Joseph Kahn attends the premiere of Ick during the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, on Sept. 7.Jemal Countess/Getty Images
It might sound like film-festival-induced hyperbole, but there is simply no filmmaker working today with the brain-rearranging energy of Joseph Kahn. Even though the Korean-American director is shamefully not yet a household name, you most definitely have unknowingly seen the spread of Kahn’s stylistic influence across mediums and genres, including his music-video work (Taylor Swift, Mariah Carey, Lady Gaga).
Working in a mode that some – like the Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness programmer Peter Kuplowsky – have dubbed “hyper-maximalism,” Kahn’s music videos and movies never stay still, throwing audiences into aggressively stylized worlds that are overflowing with neon-bright pop-culture allusions. To watch a Kahn movie – such as the deeply misunderstood 2004 Fast & Furious riff Torque, or the 2011 hybrid slasher-John Hughes homage Detention, whose breakneck momentum and desire to overwhelm the screen with intertextual ephemera presaged today’s dominating TikTok aesthetic – is to become punch-drunk on the magic of the movies.
Now, Kahn is back with the exhilarating horror-comedy Ick, his first film in six long years after debuting his politically incorrect (what might today be dubbed “anti-woke”) hip-hop satire Bodied at TIFF in 2017. Kahn’s new movie, which stars Brandon Routh (Superman Returns) as a small-town high-school science teacher fighting off an invading extraterrestrial anomaly, is an eye-grabbing ride of bloody mayhem, soundtracked by an early-2000s selection of pop rock that will infect your brain worse than the title goo.
The day after Ick made its world premiere at TIFF, Kahn spoke with The Globe and Mail about his gorgeously goopy new film.
You said at the world premiere that Ick arrived “dripping wet” in Toronto, with you only finishing it the day before.
That part was a little hyperbole – I’d been looking at the sound and visuals for a while. This took six years to make, and we were in postproduction for a year. But my general process is that I will tweak something until the very last minute. I could have delivered this two weeks ago, but we got to Canada and pieced it together.
And last night was the first time you actually saw it?
It backfired on me a little bit, because the [Royal Alexandra] theatre is so strange. It’s not a box, like a movie theatre – and now I realize why cinemas are designed that way, so that sound can bounce around the same way everywhere. There’s one sweet spot in the Royal Alex, and when you have a film like this that’s so auditory and dense, it’s hard. I’m talking now about remixing it.
Ick is very much in dialogue with your previous films – that hyper-maximalism approach. Where does that style begin for you, when starting a project?
I have a theory of film that I now call “participatory geometry.” When you have different camera angles, you’re not just offering audiences different perspectives or somewhere to look at, but different subjectivity. When I think about sequencing a film, I want to predict where the audience’s heads are going to turn next, like a chess move. And then I can pin them down.
That sounds challenging to shoot, on a practical level.
I previsualize everything, but if I had to shoot it all in one take, you’d never get it done. I shoot in pieces, which is why I’m highly reliant on good actors. If you are able to shoot one line out of a paragraph at a time, then it becomes that much more of a craft for actors.
On that note, Brandon has a real Bruce Campbell hero vibe here – he hasn’t had such a great showcase since 2006′s Superman Returns.
It’s not just me saying this as fan service, but Brandon was a great Superman because he was a great Clark Kent. Christopher Reeve was from New Jersey, and had that East Coast thing going for him. Brandon is from Iowa, a genuine Midwest Kansas boy. He’s goofy, there’s something likeable about him. But he also has a lot of emotional depth. He can cry on a dime, just like that. His wholesomeness is important, because we’re not making a horror movie. It’s more an eighties throwback movie, like Gremlins.
You’ve been working on this for six years, ever since Bodied. What was the process like?
There were positives and negatives with Bodied. There were those who went in and realized it was a satire, and those battle rap fans who wanted a street story, who hated it. So for my next movie, I thought what would I personally want to see? There’s a magic to movies that’s missing now. We’re in an era of exchange for service. The marketing is so intense, there are so many things out there, and audiences have been trained to not give money to movies – streaming feels free. Audiences are spoiled on a level like never before. So now every studio goes out and says this is the genre – it’s a horror movie, you’ll get scared, there’s a serial killer in it. It’s like ordering a hamburger: you know what you’re going to get.
It feels like it extends to film festivals, too: You get prestige drama where you’re going to cry …
If you watch this movie and expect a hamburger exchange, like, “Joseph is promising me a horror movie and gave me this weird thing,” you’ll be disappointed. But if you have an open mind, give me your trust, there might be a good exchange.
Audiences who know your work already have that promise of a “Joseph Kahn” movie in mind. But it must be a challenge to increase that exposure …
I truly believe in the audience. I don’t think they’re this way because they’re stupid. It’s because they’ve been taught. And I’m this weird samurai who used to have a master and my ways are different than everyone else’s. But I’m still practising my craft. I will try to my dying last breath to make these things. Until someone stabs me.