to a good jump scare?

I don’t really know what the key is. There are so many ways to do it. I think what’s interesting about jump scares is that people, they seem to be polarized a lot, right? People sometimes declare them as a cheap thrill that they have no value, which I don’t think that’s true. I think there is a good value, a real artful value to being startled every now and then, right? For all kinds of reasons.

But I think there’s not only one way to do that, you know. Sometimes they’re great when they come out of the blue without any hint before that this would happen. And sometimes it’s really nice teasing them that they might happen. And then there may be a fake jump scare. There’s this famous one in Halloween, I think it’s when the psychiatrist shows up instead of the killer.

And that is a jump scare, but it’s a fake out, right? It’s almost like the cat in the dumpster that jumps at the character. And there are so many ways to do them. I don’t think there’s just one way, but I think if you wanna do them, you have to lean in. And I mean, there’s one jump scare in the film that we made that sort of grew into one as we went on with the edit because we wanted to have a thrill in a certain moment to combine two elements. I don’t want to spoil it, but sort of the trans element, the perception, like weird sort of psychedelic perception of the world with a horrific thing. And you hear a scream there too. So we felt like, okay, we will amp this up and use our editing technique that we already established as a bit of a weird one. So sometimes they come also later.