Showcasing Humor and the Grotesque: The Eggers Brothers Talk ‘The Front Room’

The Eggers brothers - Robert, Sam, and Max - are a talented trio. Most are familiar with Robert's features The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman, and the upcoming Nosferatu but twin siblings Sam and Max are making their entrée into the horror genre with A24's The Front Room. The psychological horror tale stars Grammy-winning singer Brandy Norwood as Belinda Irwin, a woman who’s dealing with having another child after experiencing a stillbirth. Kathryn Hunter plays the epitome of the wicked stepmother as Solange. Andrew Burnap as Norman is still recovering from childhood trauma with Solange, and Neal Huff is the readily available Pastor Lewis.

Sam and Max filmed on location in New Jersey. They wrote and directed this feature after paying their dues by working for their brother Robert. They come from a family suffused with talent and entertainment industry knowledge and experience. The Front Room is based on Susan Hill’s macabre short story from her book The Travelling Bag and Other Ghostly Stories. Her most well-known adaptation, for stage and screen, is The Woman in Black. The Eggers brothers have taken something that is British gothic horror and attuned it to America’s cultural palette.

Sam and Max recently spoke with Script Magazine about doing their first feature together.

Sonya Alexander: So, you guys started out in theater. What did you do?

Sam Eggers: I got a degree in Musical Theater. I spent my mid-twenties trying to get into anything. Went to the cattle calls.

Max Eggers: I went to theater school and had a similar track. Did a couple of tours. Did a Shakespeare festival. Our mother had a children's theater company for about twenty years. And our father was a Shakespeare professor. We've been acting and part of the theater since we were five years old.

Sonya: Do you think being twins affects the way you work together?

Max: Of course. It's wonderful that we get along at all and the fact that we can work together at all is also a blessing. Not everybody has that, I think that goes back to our theater background and the fact that we've been 'working together forever.' Whatever we've evolved into was kind of a natural thing. We’re lucky.

Sonya: Do you feel like when you worked with Robert you had the same synergy?

Max: We did. Again, it was lucky. We've been working with him, we've been his gophers, before he filmed Nosferatu last year. We were gargoyles in his original production of Nosferatu…!

Sonya: Nice! Max, what do you feel like you learned from co-writing The Lighthouse?

Max: That was such a wonderful experience. To actually produce something that was creatively challenging, but we were able to achieve. Seeing something in every stage that got crazier and crazier and everyone influencing it and putting so much into it, was so inspiring and made us willing and able to do something like this.

Sonya: Sam, how different is it to work on this narrative fiction piece compared to the documentary you worked on, Olympia?

Sam: It's oddly similar in the sense of the process. When I was editing...a documentary is a lot like writing. I was very lucky to work with the director Harry Mavromichalis on that, who was very trusting in terms of building scenes and crafting a sort of arc of Olympia Dukakis, who is amazing. We created this, The Front Room, from the ground up in a way that I didn't with editing documentaries. I was much more obviously on the post side of it. It taught me a lot about what we could do, what we can't do.

Max: What you need in the end.

Sam: What we needed in preparation for a film like The Front Room.

Sonya: You said a documentary is like writing. How so?

Sam: It depends on the project but with Olympia, which was a verité style, Harry would film Olympia just doing stuff or going to an event or doing these long-ranging interviews that were on the fly. In the editing room, you had a lot of material. Hundreds of hours to try to put together. He would give us a topic and tell us to look at the material and put it together like a script.

Sonya: What attracted you to The Front Room short story?

Max: The subject matter was something we'd lived through ourselves. Taking care of someone as they declined. We took care of our grandfather as he declined. When the story was presented to us through Lucan Toh and Babak Anvari, we knew exactly what to do with it. How to make it personal. How to enlarge it. Taking care of someone, as Susan Hill writes, and as you can see, is not easy.

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Sonya: How much does the film differ from the short story?

Sam: It's quite different. Solange as a character and her two canes and what she does to Belinda. The original short story is set in England. Belinda and Norman are religious, and Solange is the non-religious one. To make it personal, bringing it to America, we wanted to figure out how to honestly tell the story. Making a modern-day setting, with the couple being the irreligious ones and Solange is sort of a remnant of the past coming to affect them. There are children that aren't babies in the short story that Solange affects. Because we wanted this to be one location, one house, we needed certain events.

Max: And to make Belinda and Norman into the children that Solange affects.

Sonya: Were there any African American characters in the short story?

Max: No. But I think again if we were going to adapt this and do a modern Rosemary's Baby, we have seen that thing over and over again. It would have been dishonest to not do it this way, if that makes sense.

Sonya: Were there any challenges to writing a Black female character?

Max: Sure. Aside from that, the fact that we're never going to be mothers or women, it was a lot of learning and listening.

Sam: A lot of collaboration with Brandy.

Max: Absolutely. It was a challenge because it was something we felt we needed to do to be honest about where we are today in this country but also the world at large.

Sonya: How do you think a confined space like that house adds to the horror of a story?

Max: Certainly, in this kind of story, if you feel like you can’t escape, it heightens the tension. We try to make it seem like Belinda can’t escape the house or her own mind.

Sam: Also, when we took care of our grandfather, he was in a colonial house that had very short ceilings and small walls. When you start to take care of someone, when it gets bad, you start to lose it.

Max: The walls come in.

Sam: Yeah, the walls come in. Everything starts to get smaller. We wanted our experience from that to come to the screen. Belinda doesn't have a job at that moment. You really start to lose it then because you're like, 'What am I going to do?' Keeping it in one location really helps capture that.

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Sonya: Some of the scenes looked like paintings. Were there any particular artists that inspired those or was that mentioned in the short story?

Max: We have to give so much credit to our incredible cinematographer Ava Berkofsky. They were the one who unlocked the language, which was American Baroque. An artist that inspired us in that style was Andrew Wyeth. What we were trying to do was affect a kind of beauty in this horror and position somebody like Brandy in this baroque style painting that someone like Brandy wasn't traditionally in historically.

Sam: Andrew Wyeth painted a lot of Black subjects which was rare for that time period, early 20th Century.

Max: it was just the right tone that we were looking for. Also, in an attempt to be as honest as we could visually, we were very inspired by female surrealist painters – Dorothea Tanning, Leanora Carrington.

Sam: Méret Oppenheim.

Max: It was important to us to look at the visual landscape of female artists to try in some way to capture that eye.

Sonya: What was your most rewarding day on the set?

Sam: Lunchtime! I’m just kidding. Shout out to Carlos. Greatest on-set caterers ever!

Max: If the food wasn’t good, there were some days where a mutiny would have happened…!

Sam: The third dinner scene... We did a few different angles. That scene went very well. There was a lot of energy and fire behind everyone in those scenes.

Sonya: What are some of your favorite horror films?

Sam: I don't know if people call it a horror film but something that was a parallel inspiration for us was Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Just in terms of striking such a strange tone. Also, Rosemary's Baby.

Max: A lot of Polanski's films.

Sam: The Shining.

Max: Ever heard of The Witch? [laughs]

Sonya: Oh, yeah...! I think so! [laughs]

Max: There's a movie I saw late in life that's not a horror movie but is more terrifying than any horror movie. It's by Elem Klimov...Come and See. It's a story about WW II and the Holocaust. It's like Schindler's List, you've got to be in the right frame of mind to watch it.

Sonya: How does your brother inspire you?

Max: Even when we were painted head to toe in grey in body paint as gargoyles…he’s inspired us forever.

Sam: His utter commitment to the craft. It has to be perfect. That’s what we strive for too. He is steeped in knowledge about everything, especially at this point, having a few films under his belt. He's always been, when it comes to art, a good guiding star about making things as good as possible.

Sonya: Do you feel like your next movie will be horror? Do you lean towards that genre? Or are you open to all genres?

Max: We love every kind of movie. But, and maybe this is stealing from Rob a bit, there's something about the way we grew up in New England, surrounded by such history and authors like Poe and Hawthorne…there's an urge to that. It feels natural. Whatever we do, like The Front Room, we’re not going to be afraid for it to be enjoyable, if not funny. I hope that there's pleasure in these horrors.

Sam: I do want to do a musical at some point. That’s very different from horror but also in my mind very similar. You can do a lot of things with horror and a lot with musicals.

The Front Room hits theaters on September 6, 2024.