Out of Darkness’ director set a god-tier difficulty level for his debut horror movie

polygon.com:

“Never work with children or animals,” goes the old showbiz adage. First-time filmmaker Andrew Cumming technically abided by that wisdom… though “creature feature set in the Stone Age” might soon belong on the avoid-for-your-own-sanity list.

Set 45,000 years ago and staged across the Scottish Highlands, Out of Darkness follows six prehistoric humans who wash ashore in a new world, in search of an evolved future. Cumming, Ruth Greenberg, and Oliver Kassman wrote the script in an entirely fictitious language called Tola, with a story that has the group’s immediate survival efforts threatened by something lurking in the shadows. As the patriarchal society’s leaders fall, a young woman, Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green), confronts the threat herself. With thick atmosphere and enough on its mind to imbue familiar horror tropes with much-needed specificity, Cumming’s directorial debut is the kickoff to a promising career. But making the film wasn’t easy.

With Out of Darkness out in theaters, I spoke to Cumming about taking a big swing and sticking to his guns, in spite of the many raised eyebrows he encountered over the movie’s years of development.

Out of Darkness has been a journey. How many years ago did you start work on it?

We put pen to paper in September 2015. That was when we first committed words to sentences about the subject matter.

This is your directorial debut. Very few people start out by making a prehistoric horror movie. Did it feel like a risk? Does it still?

It brings me comfort now, but not at the time, because there wasn’t really a template. A lot of debuts, you can go, “OK, I see that this is a contemporary drama,” or “It’s a sort of comedy thriller” — you can see what it is. But then when we were pitching this film, we said, “Oh, it’s a bit like Alien. But it’s also a bit like The Hills Have Eyes. Also, The Witch?” So you’re borrowing percentages from all these different films and making this Frankenstein’s monster, and then going “Oh by the way, it’s