Meet Ick: Joseph Kahn's Gooey Creature Feature

Here is the secret to Ick I’ve been holding, and I’m going to tell it to you right away: this is a stealth horror movie for kids, and the kid in you. I wanted to make starter horror for teenagers that can be shared with their parents, and all will enjoy in parallel.

Having said that, I know from both my job making music videos and as the parent of a teenager, young people consume media at a different pace. So yes, warning, this movie is fast. It’s a TikTok, music video creature feature; a PG-13 plus intergenerational fantasy horror nostalgia blast with goo and screams and a relentlessly millennial soundtrack.

And yeah, that soundtrack is insane:

You may be wondering how the F(PG-13)CK did Joseph get all those songs? I’ll tell you. I have secrets on all of them. I know where you buried the body, Tyson Ritter. Ick can be watched once but then also rewatched, paused and rewinded. You can turn off your brain if you want, or keep it on if you wish. I respect whatever you bring to it and whatever you take out of it.

It started with a simple question:

What happened to the creature feature?

Old-School Monster Mayhem

Those schlocky B movies that aimed for ideas and scenes that punched way above their financial weight class? Sometimes it would be a man in suit (Godzilla, 1954) and at others it would be sub state of the art special effects (The Blob, 1958). There was charm to the man made feel of this genre from the primal stop motion of King Kong to the creepy gigantism of Them!

Ick is my dream of making an old fashioned monster movie for a modern world. The key word here is movie. Ick is an unapologetic crowd pleaser with scares and laughs. Instead of relying on gore and sex, we scare the audience with thrilling chases and escapes. Then we amuse them with the classic 1980’s theme: a broken family trying to mend. However, in our version, we are waiting on the DNA test to see if it’s actually a family (the world today is complex).

Look, I know there are still dinosaurs running around out there, but you know how those things go by now. I like dinosaurs too but meanwhile, why not try something new?

“This movie was made completely outside the studio system. That means we can do things studios won’t do.”

All bets are off. I can kill anyone I want, I can have them act in ways that aren’t following a rulebook of genre behaviors. For instance, a friend commented this may be the first movie about a girl discovering she may not be Asian lol.

Redefining the Creature Feature

When you make an indie movie like Ick, it also means unshackled from the politics of studio marketing agendas, you get to cast for the best actor for the part. So let’s bring on the charming level 11 Superman Brandon Routh to play our down-on-his-luck Hank. Malina Weissman from Lemony Snicket brought so much naturalism to Grace I couldn’t figure out when she was acting or not. And for the love of Hank’s life, the girl he has been pining for since the 2000s, well that’s the girl in American Beauty – Mena Suvari. So we looked for girls like her, failed, and then the gods of cinema (Spielberg, Scorsese)* blessed me and decided I should just have Mena Suvari in the role. Thank you.

*Metaphor. Spielberg and Scorsese have nothing to do with this.

Hopefully, like all great scary films, Ick evokes primal fears about the world today. It could be symbolic for many things: viruses, terrorism, global warming, TikTok, AI, the proliferation of horror movies about dinner parties because dinner parties are all 25 year old studio executives know. However there is a difference between Ick and monsters of the past. Ick is there in plain sight. The generation today has lived through 9/11 and Covid-19. What we’ve learned is when the monster appears, people eventually…ignore it. Ick takes place in a world where the mind control of the monster and the apathy of the people become indistinguishable.

The monster is here and we don’t care.

That is funny.

And terrifying.

Since I’m oversharing everything about this movie on this Fathom Entertainment blog (great company), let me overshare one last thing: Ick is a film about young and old that is meant to be shared between young and old and everything in between. As a film for everyone, I wanted to make a horror movie that gives a little hope. That’s right: I purposefully made the soft rock of horror, because dammit, if I won’t, who will? There are plenty of movies to cheer for those that die. In this movie, I hope we cheer for those that live.

Anyway, as my tween says about everything: it’s not that deep.

Let’s have some fun!