The Origin: a prehistoric horror with a modern-day message

The Origin is horror going back to its roots. That is: its palaeolithic roots.

A debut feature with teeth (and bones, and tusks), it’s set 45,000 years ago, in the primeval barrens of the land that would eventually become Britannia.

The first full-length film from Scottish director Andrew Cumming is the story of a community of newly emigrated human beings teetering on the edge of survival. As the tribe searches for shelter, running out of food and becoming increasingly vulnerable to the cold, tensions fray between leader Adem and the rest of his group, culminating in a terrifying climax as someone – or something – stalks them from the woods.

Yes, reductively, these are cavemen and women, in a horror that puts new meaning on ​“jumping out of their skins”. Appropriately, they don’t speak a language recognisable to us modern humans. Rather, these fur-wearing and spear-carrying ​“primitives” converse in Tola, a fictional prehistoric speech devised by poet, historian and multi-linguist Dr Daniel Andersson, with the dialogue translated into English subtitles. It is, explains, ​“loosely based on Basque, one of the oldest existing languages”.

It all adds to the otherworldly-but-still-relatable brilliance of The Origin, which was written by Ruth Greenberg.

Amplifying the production’s sense of being of this world but also out of it: the fact that filming started in a remote corner of the Scottish Highlands shortly before the imposition of the UK’s second national lockdown in November 2020.

“We were all hunkered down, in our bubble, getting tested two or three times a week,” Cumming says over Zoom from Glasgow, where he’s currently in pre-production on a new TV series from Jed Mercurio (Line of Duty). ​“We had to make do and mend. It was like a social experiment where we were told we had to make a film at the end of it. I used to DJ, so I took my decks with me and we had parties and stuff, tried to boost everybody’s morale. You know, we tried to make it fun.”

Did that isolation-within-isolation help in any way with the filming?

By and large, I think it felt like we all committed to something fairly bonkers, even if Covid hadn’t happened. But it felt like an extra level of camaraderie and bonding.

It helped with the direction, too, because it meant that we all had complete tunnel-vision about the film. Now, for people’s mental health, that’s not great – I certainly know it wasn’t great for mine at times. But also it just means that everyone’s just focused on this creative endeavour that we’ve got to achieve.

“Palaeolithic horror” isn’t a phrase we hear very often. How did that setting come about?

When I left film school I had a general meeting with the producer Oliver Kassman [Saint Maud]. He wanted to make a horror film about the palaeolithic era. Films previous to this – Quest for Fire, Clan of the Cave Bear, and then you go back to Raquel Welch and 10,000 BC – [are] all quite camp, and it’s all a bit ​“oogah boogah” acting. I just thought it’d be an interesting time period to work in.

You wanted to avoid ​“grunting caveman”-type acting, so much so that you invented your own language. How was that for the actors?

It was actually quite straightforward – they jumped into it from the audition stage. We gave them sides [of script] of Tola, and they all attacked it with real conviction. They also did a Zoom call with Daniel Andersson, the very clever individual who came up with the language. And then it was about them all being on set and just committing to it. It was actually much more straightforward than I thought it was going to be.

How important was historical accuracy?

We felt quite comfortable about the historical accuracy side of things because of the Archaeological Consultant we had, [palaeo-anthropologist] Dr Rob Dinnis. There’s some older-school [archaeologists] who say: ​“If we didn’t dig it out of the ground, we can’t prove it happened.” Whereas Rob’s from a much newer school. He said in our first meeting: ​“If we can do it, they could do it. They just had different methods of doing certain things.” That gave us room to tell a story without it becoming this historical reenactment.

What I kept saying to my heads of department was: ​“We’re not making a National Geographic documentary. This is still a fictional piece, and we’re going to use the research we want to use. But we’re also gonna bring things in from a contemporary standpoint.”

So it’s not just a (very, very long ago) period drama, as it were?

I wanted to make something that straddled the line between history and sci-fi. The themes of the movie – fear, cruelty, survival, them versus us – are never going away. As long as human beings are alive, this is what we do to each other. I like the idea that this film could be set in the ancient past, or it could be set in the distant future, and actually, nothing’s changed. Will anything [ever] change?

Although it’s set 45,000 years ago, the film is timeless in terms of horror aesthetics and character work, of being bloody scary and feeling bloody real. Was that balance something you wanted to capture?

Yeah. We were trying to tap into something that was a very human story, where you care about these characters and earn these scary moments. The horror movies I grew up with balance character work with being scary or grisly or gory. But ultimately it comes back to character, and characters are story. The rest of it is just pyrotechnics.

When we started talking about the idea of, ​“how do you even pitch a palaeolithic horror movie?”, The Witch had just dropped. So Robert Eggers cleared the way, because then people understood you can do period and horror and it not be cheesy. It can be sincere and steeped in historical accuracy. But also, hopefully, it can scare the bejeezus out of you.

How authentic were the costumes?

We don’t actually know what early humans wore entirely, because that stuff degrades. The thing I was really keen on was that they weren’t just wearing ill-fitting, repurposed cowskins. Archaeologists have found bone-needles, so these people were sewing and tailoring their clothes, so [I wanted to] have a tighter fitting aesthetic just to show that these people were cultured.

Are the times we live in affecting the way we tell horror stories, and the stories we want to tell?

The pandemic affected the shooting of the movie. When there was a lot of panic about the hoarding of toilet paper and pasta, even in a very basic way, a very British way, it was the ​“them and us” starting to form – although we started writing this long before anybody knew this thing was gonna happen.

But going back, whether it’s Trump’s America, Brexit Britain, 1930s Germany or the Reformation, we have a history of doing this to each other. We cleave off those that are different from us, alienate them and other them. So that was what we were feeling when we were writing the script.

This is very much a story of a community on the edge. How do you think this is going to speak to an audience in 2022?

The thesis of the film is about what humans are capable of, and how they can justify the most heinous behaviour under certain circumstances. I think today you can see the way that people are being demonised for being different.

In the whole time we were writing and shooting the movie it seemed like every other week there was another story about that othering. That’s something that happens in times of political and economic instability. People get afraid. ​“How do I pay my bills this month? Why have they got a job and I don’t?” It’s a very basic, primitive thing that happens to people at times like this. So I think that whatever community the audience is a part of, hopefully they see something in our story.

The history, and the horror, are very vivid on the screen. As someone born, raised and educated in the country, you know Scotland’s geography very well. How important was your location?

I can’t speak for the actors, but I think what it probably felt for them, too, is: is it felt real. Realer than real. When you’ve got the outfits on, you’re speaking in this fictional language, you’ve got your ivory spears and you’re looking at this [eviscerated] mammoth with tusks made out of polystyrene or whatever, there’s a tendency to feel exposed. Because we’re doing something that’s a bit different.

In those landscapes – the beauty and the ancient prehistory of the landscapes, when you’re feeling that cold and rain on your face – the actors didn’t have to do much acting. ​“What’s my motivation?” ​“You’re cold and hungry!” ​“Oh great! I can play that!”

That helped to give a verisimilitude to things, and make everyone think: this is a really grounded piece of work we’re doing. We’re not doing 10,000 BC.

The Origin screens on 8^th and 12^th October. Ticket info