THE DISTURBED: an interview with Conor McMahon

Interview w/ Conor McMahon – writer and director of THE DISTURBED

Alan Kelly

The making of Irish filmmaker Conor McMahon’s latest film The Disturbed was a little different to how a film would normally be made. He wanted to make a film and experiment with improvisation. McMahon had been attending acting classes during the year with Vinny Murphy and saw it as an interesting way to make a film without having to spend months sweating over a script. So the outline of the story was written quite quickly, taking only three weeks and only 25 pages long, and this is what McMahon and his small crew used to shoot the film. There was never a script as such and he never gave the outline of it in it’s entirety to the actors, so they were never really sure how the story was going to turn out. He just gave them enough to get them through each scene. They managed to shoot the film over five days and had only two other members on the crew. Gerry Mahony recorded the sound with Paul Ward producing and doing pretty much anything else which needed to be done. There was never a script as such so McMahon only issued an outline of the story to the actors, just enough to get them through each scene. He also shot and edited the film afterwards.

The plot goes a little like this: Clyde and Jed are all set for a fun weekend of torture and filmmaking in the countryside. It’s something they do every month. Their latest victim is Sarah, a young girl kidnapped on a drunken night out. As her two captors talk over a cup of tea, she slowly realises the horror of what lies ahead. McMahon also wrote and directed Dead Meat, Produced the Ed King short The Blaxorcist and a slasher film is currently in development called The Clown.



1. The Disturbed starts off w/ two snuff-movie enthusiasts abducting a girl and planning on filming her murder, for a while there there where lot of 'stylized snuff' doing the rounds in theatres. The Disturbed looks gory but it also has a supernatural twist. So it isn't your 'traditional' slasher film, what way would you describe it?

I wouldn't call this a slasher film as all. It's kind of a hard one to pin down, the closest I've come to describing it is Hostel meets the Blair Witch Project. But it also has alot of dark comedy in it too.

2. You're a horror film aficionada- your earlier work Dead Meat had Peter Jackson connotations and The Blaxorcist obviously had a nod or two to William Peter Blatty's Exorcist. What did you draw on for The Disturbed?

The style of the Disturbed is very different from anything I've done before. The style was sort of born out of a) the story, one of the characters uses a video camera to film the torture scenes, and b) because I was doing alot of improvisation with the actors it was easier to film it in more of a documentary style. I sort of approached it as a Dogma 95 horror film. In terms of films the influenced it, in essence this is a ghost story film but I didn't want to do the typical family arrive at the house with a little girl and weird stuff starts happening. I thought it might be more interesting if 2 guys arrive for the weekend, and as they unpack their gear we reveal there's a girl in the boot.

3. Where there many budget constraints making the film?

I came up with this idea so that I could specifically make the film for almost no money. So in that way, money was never really an issue. We just used what we had and made it work. There were one or two scenes that would have needed more money to make them work, so we just came up with a different way of doing it.

4. Was horror filmmaking always an area that you wanted to work in?

Yes, ever since I was a kid I've enjoyed making horror films. They're great fun to make. When I was a teenager we use to make a new horror film every few months. It's a little harder to do that now because developing a project takes so long. Making this film was a little like going back and making a film the way I use to. We had a very small crew, just two other people.

5. With Schrooms, Red Mist, Insatiable and The Disturbed. Horror seems to be getting either more backing from The Irish Film Board or have Irish talent involved somewhere. How much difficulty have you come up against, working in the film industry?
Well this film was funded by myself and because I didn't have a proper script going into the project I imagine it would have been hard to convince people to back it. I actually didn't even know if this film would even be feature length because the outline was so short. And because it was improvisation there was alot of the film that was discovered while we were shooting it, which I imagine would give most producers a nervous breakdown.

I think the film board have definitely been supporting horror and there are alot more of them being made now than 10 years ago. I think there is still a slight snobbery in Ireland towards the horror genre so it's always going to be tough until some Irish horror film really breaks though.


6. Is The Clown in development?
Still in development.