In IT’S A WONDERFUL KNIFE, a year after saving her town from a psychotic killer on Christmas Eve, Winnie Carruthers’ life is less than wonderful – but when she wishes she’d never been born, she finds herself in a nightmare parallel universe and discovers that without her, things could be much, much worse. Now the killer is back, and she must team up with the town misfit to identify the killer and get back to her own reality.

For the upcoming release of IT’S A WONDERFUL KNIFE, Nightmarish Conjurings’ Shannon McGrew spoke with director Tyler MacIntyre (Tragedy Girls, V/H/S/99) and writer/producer Michael Kennedy (Freaky). During their chat, they discussed everything from how the story has evolved from the first draft to the screen, designing the distinct look of the killer in the film, and how casting shaped the characters organically.

Thank you both so much for speaking with me today! To kick things off, what inspired the concept of IT’S A WONDERFUL KNIFE, and how much did the story evolve from the first draft to where it is now?

Michael Kennedy: This was born out of my desire to do a Christmas slasher. I loved Freaky in every way. I loved writing that script with Chris. I loved being on set. I loved watching him work. I loved the cast. The whole experience was so great. When I wanted to sit down and write a Christmas movie, I said, what’s something that already exists that I can slasher-fy and that’s where IT’S A WONDERFUL KNIFE came to.

By not doing a beat-by-beat remake, essentially, I found my own story in it and I really felt that was the time to see if I could get producers and stuff on board. Things changed a lot from the beginning to the end, but I think a lot of it was less about the story and people’s thoughts and more about logistics, time, and money. There were some story changes and stuff because when Tyler came in, he had some really great thoughts that we implemented into the script. There were really great notes from producers and stuff and even the actors too. I’m really proud of the movie in the sense that it’s very close at least structurally and, from a story format, pretty much the original idea.

For you Tyler, what was the process like in bringing Michael’s script to life on the big screen? 

Tyler MacIntyre: It was definitely well-formed by the time I got there in terms of the concept being bulletproof and usually that’s not always the case. When I’m looking for things to come in on as a director that I’m not rewriting or don’t intend to have much of a hand in rewriting it becomes about feeling out the collaborators and feeling out how can you make these tweaks because you’re not trying to overhaul it. As a result of that, I always look for things that are not really like the things that I would write.

What I liked about this is it allowed me to use some of the tricks that I had in my kit already but at the same time it has a bit of a perspective to it. It’s a much more uplifting positive worldview than some of the stuff that I’ve done and that was attractive. Can I tell a story that kind of plays it straight like that and what can I bring to that? I would say that the development was more about shaping the type of satire and figuring out where the overlap is and then trying to maximize the set pieces and the scares and the kills and things like that. Once we started finding the cast, we started writing a little bit towards their sensibilities. That’s the fun of it getting to actually filmmake and then find other filmmakers, screenwriters, producers, and actors and bring them into the process because this is a collaboration. I want people to be confident in what they’re bringing in because that’s how you get the best of them.

Tyler MacIntyre: Justin came in with big ideas about how that character should be and that was awesome because he was just a fountain of ideas. We talked about references to these smarmy characters like Michael Douglas in Wall Street, that sort of baby boomer-type a**hole who is kind of corporate. Justin also had a soft-spoken kind of approach to it and it became about shaping those ideas. He had a very specific way he wanted to look and I wanted to try and shape the performance that he’s most excited to give. My approach to that was finding out what would be too much and backing off of it a touch. Christmas movies are a bit of a fable. You can have a more outlandish kind of villain to it whose heart fails to grow three sizes and that’s fun. He ended up having such a supernatural amount of energy to introduce into this story and it was the right type of evil for what we needed.

The rest of the cast was a bit more surgical. I’m very careful about the type of energies that are bouncing off of people. At the time, Michael was quite involved with producing the project so we were watching all the tapes together. I did as many in-person callbacks as I could but I have a relatively abnormal callback process in that they’re just conversations. I don’t need people to come in and re-read the scenes and stuff like that. It’s just more about feeling out who they are as people and then shaping the character to the truth that they’re bringing.

We got fortunate when it came to filling out the rest of the cast with some great peripheral characters like [horror icon] Katharine Isabelle and having her be a firecracker character. Even people like Joel McHale, who’s doing a performance he doesn’t normally do, and even people like William B. Davis and Sean Depner. Some of my favorite comedic moments are all coming from Sean with Justin. If you’re going to put a local actor in a scene with Justin Long, you’re not expecting them to go step for step keeping up comedically. There’s a lot of good talent up there and it was great to find Sean.

Michael Kennedy: The casting of Sean actually came before Justin. When we cast Sean, the role was actually like a 20-21-year-old boyfriend of Everlyn Waters (Sydney Scotia) when the villain was a woman. The villain changed a lot in the script from when it was initially a 60-year-old. It was a hard role to cast because it kept changing and we kept trying to find the right person. When Sean came on board, the script still had Evelyn Waters as the villain and she was in her forties and Buck was her boy-toy. When we cast Sean as Buck we were like, Sean looks 30 even though he plays a 16-year-old on Riverdale [Laughs]. We all loved him for the part of Buck and then someone… I can’t remember who it was, it might have been you Tyler…

Tyler MacIntyre: He was supposed to be a couple of years older than the high school kids and we ended up loving him so much that we rewrote the script to keep him.

Michael Kennedy: It was either change the character or he wouldn’t get the part because he looked too old. It ended up working cause we changed the age of the character which then informed okay, now he’s 30. Then we needed to go back to the character of Henry Waters, played by Justin Long, and maybe they’re brothers now instead of a father and son situation we had at one point. We liked the Evelyn character so much that even though we had to pair the role down, we still wanted her presence to be in there. Sydney Scotia, who did the movie and only has like four lines, is so f***ing good. If we ever get to make a sequel to this, I can’t wait to give her so much more to do.

Tyler MacIntyre: I was really happy with the ensemble we had. In a movie this tight running time-wise it’s like, oh man, these people are so good but we don’t quite have enough for someone to do. I’d rather have that problem than the opposite problem.

One of my favorite scenes in IT’S A WONDERFUL KNIFE takes place in a theater with a strobe technique that gives the audience only glimpses of the horror taking place. What was the process like in both writing and executing that scene? 

Michael Kennedy: The scene as written was similar in the sense that I knew I wanted this fake-out situation where the trio would essentially be luring the killer to the theater. In fact, one part of the draft, when we weren’t worried about budget or anything, was this whole sequence where Winnie (Jane Widdop) and her aunts are wandering around town casually letting anyone within earshot know that they were going to be at the movie theater that night because they were trying to lure [the killer there]. With time, money, and budget, it started getting pared down. The fake-out with Darla (Zenia Marshall) and Robbie (Jason Fernandes) was there, and the lights going on were there, but it was more of a surprise sequence where there were no strobe effects.

Tyler MacIntyre: [We shot] in the Rio Theatre in Vancouver and we went there to scout pretty early on. I love that theater to death because a lot of my early projects played there. We went to scout there because it was only a couple of blocks from the production office. While in there, we asked for the house lights to go up and then all of a sudden the whole place goes dark and then it comes back up. Nicholas Piatnik, our cinematographer, and I look at each other and we’re like [surprised look].

Michael Kennedy: We also realized in that moment too there was a nice way to reincorporate Winnie’s camera into the proceedings in a way that you wouldn’t think about. The camera is such a piece of the character and so it became a really great way to pay off the camera because she uses it to help herself. That was all Tyler and Nick, and the way it was shot was really cool because we didn’t actually use a camera. It was a legit strobe light that someone made to look like a camera and stuff. It’s a pretty cool sequence.

Lastly, the visual aesthetics and atmosphere created around the presentation of the killer were superb, especially in regard to their attire. It says a lot about who you’re up against. How did the inspiration behind the killer’s outfit come to be? 

Tyler MacIntyre: In the script, there was a fair amount of description about it being a long white cloak with an ornate knife. We knew we were dealing with a lean and quick slasher, almost Ghostface style. With it being all white, that has a different set of challenges so we started looking at vintage tree toppers that were angels. They have these porcelain faces that are often very blank and so we thought, well, what if we blow that idea up and we make the killer look like a tree topper? Then it became apparent that he shouldn’t really have wings cause that’s really impractical, so how do we get that sort of vibe with the shoulders?

It was a process we worked on with our costume designer, Matea Pasaric, and our production designer, Tiana P. Gordon, to figure out the parameters of that and the knife/dagger which would have some kind of wings on it. We also wanted this very blank white texture and I sort of was going after a frosted light bulb kind of texture where you can look into it and all you see is the world around you. It was very fun to figure out how to do that but it was completely impractical because you couldn’t see jack shit out of that thing.

Michael Kennedy: When I sat down to write it, I knew I didn’t want Santa Claus and I knew if I didn’t completely describe the character in some way that someone would probably just go, it’s Santa Claus. And that has been done to death. I love it in Silent Night, Deadly Night and Christmas Evil and other stuff. I also wanted to evoke an image of Christmas and for me, it’s kind of a really f***ed up way to talk about how religion can be so deadly…

Tyler MacIntyre: He shot down my slasher Jesus idea [Laughs].

Michael Kennedy: When I described the killer in the script, he was called the angel from the beginning. It wasn’t referred to as the killer. It was the angel in every reference to the character. It was white head to toe and I think I even described the white gloves that he wears and even white boots, but it was really a basic description that they ran with. As far as the knife goes, I described it as a silver blade with a gold handle cause I wanted another angelic thing there, and production were the ones that were like, we’ll give the knife wings. When I saw both I was like, holy s***, this came out of almost thin air. There’s been kind of a modern renaissance of slashers, but only the old-school slashers have a look still and I feel like we kind of got trapped in people doing black hoodie masks and I knew that was something I wanted to avoid too. In Happy Death Day, it actually really works that he wears a black hoodie with a baby face mask because it’s so contrasting, but then it kind of became what everyone was copying.

Tyler MacIntyre: There’s a school swag kind of vibe to those black hoodies.

Michael Kennedy: I loved Totally Killer but I didn’t understand why he was wearing a black hoodie with that mask. I’m like you, Shannon, I feel like it’s part of the narrative. It’s part of the story. Michael Myers has the blank canvas and it works because it was the first one, but anyone that’s tried to duplicate it, it doesn’t work, you know? Scream works so well because it’s literally them looking at a mask that’s screaming back at them and then obviously becomes like a full-fledged character. Even with Urban Legend, I appreciated that they tried something.

IT’S A WONDERFUL KNIFE had its world premiere at Beyond Fest, which we reviewed here. IT’S A WONDERFUL KNIFE will be released only in theaters across the country on November 10th. IT’S A WONDERFUL KNIFE will stream on Shudder at a later date.

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Shannon McGrew

Founder/Co-Owner at Nightmarish Conjurings

Shannon is the Founder of Nightmarish Conjurings and a lover of all things horror and haunt related. When she's not obsessively collecting all things "Trick 'R Treat" related, or trying to convince everyone that "Hereditary" is one of the greatest horror films ever made, you can find her designing interiors for commercial restaurants. An avid haunt fan, Shannon spends the entire year visiting haunts and immersive experiences throughout the Southern California area and hopes to one day design her own haunted attraction.

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