Jakob’s Wife (2021) is the sophomore directorial feature of Travis Stevens, founder and CEO of Snowfort Pictures. The haunted house film, Girl on the Third Floor (2019), marked his transition to the director’s chair after producing a number of genre films that found success on the festival circuit that went on to secure distribution. They include Frank Pavich’s documentary, Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013), Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer’s Starry Eyes (2014), Ted Geoghegan’s We Are Still Here (2015), John Carchietta’s Teenage Cocktail (2016), and Sarah Adina Smith’s Buster Mal’s Heart (2016).
Following his haunted house films, Stevens turns his attention to the vampire sub-genre. After a chance encounter with a stranger, Anne Fedder (Barbara Crampton) feels empowered. Discovering a fresh appetite for life that had slowly diminished during her marriage to minister Jakob (Larry Fessenden), this newfound energy leads to a bloodlust that will transform the power dynamic of their marriage.
In conversation with PopMatters, Stevens reflects on cinema as an expression of ideas, the need to emotionally satisfy his audience, and his intentions to merge the passive and active modes of film viewing.
What are your feelings having now completed Jakob’s Wife, as audiences begin watching and critiquing the film?
By the time the movie comes out, you’ve watched it close to a hundred times. Maybe it just feels that way, but if you’re grooming it on each pass, with each scene, then by the time it gets out, you’re brain is so fried that it’s nice to experience it through other people’s words. Whether it’s a positive or a negative review, you hope the person evaluating it is analysing what you intended the film to express.
Filmmaker Terence Davies told me, “You want a response, you need a response and if there is no response, or a response is indifferent, where do you find the courage to go on?” The conflict for the storyteller is that they’re looking outward for acceptance, as much as they’re looking inward to accept the translation of their vision.
In my final year at university, there were three components to my studies: film, painting, and a 60-page paper on who’s making the movie; is it the filmmaker or the audience? The filmmaker is the artist, and movies are being made to create an emotional reaction. The audience’s needs are just as important as the filmmaker’s needs.
It has been fascinating for the duration of my career, and it’s something I pick up on when I’m watching a movie. Is this person just doing their own thing, or do they have an understanding of where we all are emotionally in this theatre right now?
Art is about creative expression, but the transactional relationship that exists between the film and its audience justifies the need to treat art as commerce. It’s an inescapable conflict because art must be attentive to external considerations.
We’re currently in an era of genre films where they can be both commercial and emotionally valuable, or rather express cultural, emotional, and societal themes that have value. We have many supportive distributors and streamers that recognise there’s an audience for smart, well-crafted genre films. My experience is that it’s not an either/or.
There have been periods when it has been, and at a certain budget level, it becomes that. If you’re looking for $10 million, $50 million, or $100 million, chances are there’s going to be less freedom for wherever your artistic instincts take you.
I speak for myself, but as an audience member, you’re just looking for something that feels true and authentic and has intent. We’re in a golden age of genre movies from around the world, from different perspectives, cultures, genders, and sexualities, that are offering something true.
How do you compare the experience of writing and directing your second feature to your first?
It’s about confidence, and as a producer, I felt more secure because I was behind the filmmaker. It still allowed for creative expression, but I didn’t need to be the one standing there making every decision. Producers are filmmakers, but as a writer-director, you’re charting the course.
It has been exciting, but in the first movie, you’re getting your sea legs. What makes the biggest difference in how you feel about making a film, is when you reach the point it becomes easier to say yes or no. When you’re starting out, your instinct is to always say yes, because you want to keep things moving.
It’s the ability and the confidence to recognise the value of the choice in front of you. The willingness to stand behind your choice happens after your first film, and with the more you make. It’s also your ability to recognise how to be flexible and listen to other people’s input. It all comes as you grow in confidence.
I sense you’re a genre fan with an enthusiasm to try your hand at all the different types of genre films. It doesn’t strike me that you’re likely to repeat yourself.
Part of it is an opportunity. Somebody wants to make a haunted house movie or a vampire film. If it’s in a sub-genre, I’m creatively excited about what I can do to reference classics from the sub-genre, and do something new. It’s fun to work your art through the known qualities of the sub-genre, and the beauty of horror is that it’s valuable. You can take old ideas and put them into new places, and that can be creatively rewarding.
New ideas are wonderful and everybody wants to come up with the next new thing. I have a lot of fun thinking about what these movies can be, digesting the classics, or the history of the movies in that sub-genre, picking out the pieces I respond to, and trying to modernise or flip them on their head.
What I like about Girl on the Third Floor and Jakob’s Wife is that on the surface they’re a haunted house and a vampire movie, but that allows me to try to do subversive things. There are some radical ideas in those movies about the way men and women engage with each other, but if you watch the trailer, or look on the surface level, they feel like familiar genre films.
It’s like playing pop music, but the lyrics have something in them that’s, “Wait, what was that?” Maybe people are just looking for an old-school, fun, splatter horror movie, but these films are hopefully planting a seed where they start to grow, and you think, ‘Hang on, maybe I need to start and treat my partner differently.’ At least that’s what I’m hoping.
It’s not as important to me what’s happening as to why it’s happening? In many of my favourite horror films, there’s a purpose to the story that hits you deeper than just what happens to the characters.
The “why” is interesting because you’re asking the audience to be active, not passive participants. You ask your audience to watch your films the same way that you like to watch other people’s films.
There are certain films and filmmakers you sit down to watch, and you know you’re going to have to put in the work. There’s a huge portion of the audience that’s, “No thank you.” Then there’s the mainstream audience that just wants to sit there, have the movie play in the background, or play it at 1.5 speed. They watched the movie but didn’t experience seeing it, which is like skipping it.
I’m trying to find a medium between the two where it’s pop/pulp/mainstream stuff that hooks the audience and gets them to put in that extra work, or to a wider audience that might be showing up to an A24 movie. It sounded like I was talking negatively then; I’m not. I love A24 movies, but when things feel too arty, there are certain people that say, “No, I don’t like that.”
Do you want to create a more explosive film that’s subversive and breaks the rules, or do you enjoy creating something that’s familiar, that people can latch onto in that context, but beneath the surface it’s playful? Would you rather stay in that mould, or rip open the conventions of genre cinema?
It depends on what the elements at play are in a particular project–the actors, the story, your vision. My next film is more explosive in the artistic, surrealist imagery and the feel of it. Not that I prefer that, but it’ll be right for this one.
The movie I want to make after that is much more in the commercial, fun comedy-horror realm. It’s about what you think the best rhythm for the song is.