hough DARK WATER marks his first foray into mystery and horror, Walter Salles has long been fascinated with the cinematic exploration of fear—and especially admires the master directors who blazed the trail before him. “I’ve always been interested in the early films of Roman Polanski and other New Wave directors that deal with the most primal questions of mortality, of urban alienation, of abandonment and solitude,” he says. “What has always been most interesting about ghost stories to me is that they bring into question our own human limits and our desire to believe that after the end of our lives, there is more than just oblivion.”
He continues: “So when I read Rafael Yglesias’ script I was quite taken with how it seemed to rise above the horror genre much like those early Polanski films. I like films that go beyond genre, that seem to pertain to a genre yet take you somewhere else, and this story seemed to do that. I was touched by the characters and especially by the mother-daughter relationship that is the very core of the story. And I saw it very much as a story about loss and how it can be transcended.”
In exploring the nature of fear as a primal human emotion, Salles put his emphasis on the idea that the most unshakable chills and surprises are generated more from inside the mind— where our own personal demons and childhood terrors still lurk—rather than from more obvious external events. “I feel that many recent horror films are simply too direct in their approach,” observes Salles. “I’m more interested in the kind of film where what you feel is more important than what you hear and what you see, where things aren’t overexplained, and questions are left hanging.”
In addition to citing Polanski, Kubrick and Hitchcock as influences, Salles was also knowledgeable about Japanese horror films before he took on DARK WATER. Having made a Brazilian documentary on the conflict between tradition and modernity in Japan, he had a firsthand introduction to the work of directors such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa or Hideo Nakata. “This new wave of Japanese horror films, influenced by Alfred Hitchcock and Theodore Dreyer, have been exploring some very interesting themes.”
One of those themes is a key element that can be found at the heart of many of cinema’s most potent horror-thrillers: the theme of childhood and the child’s ability to be both more accepting and fearless than adults even when faced with the most horrifying and inexplicable of mysteries. Says Salles: “Every single character in DARK WATER has psychological barriers that prevent them from moving forward, from transcending their surroundings— everyone except for young Ceci. A child doesn’t have those imprints from a whole life, that sense of limits and barriers that comes with growing up. There are no social impositions that have crystallized yet, so they are much more accepting, much more free than the average adult. Yet the one thing children do seem to have is an innate sense of justice, of what is fair and what is not.”
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