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Director Trey Shults attends the 2016 New York Film Critics Circle Awards on Jan. 3, 2017 in New York City.Mike Coppola/Getty Images

You don't need to be a Wayans brother to know that so-called scary movies are usually more fun than they are scary. And if you think a non-horror film such as Deliverance isn't a horror film, you need to wake up and smell the banjo.

All to say that there's horror, and then there's horror. The most frightening films are the ones grounded in reality, not alien invaders or supernatural situations. Which brings us to the emerging filmmaker Trey Edward Shults. (He's originally from Texas, a state still traumatized over the great chainsaw scare of the mid-1970s.)

Shults broke into the spotlight in 2015 with his critically acclaimed directorial debut, Krisha. A taut family drama inspired by Shults's own relatives, Krisha involved a Thanksgiving dinner and an estranged, older woman with a history of addiction. The film took cues from Roman Polanski's Apartment Trilogy psychological-horror films, including Rosemary's Baby.

"My cousin came home for a family reunion and she relapsed," Shults says, speaking from his home in Orlando. "The film is not totally based on that incident, but I remember how it made me feel. It was bottom of your stomach dread."

That atmosphere of dread, combined with an intense score – "It was meant to put you in Krisha's mental state" – created an unsettling tone much different than the awkward family dinner of films such as August: Osage County or Home for the Holidays.

"I don't consider Krisha a horror film," Shults, 28, says, "but I think it's cool that other people do."

Shults's new film, It Comes at Night, is a horror film. An unnamed cataclysm involving a highly contagious airborne disease sends citizens fleeing cities into the woods, where a pair of highly vigilant families pool their limited resources and forge an unsteady alliance that is threatened by suspicion and tribal-like protectionism.

And yet, even given the intense terror of the circumstances, Shults doesn't consider It Comes at Night to be a full-on horror film. "I didn't make it just to make a scary movie. As with Krisha, I made it for personal reasons."

The film, which stars Joel Edgerton as a rifle-toting history professor hunkered down with his biracial family in a sprawling summer home in the woods, begins with a mother saying goodbye to her infected father, just before he's shot, set aflame and buried in order to prevent the disease from spreading among the small (and getting smaller) clan.

"I wrote the film two months after I lost my dad to pancreatic cancer," Shults explains. "In hindsight, I was going through grief. The whole movie just spewed out of me in a couple of days."

The film, which revolves around a gentle 17-year-old boy (played by Kelvin Harrison Jr.), is rich visually and thematically. In the most trying of conditions, a son – stepson, actually – is given lessons on manhood and the priority of family from his father.

"I was reading books about genocide, actually, and thinking about cycles of violence" Shults says. "How ordinary people became evil. It's a tribal mentality, and, in this film, the families are the tribes."

Ultimately, It Comes at Night comes down to alarm, and the extreme reactions it provokes. In his frightening 1970 novel Deliverance (which was adapted into the 1972 film), the author James Dickey used the term "countermonsters" when referring to man's ability to transform when facing real monsters.

"I think this film is about the fear of the unknown, the ultimate unknown being death," Shults says. "How far will you go? There's worse things than death, and worse is losing your humanity in the process."

Countermonsters and the lack of mercy – the horror of it all. Were that it was just a movie.

It Comes at Night opens across Canada June 9.

Nobu Matsuhisa jokes that Robert De Niro, who co-founded the Nobu restaurant and hotel chain, can “eat anything” on his menu. The chef and actor were in Toronto Tuesday promoting Nobu’s first Canadian expansion in the city.

The Canadian Press

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