What comes at night? Hitting new horror heights, ‘Krisha’ director probes the darkness within good people

He’s earned critical raves and the backing of the hottest upstart distributor in town, but lately “Krisha” filmmaker Trey Edward Shults has been plagued by nightmares over the release of his new film, “It Comes at Night.”

“At night is when my brain gets active. It’s when my insecurities and my fears come, and I’m in my own head,” says Shults, 28, sitting inside a Hollywood mixing studio days before A24 opens his sophomore feature. “Night,” an unflinching piece of postapocalyptic psychological horror, has garnered significantly better reviews than its opening weekend rival, Universal’s bland “Mummy” reboot starring Tom Cruise.

“I see people expecting a monster movie and hating it,” he shrugs with a half-smile, quoting moviegoers who might come in expecting fanged creatures in the woods, a horde of zombies, or some terror-inducing killer in the shadows. “‘What comes at night? Where’s the monster?’”

The fear that drives “It Comes at Night” is far deeper and more insidious than mere monsters. On paper it reads as horror catnip, perhaps the antithesis of a domestic drama like Shults’ debut film, “Krisha”: After a mysterious viral outbreak turns humanity against itself, a trio of outbreak survivors (led by shotgun-toting papa Joel Edgerton) warily welcome strangers into their remote homestead in the woods.

Like “Krisha,” the award-winning $30,000 indie debut that starred Shults’ own aunt Krisha Fairchild as a black sheep home for the holidays, “It Comes at Night” is a terrifying take on family tensions pushed to the brink. Edgerton, Christopher Abbott, Carmen Ejogo, Riley Keough, and newcomer Kelvin Harrison Jr. star in the claustrophobic thriller, a horror movie not about the evils that lurk outside, but those that lie within.

Shults’ films have more in common than you might think. Both share intensely personal ties to the filmmaker’s own life, a probing preoccupation with filial trauma and guilt, and the visceral sensibility he conveys using film to explore difficult emotional terrain.

Shults speaks in a low baritone, engaging and open, easy with a laugh despite the heavy subject matter. His mother and stepfather are both therapists, he explains. It’s probably why the two films he’s made so far feel like cinema as therapy.

“It Comes at Night” opens on Ejogo’s Sarah bidding tearful goodbye to her infected father, his body racked with symptoms of the sickness that’s annihilated the outside world. Her husband Paul (Edgerton) and 17-year-old son Travis (Harrison) cart him away in a wheelbarrow and dump him in a grave before Paul puts a bullet in his brain and sets the body on fire.

The scene was inspired by a real moment Shults had with his biological dad, from whom he was estranged for a decade. “A lot of our relationship went into ‘Krisha,’ because he battled with addiction. His life was good for a while but then it went off the rails and I felt I had to cut off our relationship.”

He visited his father as he succumbed to pancreatic cancer, a moment Shults calls one of his most traumatic experiences. “He was so full of regret for everything that he did, and I was trying to help him find peace,” he says. “It was the closest I had ever come to death.”

“It Comes at Night” was born of processing that trauma. “It started with that opening scene where she’s talking to her dad — that’s what I was saying to mine. It came down to the word ‘regret,’ the regret he felt. I think regret is a huge part of this movie.”

He searches to explain the headspace he was in when he wrote “It Comes at Night,” going from his father’s death to reading books on genocide and human behavior, mulling humankind’s disposition toward tribalism and violent self-defense.

Between being kicked out of flight attendant school and picking up a dream job working for filmmaker Terrence Malick, an auspicious start to his film career, he’d also done work for a family member he describes as a survivalist “prepper,” helping them reinforce their home in the event of unforeseeable calamity.

Bits of all of this find their way into “Night,” in how teenager Travis, navigating his own burgeoning curiosities, hopes, and desires, quietly wrestles with the decisions his parents make in the name of protecting their own. Shults admits there’s a lot of him in Travis and his own stepfather in Edgerton’s Paul.

“There are worse things than death,” he says. “Worse is losing your humanity, and that is 100% the struggle I had with my stepdad. He’s told me, ‘I’m not wired like your mom; I’ll do whatever I have to do, for my family.’ I battled with myself over if he was crazy or not. What Joel says in the movie — ‘You can’t trust anybody but family’ — he’s said to me my whole life.”

His first draft spilled out in three days. Shortly thereafter he rewrote and then finally shot the “Krisha” feature he’d been trying to make for years, keeping the script for “It Comes at Night” in his back pocket. “Krisha” premiered at SXSW in the spring of 2015 and became an indie darling, nabbing the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award before playing the Cannes Film Festival. A24, the company behind “Moonlight” and “Ex Machina,” swept in to acquire the film for distribution and signed on to make what Shults had next.

After the microbudgeted debut he filmed in his family home, “It Comes at Night” marks a major leap to bona fide filmmaking for Shults, who found himself working with seasoned producers, a bigger crew, a budget just under $5 million, and actors he’s not related to.

Edgerton had just finished “Loving” when he signed on to star and executive produce, enticed to the project after watching “Krisha.” “It’s masterful in that it was able to elicit such terror out of a kitchen-sink drama,” Edgerton says by phone. “The idea that he could turn family Thanksgiving into a terrifying day, where the threat of something looming underpins that whole film — that he could turn someone cooking a turkey into a sequence that is cinematically dreadful.”

The sense of slow-building anxiety creeps through “It Comes at Night” in subtle moments between actors and haunting lensing by “Krisha” cinematographer Drew Daniels.

The camera floats, disembodied, down darkened hallways that loom with their own secrets, to the basement door ominously painted crimson. It dances around Edgerton and Abbott in the stark daylight of an interrogation scene, one of the film’s tricky one-take shots captured in the woods of New York’s Hudson River Valley.

Shults knows what he wants, his producers say of the conviction of his vision. And they hope viewers find relevance in the film’s underlying parallels to today’s increasingly fraught social climate.

Producers David Kaplan (“It Follows”) and Andrea Roa (“Tramps”) remember being struck by that relevance while watching an early cut the day after the presidential election. “We both found it a bit cathartic, to watch the movie under those conditions,” said Kaplan. “It is about people making decisions under duress, and making decisions from a place of fear, and how that can spiral out of control.”

Edgerton points to parallels between the characters’ desperate trajectory and America’s immigration policies.

“It feels like this microcosm of a refugee story,” he says. “Here you have a house that could represent a country, and a family that could represent the people that live in that country, questioning whether to invite other people in. We are the family that holds the keys.”

Shults can’t deny there’s an unintentional timeliness to the streak of isolationist paranoia that runs through the film, which he wrote before the election while living between Texas and Florida, when talk of Trump’s proposed border wall dominated headlines.

“I thought he was a joke, that he wasn’t going to win,” Shults shakes his head. “It was weird to be working on the movie and editing the movie and see it reflect things that were happening in the world.”

He’s worked almost nonstop since shooting wrapped last September, hurtling through the editing process. At an early test screening he broke down in tears, exhausted, and was comforted by his friend and now fellow standard bearer of new American indie horror, “The Witch” director Robert Eggers, with whom he grew close while hitting the film festival circuit with “Krisha.”

“He was sitting by me and said, ‘Whatever you’re channeling, it’s OK,’” Shults recalls. Even the recent nightmare Shults had subconsciously tied his various career and life anxieties into one haunting vision.

In it, he remembers, he was told he had cancer and only one week to live. His dream self realized he didn’t have enough time to finish the script he’s working on and asked a friend to carry out his vision after he’s gone: “I said, ‘Here — will you make this or share it or something?’”

As for the new script, it’s a story involving a family dealing with tragedy that has elements of “Krisha” and “It Comes at Night.” He wants it to “flow like a piece of music, like ‘Goodfellas’ or ‘Boogie Nights’ or ‘Dazed and Confused.’” And of course, it is a personal tale — one with a tragedy at its center “and a spiral down to hate and upward into love that follows,” he says. “It’s my baby. It means everything to me.”

Relief will come soon, now that “It Comes at Night” is out. Maybe. “All I wanted for months was for the movie to be done and to rest,” laughs Shults, who lives in Orlando. “And then I’m home for four days and I start getting antsy that I’m not doing enough.”

jen.yamato@latimes.com

@jenyamato

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