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Sharknado director Anthony C. Ferrante gets serious and scary with his new horror movie, Nix. Words Glenn Cochrane nthony C. Ferrante is the guy who gave us the Sharknado movies. Yet despite being an undisputed master of schlock, he’s also a seasoned filmmaker whose body of work encompasses an impressive array of genres. His latest film, Nix, is a complex horror story that incorporates mythology, psychological trauma, and the unrelenting pain of grief. To say it's far removed from the B-movie exploits of Sharknado is an understatement, and those who wish to pigeonhole him as a director of schlock would be very much mistaken Chatting with STACK over Zoom, Ferrante admits he’s always been a horror guy. “love horror. In fact, my first few films were very horrordriven until | did Sharknado and went totally bat-crap crazy,” he says wryly. “But | had been looking for a long time for a film that we could do that had a little bit more meaning behind it, and a little more depth.” That film is Nix, which tells of a family's tragedy while on vacation at a lake, and explores the aftermath of loss, as they are haunted by the events decades later. Steeped in Germanic folklore, the exploration of psychological trauma is as powerful as it is scary, Ferrante offers up a horrific experience that, while being a monster movie, is also firmly grounded in humanity. As with so many movies of the past few years, Nix was a product of the global pandemic, and although work had commenced prior to the outbreak, its impact on the story was immediate. “Originally it was a different mythology, MiSies Lee) ra aia koa and then COVID hit when we were about ready to shoot,” he says. "So | tabled it and redeveloped the movie. And during that time we started realising that we needed to dig deeper and needed to try harder to make something that resonated more. “We talked about stuff that was happening with our families, and we watched people deal with grief and addiction, and we thought, ‘What if we did something that people weren't expecting?’ "| did a little research and dug around for a really good mythology and | came across the Nyx, or the Nokken, or Nixie, which is a folklore creature that appears as half a face in the water. And | was just haunted by that image and fascinated by it. "The mythology of the Nyx beyond that is a water fairy.” he adds with amusement. “It's not that interesting, but the other thing that intrigued me was the way that ‘nix’ in German means ‘nothing'.” Ferrante is also acutely aware that Nix marks a return to themes that he’s explored in his previous work. “There's kind of a trilogy of films going on in my filmography. My first film was Boo, and there's a thriller | did called Forgotten Evil, and now Nix — they kind of all deal with the mindscape. And | think that | kind of perfected it with this movie in particular, and it definitely takes you on a mind journey.” He also facetiously offers his own comparison to further illustrate the story. “I describe it as Ordinary People meets Videodrome.” Adding with a gleeful smirk, “At its core it's an indie (D0 family drama with horrific elements to it” © jbhificom.au (UB HIFFT
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