With a background in VR and 3D soundscapes, Tuason leaves almost everything up to the imagination and some very well-placed sound effects.<\/p>\n
“I’m relying entirely on the audience to make that up in their own head. Because I thought about hiding stuff like [horror director] Mike Flanagan does,” the writer and director tells ABC News.<\/p>\n
“But then I watched The Babadook, and I just saw a jacket hanging on an old rack<\/a>, and I said, that’s enough. I won’t do anything. I’ll just hang a jacket on a chair.”<\/p>\n In the 2014 Australian psychological horror The Babadook, the monster hides in plain sight as a jacket and hat hanging in a police station. (YouTube: @IconFilmDistrobution)<\/p>\n Made for under $US1 million and filmed in Tuason’s childhood home, Undertone is the definition of bare-bones filmmaking. The movie follows Evy (Nina Kiri), a young woman providing hospice care to her comatose mother in her isolated, creaky childhood home.<\/p>\n Her outlet is The Undertone, a supernatural horror podcast she records in the dead of night to work around her co-host Justin’s (The White Lotus’s Adam DiMarco) UK time difference. Evy is the consummate sceptic to Justin’s believer, but after being sent 10 anonymous sound recordings of a couple on the edge her foundations begin to crumble.<\/p>\n Differing time zones means Evy is forced to record The Undertone at 3am. (Supplied: A24\/Dustin Rabin)<\/p>\n Rather than assault the audience with a visual threat, Undertone invites observers to lean in, to listen closer to the delicate soundscape to understand what could be lurking underneath the soundwaves.<\/p>\n “To me, a good 3D soundscape would be when you close your eyes and you can still feel like you’re there,” Tuason says.<\/p>\n “If the surround sound could tell a story with your eyes closed, I’d say that’s pretty successful.”<\/p>\n Close to home<\/p>\n Undertone is a painfully personal project for Tuason. In addition to being filmed entirely in his childhood home, the story is based on his own experiences of caring for his dying parents.<\/p>\n “It was really introspective. I had to dig into my childhood fears,” Tuason says.<\/p>\n “But at the same time, after going through an experience like caring for your parents, you’re just kind of brave after that.”<\/p>\n Undertone writer\/director Ian Tuason with his lead Nina Kiri chat underneath one of the many crosses plastered throughout the house. (Supplied: A24\/Dustin Rabin)<\/p>\n For Tuason, the horror in Undertone doesn’t just come from imminent danger but also the shame and guilt Evy feels as she’s forced to care for her mother as she slowly dies. He covered the walls of Evy’s mother’s home with Catholic paraphernalia \u2014 crosses and statues and tableaux \u2014 in a reflection of his own experience with religious expectations.<\/p>\n “I think when you grow up Catholic, these symbols do evoke a lot of emotions, and some of those emotions might be unconscious. I think feelings of guilt are buried under there,” he says.<\/p>\n “And then feelings of doubt, and then it turns into a downward spiral because your doubt triggers feelings of guilt, because you might feel guilty that you have doubt.”<\/p>\n Tuason says the process of mapping out Evy’s journey on film provided the director with a type of catharsis.<\/p>\n “I had it on set, when Nina Kiri nailed that confession to the last phone caller. At that point, I felt like she was me just confessing all her guilt and doubt,” he says.<\/p>\n “Then I looked at the time code on the monitor and it was my mum’s birthday.”<\/p>\n Evy’s ailing mother is a constant, unsettling presence in Undertone. (Supplied: A24\/Dustin Rabin)<\/p>\n Flickering lights<\/p>\n Finding mum in the monitor wasn’t the only spooky occurrence Tuason observed while filming in the house; the supernatural phenomena happened so often it almost became part of the charm.<\/p>\n “Right now, if you ask any crew member, they’ll all tell you they each have their own experience that’s separate from everyone else,” he says.<\/p>\n “When the camera team came to test some cameras, the lights started flickering in only the rooms that they were going to shoot in.”<\/p>\n “[One day] our DP, Graham Beasley, he’s holding his camera walking up the staircase that has all the drawings on it and he said ‘Ian, I think I believe everything you’re saying now’.”<\/p>\n Evy’s nightmare intensifies the more she listens to the mysterious recordings. (Supplied: A24\/Dustin Rabin)<\/p>\n Uncanny events followed Tuason even after shooting had wrapped. As a micro-budget indie film it was a miracle for Undertone to even be made, but getting audiences to see it was another mountain to climb.<\/p>\n Most directors would fret over the prospect of being buried in the noise of Hollywood, but not Tuason. In an interview for the film’s electronic press kit, a collection of information and behind-the-scenes content to help entice distributors, Tuason was asked what was in the future for Undertone.<\/p>\n![\"a](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/57a4eb9e6df143c2c0fa6fe19deee985.jpeg\")
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