The Seeding Director Barnaby Clay Psychoanalyzes His Horror Film with Us

Horror films are often highly allegorical, from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Us, offering filmmakers ways to channel different social, political, or emotional issues in entertaining ways. The new horror thriller The Seeding seems like it did exactly this for writer-director Barnaby Clay, manifesting elements of his subconscious (and the collective unconscious, for that matter) into a harrowing survival film.

Of course, like any work with the subconscious, the process wasn’t always literal, but it’s fascinating to reverse engineer the film and see how different pieces fit together. Clay experienced a heavy period of life events, from the death of his father to his wife’s pregnancy and the birth of his first child, all of which filtered into the writing process of The Seeding like a slow-drip.

The film follows a solitary man who gets lost in the desert canyons of Utah before discovering a strange woman living in an isolated pit surrounded by walls of rock. Soon, he’s trapped in the pit with her, tormented by strange young men who keep them barely alive by sending down goods and supplies when they aren’t mocking and torturing them. Any Lacanian or Freudian would have a field day psychoanalyzing The Seeding with Barnaby Clay, but we did our best. Check out the interview below and the video above.

The Seeding’s Primal Fears

It’s fun to pick apart the plot of The Seeding and isolate how it allegorizes the primal male fear of women and childbirth, along with the sticky oddness of human nature and the trauma of birth and death. A man forced into domestication with a woman, with surreal, evil children taunting him throughout — the fear of fatherhood and emasculation, personified. We asked Clay if the process of writing and creating The Seeding addressed any of these admittedly subconscious concepts.

“I don’t know whether it addressed it,” said Clay. “But I think when you bring these things out in your art, so to speak, just by doing that, you’re addressing it and you are sort of dealing with it. It’s funny because I was writing it in that position, in that situation where my wife was pregnant. And when she had a baby and I was writing this stuff, I wasn’t conscious of, ‘This is what I’m going to write about.’ It’s not really happening like that. It was more just like you realize that there are certain parallels which are popping up on the page, and that’s just running out of your subconscious basically […] It generally seeps into the work.”

“Also, when you are in that situation, facing parenthood for the first time — also, about maybe three or four years before, my father had died,” added Clay, who continued:

“So, birth and death, these are the two times which are like the most real moments of a person’s life. When you experience that, they’re also really surreal as well on a practical level. They are both things that kind of switch on certain light bulbs, which are kind of very deep, primal feelings you suddenly become aware of, you suddenly start looking at things in a much larger way. Which is really kind of great as well, and then you slowly, as time goes on, you slowly go back to your kind of narrow daily life viewpoint. But occasionally, you get pulled out of it.”

However allegorical The Seeding may be, though, it was important for Clay to keep things grounded, something which is aided phenomenally by the performances of Scott Haze and a perfect Kate Lyn Sheil. It had to feel real, no matter how much of a microcosm it may be. “With the whole story, actually, I was very conscious when I was writing it to make every decision and every action feel like it could actually be that way in reality.” He added:

“Occasionally I would write something and think, ‘This is insane. This would never happen.’ But then I would read something in the news about some man who kept three children in the basement for a year and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is America, crazy stuff happens.’ So there’s always this decision-making process when you’re writing, and that goes into the characters as well. Like, what would this person do?”

Barnaby Clay’s Woman in the Dunes

If you’re a fan of Japanese New Wave cinema, you may recognize elements of The Seeding. While thematically and aesthetically very different, the narrative kernel of the film is highly reminiscent of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 masterpiece, Woman in the Dunes, where a man becomes trapped in a pit with a mysterious woman who has built a home and life there. That film’s psychosexual themes and exploration of cultural repression is a long way from The Seeding, but it’s important to note the film.

Furthering the psychological connection between The Seeding and Clay’s personal experiences of marriage and fatherhood, it turns out that Woman in the Dunes made for one of the first date nights between Clay and his wife, legendary musician Karen Lee Orzolek (Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs). So, of course the foundational storyline of the film would inspire Clay’s allegorical film.

“I will certainly bring that up as a reference because, obviously, it’s a favorite of mine as well. I mean, I’m a big fan of both the film and the book, and I was fascinated by that film when I first saw it. In fact, I think it was the first date film I had with my wife, funnily enough, which is a really weird, crazy date movie,” explained Clay.

So it was an important film for me, but at the same time, it’s like a perfect film. Even though a lot of people haven’t seen it and stuff, I just feel like it would never need a remake or anything, like a Western remake. But I loved the premise of it, and when I was trying to get this film together, I was thinking about ways to contain a story, and that came to mind.

“And then some years later, when my wife was pregnant, that was when the idea came together,” continued the filmmaker. “And I just said, ‘Well, maybe there’s a way I can marry these two things and do it in a way that feels like it honors that, but is a different film at the same time, and I can move it in a direction which is far enough away that they’re two separate entities.’ I mean, I’m inspired by so many different types of movies, but that’s the most obvious one.”

Scott Haze and Kate Lyn Sheil

Scott Haze is excellent as the protagonist of The Seeding, and his performance is an abstract study in pain and fear. “I didn’t want to give a lot away about his life. I tend to favor films that kind of drop into somebody’s life, and you learn about them through their actions, as opposed to them telling you a bunch of backstory. And I also wanted to make him somebody who, even though he’s the protagonist, was not necessarily the nicest guy as well. He’s not like a terrible guy, but he’s just, you know…” said Clay, trailing off.

As abstract as they may be, the two main characters in the canyons here do the heavy lifting of engaging the viewer and keeping the stakes high. We care about their fate because they are interesting, complex characters played by great actors.

“I saw [Scott’s character] as somebody who, back home in his previous life, spent a lot of time actually trying to get away from people, and was socially withdrawn. And so it’s ironic that he ends up being in the situation where he is, forced to be away from people, and that he kind of wants to go back. But then he starts to kind of think, ‘What is it that I’m really trying to get back to?'” explained Clay. When it came to Sheil’s character, Clay knew what he wanted:

“With her, again, the obvious way is to make her this kind of feral wild woman down there. But then I just thought, well sure, she could have gone feral down there, but maybe she couldn’t. Maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe her actual instincts are to be kind of like her version of normal, and to learn and be curious. She doesn’t have to be feral. She could still have a good brain and want to learn, and she could still be pretty and communicative and care about things.”

“And that goes through her character,” continued Clay. “Even the house that she lives in, it’s a shack which has been put together out of stuff that has been discarded in the desert and dragged over and thrown over the edge and put in the house, but at the same time, she takes care of it. She looks after it. She cares about her appearance. She cleans herself at night. She doesn’t want to smell. Obviously, it also works better on a level of entrapment if she is more alluring and she’s not just a kind of wild beast. Scott’s character spends enough time with her that he begins to view her with a different mindset.”

Related: 9 Terrifying Horror Movies about Pregnancy

Coincidentally, Sheil herself just had a child as well, a kind of cinematic happenstance that’s perfect for The Seeding. “Well, actually, she didn’t get pregnant until after the film,” said Clay. “So it was funny because when we were shooting scenes with her and this child, it felt like there was a slight awkwardness there, that she wasn’t really used to that. She asked me a lot about parenting from my side, but she didn’t really talk about it on her side. She’s quite a private person as well.” He added:

But it’s interesting because the film premiered at Tribeca, and the day that it premiered was the exact date the baby was due. It wasn’t the day that her baby was born, but it was the day that her baby was due. She had a girl, so it was just such a crazy coincidence. I always told her that she should bring her baby along to one of the screenings to make it kind of an immersive experience.

Related: The Seeding Review | Freudian Horror Film Delivers Death in the Desert

Tristan Bechet and Karen O’s Score for The Seeding

As if The Seeding wasn’t personal enough, the score was created by Clay’s cousin, Tristan Bechet, with an original song by Karen O, a melancholic lullaby. Bechet’s score is phenomenal here, sounding like the industrial nightmares of the metallic shed where the characters are forced to make a home.

“We’ve worked together many times in the past, and I just knew when I was writing this that there was nobody else who I thought about,” explained Clay. “This is Tristan in his wheelhouse. He comes from an industrial noise music background. And he is, sometimes to a fault, left field. He approaches something, and he’s just like, ‘This is the way that you people do it, but I’m gonna do it this way.’ That’s his thing. And I love that attitude. I really want to push that attitude and just explore the different routes and try and do something different.”

“He was working with these giant springs from the suspension of trucks, where you hit these springs, and he went and recorded this collection of sounds and then started putting them together into something a little bit more melodic,” continued Clay, who added:

We had maybe 20 pieces of music before we even began casting the film, which was great. Once the film was cast with Kate and Scott, one of the first things I did was send them five pieces of music, and also the same with the crew as well. I sent it to my DP, sent it to my production designer, and was like, ‘Listen to this. This is the world. Here’s the script. Here’s the sound.’

“[Tristan] can conjure a sense of dread and foreboding like nobody else, and it just sounds unique. But then I also knew I wanted to temper that with something warm and beautiful and mothering,” added Clay. “My wife has a unique talent, where she can just get to the emotional core very easily. It’s not easy, but she can just get that. And so, I knew that she would be able to give me a piece of music. The score without that is an industrial noise score, but when you add that in there, it just brings this balance which is so needed and it also is so warm and kind of acoustic. It just felt so right, basically.”

Indeed, it does. You can find information about purchasing The Seeding score here when available. From Magnet Releasing, The Seeding will be available in select theaters Jan. 26 and also on digital platforms through the link below:

Watch The Seeding