With ICK hitting theaters this weekend, we recently caught up with director Joseph Kahn (Bodied; Torque) to talk about his latest monster movie that blends classic creature-feature thrills with a modern twist.
In the film, Kahn explores the chaos unleashed by a mysterious entity known as the Ick. The synopsis reads, "For almost two decades, a viscous vine-like growth known colloquially as “The Ick” has benignly crept into every nook and cranny of American life while the residents of small town Eastbrook remain blasé about its existence. The exceptions are former high school football star-turned-hapless science teacher Hank and his sardonically perceptive student Grace who are thrown together by Grace’s mom Staci’s closely-guarded secret and a mutual suspicion that the Ick is about to unleash some monstrous mayhem."
Talking with Kahn, he shared insights about his inspirations (including Spielberg classics like Jaws and Jurassic Park), the challenges of bringing the monstrous Ick to life, the pitch perfect casting of Brandon Routh, Mena Suvari, and Malina Weissman, and a whole lot more - including a reflection on Power/Rangers ten years later!
Watch our full video interview with Joseph Kahn below and/or keep scrolling to read the transcription. Plus, remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more exclusive content!
ROHAN: You’ve mentioned drawing inspiration from Steven Spielberg and films like Jaws and Jurassic Park. What about those classics inspired you to create ICK and tell this story?
JOSEPH: Well, I wanted to make a monster movie, which is a really funny genre, because it's a classic Hollywood genre, but people don't really make a lot of monster movies, like they try to reboot Frankenstein and Dracula every once in a while, but that's it, you know? And maybe they did the werewolf thing, but then, no one tries to come up with new monsters, and especially things like The Blob, The Faculty, all these movies, it's such a great genre. And more specifically, telling that genre from the perspective of a family film, cause when I was a kid, I used to watch these movies on television. And then, you know, during the 80s, they had movies like Gremlins and stuff like that. But now, if you're going to get into horror, they just like throw kids at the wolves. It's like you've got to go watch Terrifier or, you know, even a Final Destination movie where it's so violent in like giving you these nightmare images of people getting ripped apart in different ways. Is it really appropriate for kids? I don't know. Maybe kids are very different, but I still like to believe there's some innocence left in the world. So, I wanted to make a monster movie for all ages that genuinely is a starter horror flick.
ROHAN: ICK feels rich with metaphor. When designing this monster, what themes or ideas did you want the creature to represent?
JOSEPH: Well, whenever you do monster movies, obviously they're about something - Godzilla is the atom bomb, King Kong is the primitive versus the industrialized world. Dracula, it's funny, like it's a kind of a European dude walking around knocking on doors, and if you let him in, he goes and screws your wife, right? So, I think with Ick, it's my modern treaties, and the question is, what happens when the monster comes to your town? Well, in the modern world, we've already had that answer. We've seen the monster come to town in many different ways, whether it's 9/11 whether it's, you know, climate change, whether it's COVID, whether it's politics, whether you're a Democrat, Republican, from either perspective, you think a monster has come into the office, right? And, you know, what ends up happening is for two weeks, everyone freaks out. Everyone goes crazy, everything like that. And then what happens after that? Nothing. People start living with it. People just sort of ignore it. And that might be a sign of incredible stupidity, or it might be a sign of human survival. You know, I don't have that particular answer. I'm just satirizing it. I'm not a sociologist, I'm not a historian, I'm a filmmaker, and what I do best is have fun with things. So, I'm just taking those things and riffing on it and giving you an entertaining time reliving the time today. People may say Ick is very unrealistic, because we would never ignore the monster. But I ask you, is that true?
ROHAN: The movie has some very elaborate VFX sequences, like the massive pool scene. What was the most challenging shot to execute from a technical standpoint?
JOSEPH: This movie is constructed of a bunch of horribly complicated techniques, from prosthetics to stunts to the fact that we're shooting in real sets. I mean, that's one thing, weirdly enough, for as low budget of a film we're doing, we're doing something that even the big Marvel movies don't do, which is shoot in real locations. If they step out into New York, that's not New York, they're stepping out into a green screen, and they manufacture all this stuff. When you step out into our small town, those are real buildings, those are real football stadiums. We never CG anything of that stuff, you know, all that stuff, like that's real cars driving down real roads. It's all real. So, yeah, the Ick is CG, but everything else is real. So that is an incredibly hard thing to do in a film like this, especially for the budget. And I'm super happy with that, because I think there's a contextualized feeling of realism. Yes, the Ick is fantasy, but everything else is dead real.
ROHAN: You assembled an amazing cast with Brandon Routh, Mena Suvari, and Malina Weissman—each playing roles that feel different from what we’ve seen them do before. What went into casting these three?
JOSEPH: Well, there’s some beautiful baggage specifically between Brandon and Mena, because Brandon obviously comes with the Superman vibe. And you look at him, you're like, that's Superman, but then I break his leg, and on top of it, life didn't go well for him. This is not Brandon playing Superman. This is Brandon post-Superman, you know, like, where has he been? And he's such an amazing actor, and he's got so much charm. He's so good looking. He should be Tom Cruise. For whatever reason, we, the audience, have failed him. So, this is a chance for him to show what he can do. And so, I feel like it's kind of like an alignment between the character and Brandon. Brandon gets to finally show what he can do, and I love seeing it. I think it's a revelatory, like charming performance.
Then, for the comedic actress next to him, like he his character has to pine for one girl for twenty years, so that girl has to be so iconic and so interesting that you believe that he would pine for her for twenty years. And so, if you go back twenty years, to the 2000s, who do you pine for? Who's the girl of the moment? Well, they made a movie about that girl. It's called American Beauty and she's on the poster. It's Mena Suvari. So, I was like, I better go find somebody like Mena Suvari, but I actually ended up getting Mena Suvari, so that was amazing, and she's such an incredible comedic actor. She's in American Pie. I mean, she's one of the great comedic actresses of our time, and I just love her perkiness and funniness.
And then, there's Malina. When you try to cast eighteen year olds, most of them are not famous, because they're just starting their careers, like by the time they turn twenty-five, that's when they get their fan bases and stuff. But Malina was in Lemony Snicket, and when I looked at her performance, it was kind of amazing, because she played it so straight. She put no comedy in it whatsoever, and yet it was funny. And I suddenly realized that's the way the movie needs to be. Everybody needs to take their role seriously. They do not play it funny. They play it straight and let the context be funny, and she kind of set the tone.
ROHAN: Was the script always designed to be played straight, or did that tone develop during filming?
JOSEPH: Well, Sam Laskey did the original draft, and it definitely had a comedic tone to it. There were definitely jokes and still, and there's some great jokes that are still in there. For instance, the whole Wal-Mart scene. That's clearly a very comedic scene. There's jokes all over the place, but I think the real trick is that none of the characters are winking at the camera as they say this stuff. They are absolutely in the belief of their perspectives and point of views, because there's a lot of point of views in this movie. Because one of the things that's interesting about monster movies is that, in the past, you know, they would all find out who the monster is, they would get together and then they would team up to kill the monster and burn it in a windmill. In our movie, when the monster comes in, just like in real life, no one unites. Everyone divides into their subcultures, and everyone argues with each other. That's the way we deal with monsters today. We just argue about everything. And I think that's real.
ROHAN: The ending is left somewhat open-ended. What was your intention behind that choice?
JOSEPH: We’re going to be a little vague here, because we're not doing spoilers, but I will say this, the answer to the question that is being asked is not important, because once you love someone, does it really matter if it's genetic or not?
ROHAN: You mentioned classic monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein. How liberating was it to build a new creature with your own set of rules?
JOSEPH: Ick is kind of a fusion of the best pieces of a lot of different monsters, the light sensitivity of a vampire, the sort of amorphous quality of a Blob, the overtaking of somebody and infection of a zombie and the mind melding of the Thing. So, it's got like elements of all to create its own creature with its own rules that you discover as you watch the movie, and the sort of ambiguous rules of it is also part of the Ick by design. You never really know how it works. You never know why it came. You never know anything. And you know what? Because it's a reflection of, on a certain level, you know, of all the things that people say this movie is about COVID. This was written before COVID. I think one of the parallels to COVID is that we didn't really know how COVID worked. We would debate it. We would say it was in a lab. It was, you know, it infected you, it infected kids. No, it didn't. And people would argue about all this stuff. But, at the end of the day, people were afraid of it, but people didn't really know how it worked. And so, that's the Ick. We don't know how the Ick works. We don't know where it came from. But you know what? I'm sorry, in movies, maybe you need all those answers, but in real life, we don't know - people to this day, for instance, like a 9/11, people debate what really happened, right? They had all these conspiracy theories and stuff like that. So, the confusion of the Ick is accurate to real life again. I don't think it's a negative. I think it's actually the way the real world sees monsters, with absolute confusion.
ROHAN: The soundtrack plays a big role in the film. Was music always integral to the script?
JOSEPH: It was always part of the script, because Hank put together a playlist for his girlfriend, and it kind of represents his moment stuck in time. So, when we play all these songs, it's acting both as a tribute to the 2000s and his life there, but also a reflection of his stasis in time. And the funny thing is that it should make Millennials feel old for the first time, because those songs are all twenty years old. You know, what 20 years is? That's a generation. But at the same time, when Hank finally frees himself up and realizes that life has passed him by, the things he wishes that he did aren't going to happen, but he sort of embraces a new form of love, this discovery of something greater than himself. I think that's the journey that a lot of people do as adults, you start thinking only about yourself, and you start thinking about other people, and then suddenly you're no longer afraid of death as much as when you were a kid. You're like, okay, as long as I pass things on to other people. I pass this music on to other people. I pass my culture on to other people. I can go have a nice life. I had my time now, have a great time with yours, and that makes you feel good as an old person. And that's the journey that millennials are taking now. That's the journey that they take in the movie.
ROHAN: Before we wrap, I have to ask about Power/Rangers. What inspired that short film, and how do you look back on it today?
JOSEPH: The initial idea around Power/Rangers was that it was made at a very angry time of my life, and I felt like I was being disrespected by the studios in Hollywood, just like every other actor or director that doesn't get the roles they want, right? And I was like, I heard they're gonna make a Power Rangers movie. Well, I'm gonna be the Osama bin Laden of Power Rangers and do a sneak attack and take my thing and crash it into their franchise, right? So I made the impossible Power Rangers movie with a cheat code. I was gonna make it violent. I was gonna show killings and murders and blood and sex and tits and drugs and make the impossible Power Rangers movie. And I was going to make people love it, and I was gonna make it impossible for them to live up to that particular idea. That was the agenda. And it was a joke, but the joke wasn't that it would be played winking to the audience. There was no winking. The joke would be that you would walk out of it and go, that was [frick]ing awesome. But, then after, you go, I just liked a Power Rangers movie that had drugs and sex and killing in it, and stuff like that. That's the joke.
If I had to do it today, I would take it more seriously. I think there's ways to do it without having to resort to all that. I can do the PG-13 version of it, and that's my maturity as a filmmaker. I'm confident that I can get the same reaction without having to press those easy buttons.
From acclaimed director Joseph Kahn comes his latest film, ICK, a pulpy horror comedy bursting with splattery bedlam starring Brandon Routh, Malina Weissman, and Mena Suvari. For almost two decades, a viscous vine-like growth known colloquially as “The Ick” has benignly crept into every nook and cranny of American life while the residents of small town Eastbrook remain blasé about its existence. The exceptions are former high school football star-turned-hapless science teacher Hank (Routh) and his sardonically perceptive student Grace (Weissman) who are thrown together by Grace’s mom Staci’s (Suvari) closely-guarded secret and a mutual suspicion that the Ick is about to unleash some monstrous mayhem.
A wild ride driven by a power punk spirit, ICK is a dizzyingly fun and hilariously grotesque homage to throwback PG horror flicks, as well as an ode to Millennial nostalgia manifested in soundtrack needle drops by American Rejects, Paramore, and Blink 182.