‘Don’t Breathe’ Director Fede Alvarez Describes Following ‘Evil Dead’ And American Decline At SxSW 2016

After screening his new movie, Don’t Breathe, at SXSW, director Fede Alvarez fielded questions from the audience about his remarkable new horror thriller.

Don’t Breathe follow three young criminals as they intend to rob the house of a blind Iraq war veteran. When The Blind Man turns out to be less helpless than they had believed (and Stephen Lang, which should’ve been their first warning sign) the criminals find themselves fighting for their lives.

Not only is Don’t Breathe an unrelenting horror showcase, but it’s also a smaller, more intimate project from a director whose debut was about as ostentatious as jobs come in the horror world.

Alvarez made his feature length debut with Evil Dead, a remake of Sam Raimi’s horror classic produced by Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures production company. Though no one thought it was terrible, it was not received warmly by horror fans, who found a remake unnecessary (though it did well at the box office).

“Evil Dead was a different challenge because we had to honor other films and it wasn’t really our film,” Alvarez told SXSW audiences at the Alamo Drafthouse.

Alvarez hopes that Don’t Breathe will begin to establish a name for himself beyond the controversial remake. This made Don’t Breathe, his own creation (co-written with Rodo Sayagues), a more personal project.

“There are many things that can make a movie personal. For me, one of the things is comparing it to Evil Dead,” Alvarez said at the SXSW premiere. "Evil Dead is a movie that—even though I wrote and directed it—has so many other elements. It’s hard to say that film is my personal film.”

Alvarez was motivated by a desire to both come up with something new and prove his horror chops with his own story. “It’s about trying to come up with stuff you haven’t seen before,” Alvarez said.

Like any horror fan, he pillaged the past for his new monster. “The creative process for us is ripping off what we loved in the past.”

One of the elements that’s undeniably new in Don’t Breathe is a modern social consciousness, dramatizing the hardscrabble life of its Detroit teens in the ruins of an American city. Alvarez downplayed the political dimensions when asked about them by an attractive and insightful writer from iDigitalTimes. “Because we love Robocop,” was Alvarez’ primary stated reason for the decayed Detroit setting.

“I come from Montevideo in Uruguay, a third-world country where we always grew up with a sense of no future,” he said during the premiere. “It’s not something unique to where I come from. It happens in many, many different places. The characters in this movie, the reason I choose to tell the story of thieves and people who break into houses is because they want to break away from that reality.”

Alvarez emphasized that every generation has its “This city used to be the shit, now you’re fucked” mentality. In some ways he sees Don’t Breathe as reflecting that mentality for a country not used to economic decline.

“We all grew up with the feeling that it wouldn’t be as good as it was for the previous generation,” he said of his own generation in Uruguay.

Of course, there were also politically charged subjects touched on in the movie that Alvarez was less willing to talk about. “There’s all the gun shit,” he said, cutting a smirk for the Austin audience, “but I don’t want to get into it. Not in Texas.”