>> PREVIEW
SEVERANCE
STARRING Laura Harris, Toby Stephens and Danny Dyer
DIRECTED BY Christopher Smith
Opens Friday, June 1
Uptown Screen
Horror-comedy is a genre that many decent filmmakers have tried to conquer, with varying degrees of success. Shaun of the Dead is the most recent. What is it about the scores of other attempts that have failed to make a splash with North American audiences? Maybe none of them featured the pure, unadulterated bad-ass hotness of Laura Harris.
Harris, known to audiences as Marie Warner on 24 and Daisy Adair on Dead Like Me, is no stranger to playing characters who aren’t quite as simple as they seem. A murderess on 24 and a grim reaper on Dead Like Me, Harris says it is just this kind of complex duality that drew her to the character of Maggie in Christopher Smith’s new horror comedy Severance.
Playing the stock horror babe, Harris’s performance transcends the typical horror heroine. Lithe, transparently pale, impossibly blond and… smart? The film starts with Harris and her group of co-workers getting stuck in the woods of Hungary after their team-building exercise gets sidetracked by an unknown menace lurking deep in the forest. Harris’s Maggie is a shotgun-toting, chain-smoking borderline anorexic, who manages to capture a strange blend somewhere between Alien’s Ripley and When Harry Met Sally’s Meg Ryan.
"When I first read the script (this) was my first thought, this is the alien structure… this is like a gift from god. It’s very rare to read a character that was part of an ensemble who really comes into her own. Initially no one listens to her, even though her ideas are totally accurate and might save their ass. She is just not really that important, she is just there. It is kind of like Ripley," she says.
But aside from Ripley and Sally, there is another more interesting influence at work here. Perhaps an odd choice for a horror film, but something Harris said helped her get into her character’s back story – Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. "I watched Working Girl non-stop, so the ideas were circulating somewhere in my consciousness while I was up there. Someone called me on it earlier, they said I see Melanie Griffith in Working Girl and I was like ‘holy cow, that is amazing that even one person would smell that,’" Harris says.
But Severance isn’t the first horror Harris has worked on. Working with famed auteur (a word she has trouble pronouncing) Robert Rodriguez while playing queen alien Marybeth Louise Hutchinson in The Faculty was an experience Harris said she never fully appreciated at the time, missing all the horror homage’s Rodriguez was pulling from. "The difference for me was that this time I had watched those films and I appreciate them. I was a teenager when I did The Faculty, and I hadn’t seen those films, I had never seen a horror film in my life so I had no appreciation for what was being done," she says.
She has since gained full appreciation for the genre through the eyes of Smith and his unadulterated passion for film and its effect on politics and society, something Harris was instantly drawn to. "Chris mentioned this a few times when we were talking about (the genre), but very often when something is going on politically like the Vietnam War or right now when people are disgruntled or unhappy, that usually is a time when horror movies peak. They are, like invasion of the body snatchers, pretty serious political commentary. It is a genre that is actually used to express the frustration that people seem to have. They don’t know where to put aggression."
And what was Harris’s favourite part of filming for two months in Hungary? Not the over abundance of pickled foods covered in paprika or bugs the size of fists, but (Beware: here comes the plot spoiler) the Hungarian hookers who save her life at the end of the film. "It is just genius, the fact that two Hungarian hookers save my life, it is just too good to be true. So sexploitation, the topless hooker saves the day." |
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