‘Undertone’ Director Says Filming in His Childhood Home Helped Him Cope With Parents’ Deaths

Anyone who watches a trailer for “Undertone” can tell that the film will be a terrifying thrill ride. Ian Tuason’s debut feature — now hitting theaters via A24 in March — immerses audiences in a nightmare through chilling, immersive sound design. Critics have already hailed the film (which premiered at Fantasia International Film Festival and recently played again at Sundance Film Festival) as a profoundly scary feature.

What you might not know from first glance is how deeply personal Tuason’s horror debut really is.

“I didn’t have enough money to make anything else except for a one-location film, and that, to me, would only work as a horror,” Tuason said while sitting for TheWrap’s Sundance Interview Series in Park City. “Once I started developing it, I realized it was the perfect genre for what I was trying to say.”

Tuason started writing “Undertone,” which began as a radio play, back in 2018. The film would change radically, however, when tragedy struck Tuason in the early 2020s. At the start of the COVID pandemic, both of Tuason’s parents received terminal cancer diagnoses. With the pandemic ravaging medical clinics, Tuason said that “hospitals wouldn’t take them.”

So the filmmaker moved back to his childhood home in Rexdale (a neighborhood in Toronto) to care for his parents himself.

“My dad was kind of independent still, but my mom was dependent on me, and then I was just kind of watching her,” Tuason said. “I started thinking back to when I was a kid and I saw ‘The Exorcist,’ which is the scariest movie I’ve seen. I wanted to make something as scary, but I needed to find something to weaponize as ‘safe’ as a daughter at home. I couldn’t think of it until I saw my mom helpless.”

Months after their initial diagnosis, Tuason’s mother died. His father followed two years later.

During his caretaking, Tuason (who recently signed on to reboot the “Paranormal Activity” franchise) turned to creepypasta, a brand of online horror stories and legends that started gaining traction in the late oughts. The filmmaker soon thought he could use his horror radio play concept as an outline for the trauma happening in his home.

“My sick brain started thinking, ‘What if she started talking in a different voice? How scary would that be?’ Then I went back into the radio play and I was like, ‘OK, what’s Evy doing in between recording.'”

“Undertone” follows Nina Kiri as Evy, a paranormal podcaster who moves home to take care of her mother. Evy (the only character shown on-screen in the film) soon starts listening to a series of recordings of a couple experiencing their own haunting.

Tuason filmed the movie in his childhood home — the same house where he cared for both his dying parents.

“It was very personal to Ian — so sacred, because it’s like his full life on the line,” Kiri said. “Because he’s so vulnerable with his house, his story, there’s a feeling that you want to honor every detail. Never once did he say, ‘Don’t touch that,’ and we’re fully in his house.

“That’s such a free environment to begin from, and the wish to do a good job doesn’t come from someone else imposing that on you or imposing their ideas on you,” Kiri continued. “It’s just someone else being so completely open that you want to do everything justice. So it was very special.”

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