Pete Davidson smiled for the camera and gave two thumbs up.
Blood dripped from his head to his chin.
His white shirt was completely doused, red splashed all down his chest, his hands caked in crimson.
The actor-comedian looked like he had just walked out of a slaughterhouse, but he was standing outside of a retirement home.
It was 2022 and he was on the New Jersey set of the horror movie “The Home.”
The film, opening in theaters Friday (July 25), owes a large part of its foreboding mood to a local landmark that dates to the 19th century.
Director James DeMonaco, known for writing and directing “The Purge” movies, says it wasn’t easy to give “The Home” a home.
“We couldn’t find a place, we were searching,” he tells NJ Advance Media.
Davidson plays Max, a character forced to confront the terrible secrets of the senior home where he works. He’s told never to go to the fourth floor, but has to know more after hearing unsettling screeches and cries coming from there.
Just don’t go to the fourth floor.Roadside Attractions
DeMonaco wanted to find somewhere to film the movie that looked both lived-in and mysterious.
“It was one of these intangible things that you know it when you see it,” DeMonaco says. “I needed something that was ominous and large and somewhat imposing, but also had a warmth inside that I wanted to portray a little bit to go against the creepy nature of what was happening.”
And the horror maestro, who hails from Staten Island, had his heart set on filming in New Jersey.
He wanted to film in a building where his cast could play residents of the home and the production would not have to move from location to location.
“New Jersey has a great tax credit for movies and I wanted to shoot in the tri-state area because I could pull on the great theater community from New York, and even Jersey has a good theater community,” DeMonaco says. “We knew to populate the home and its residents, we wanted really good, seasoned actors, so I didn’t want to leave. But we couldn’t find the home. We couldn’t find it anywhere.”
That is, until location manager Henry Winnik brought the Saint Francis Residential Community to the director’s attention.
James DeMonaco, who is known for “The Purge” movies, directed “The Home.”Dia Dipasupil | Getty Images
The stately senior living facility sat on 20 acres in Denville.
Since 1895, when it opened as a health resort, it had been the property of the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother, a Franciscan Catholic congregation currently based in Wisconsin.
“As soon as I got out of the car, as soon as we were driving up to it, I was like ‘oh, this is it,’” DeMonaco says. “It was immense.”
Not only that, but the Diamond Spring Road facility had recently closed, giving the movie free rein.
“There was no parameters, no restrictions as to where we can go,” the director says, and Denville welcomed the production. “We found everything on site. It was so enormous. They even had a church inside, which we used. I couldn’t believe the size of the place, it was really a city. It must have been a great place.”
Besides individual rooms in the facility, the movie showcases its many common areas, like the ballroom and commissary.
At the time of the filming, the Saint Francis grounds, once home to Saint Francis Sanitarium, had been there for 127 years.
“Because it was empty, it was quite creepy in an odd way because we knew it had been around so long and we saw there was a lot of accoutrements from the residents who left,” DeMonaco says. “There were plaques on the walls of all the people who died there over the years … There was a cemetery on site, which was kind of odd and ominous, so it all fed the mood of making a horror film, too, which was great.”
The entrance to Saint Francis Residential Community in 2018. The facility was demolished not long after “The Home” filmed there.Google
Now “The Home” stands as an intimate — albeit bloody — record of a piece of New Jersey history.
Just months after the movie filmed at Saint Francis Residential Community in 2022, Denville announced that Springpoint Senior Living, its new owner, would start demolition of the property.
“The Home,” distributed by Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions, spent $11.7 million filming in New Jersey, the state Economic Development Authority told NJ Advance Media when the movie’s trailer was released. The production received a $4.1 million tax credit.
Other filming locations included a private home in Nutley; Woodland Park’s Garret Mountain Reservation, Rifle Camp Park and a Mobil gas station in the same town; the Madison Hotel in Morris County (between Madison and Morristown); and a storefront on Elizabeth Avenue in Elizabeth.
Davidson, who became a household name as a cast member on “Saturday Night Live” before leaving the show in 2022, has filmed other movies in New Jersey.
His latest, “Riff Raff,“ in which he and Bill Murray play gangsters, was released in February. He also filmed the 2023 movie “Dumb Money” locally.
You’d also put on protective eyewear if you’d gone through the ordeal Pete Davidson experiences at Green Meadows Retirement Home. Dia Dipasupil | Getty ImagesPete Davidson: Horror hero
Davidson previously starred in the ensemble of horror comedy “Bodies Bodies Bodies” (2022), but this is his first lead role in a horror film.
The majority of “The Home” centers on his character’s experience at Green Meadows Retirement Home. The story unfolds as he walks its long hallways, interacting with its residents, on edge as he struggles to get a single night’s sleep in the restless place.
As Max, Davidson is a young man who grew up with a foster family (Princeton native Jessica Hecht plays his foster mother) and is now haunted by his past, especially the loss of his brother Luke.
Max, a graffiti artist, ends up at the senior home as a way to avoid jail time after being arrested. Thanks to some help from his foster father (Victor Williams), he is instead sent to work at Green Meadows as part of his community service. He becomes the live-in super, tasked with cleaning and garbage collection.
He gets a warm welcome from residents like Lou (John Glover), a veteran stage actor who teaches drama classes.
But right away, things seem off.
And it’s not just the whole “never go to the fourth floor” thing.
A doctor at the facility (Bruce Altman) makes a creepy remark about Max having “interesting eyes.” There’s also all the unexplained shrieking going on upstairs.
Pete Davidson’s eye features prominently in the horror movie.Roadside Attractions
Max bonds with one resident named Norma (Mary Beth Peil) over their shared loss of loved ones. Like Max, she’s haunted, and not just by her own grief. She feels compelled to give her new friend a warning.
“There’s something very wrong with this place,” she tells him. “Something terribly wrong.”
DeMonaco, 55, didn’t meet fellow Staten Islander Davidson through the casting process for the movie. He’d already known him for more than 15 years.
“I knew Pete before he was Pete Davidson,” says the director, whose first produced script, 17 years before “The Purge” (2013), was “Jack” (1996). (The movie, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, stars Robin Williams and is decidedly not in the horror realm.)
As a young teen, Davidson — now 31 and expecting his first child — worked as a busboy at a local Italian restaurant DeMonaco frequented. They stayed friends over the years, and when DeMonaco needed a lead for his horror film, he knew Davidson would be right for the role.
“I really hope people see it, because I think Pete is great at the action horror of it all,“ he says. ”It kind of goes bonkers in the last 30 minutes. There’s a big twist. I want people to see if they can guess the twist.”
Writer-director James DeMonaco with Pete Davidson this week at the premiere of “The Home” in New York. They’ve known each other for more than 15 years.Dia Dipasupil | Getty ImagesReal-life Jersey haunting
DeMonaco says filming the frenzied end of the movie was “truly a blast.”
He intentionally saved those scenes for later in production.
“We all were waiting to shoot that,” he says.
However, filming at the Saint Francis building in Denville brought some unscripted scares.
“The place, we started to feel, was haunted,” DeMonaco says.
He points to one “weird incident.” It happened when they were filming in the room belonging to Max’s new friend Norma.
“My crew found a music box underneath the bed that was already existing in the room, and it played three songs,” DeMonaco says. “And one of the songs was the song that Norma sings at the piano. And then we found the plaque in the room of all the people who died there, and there was a woman named Norma. So now the crew actually started to believe that this place was haunted. So it was kind of fun. That set the mood also.”
COVID, climate change and longevity
The swirl of ideas that became “The Home” surfaced during the early social distancing days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
DeMonaco wrote the film with his best friend Adam Cantor, another Staten Islander.
“We were in the same pod,” he says. “We were only seeing each other because his boys played with my daughter, and so we were hanging out in my backyard. And we’re both quite neurotic, and we were talking about COVID, and at the same time there was a lot of issues at the elder care facilities in New York — with Andrew Cuomo and how he handled the pandemic … We were talking about that a lot. We both had strange experiences with people in our families at elder care facilities.”
DeMonaco’s wife had been urging him to use his extra free time during the pandemic to try yoga — “I eat a lot Italian food and I’m not that healthy and limber,” he says.
Heeding her suggestion brought an influx of health-related videos his way.
“My YouTube feed, or algorithm, started to be inundated with all kinds of longevity videos and supplements to live longer,” DeMonaco says. “And I found I became intrigued with what I noticed was this kind of obsession — it seemed like in America, maybe across the world — with living longer and longevity.”
“The Home” plays on all of these elements while also touching on climate change.
The movie isn’t concerned with the finer points of global warming, but instead what it has to say about the actions of older generations and how they are affecting the lives of young people and future generations.
A “generational battle” in the film symbolically expresses that reality, becoming the overarching theme, DeMonaco says.
Davidson’s Max finds himself in the middle of a “generational battle.” Roadside Attractions
Cantor and DeMonaco found horror inspiration from movies like Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968), Robert Altman’s “3 Women” (1977) and Michael Winner’s “The Sentinel” (1977).
“I watched a lot of ’70s psychological horror,” DeMonaco says.
Misdirection, skillfully deployed in many a horror film, also becomes a theme in “The Home,” through commentary on modern life and the perils of boredom:
“We all derive pleasure from certain things that maybe we shouldn’t be deriving pleasure from,” DeMonaco says.
Seeing Pete Davidson scared out of his mind?
Apparently not one of them.
“The Home,” rated R, runs 1 hour and 37 minutes and is in theaters Friday, July 25.
Thank you for reading. Please consider supporting NJ.com with a subscription.
Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter/X, @amykup.bsky.social on Bluesky and @kupamy on Instagram and Threads.
If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.