‘Haunters of the Silence’ Interview: Tatu Heikkinen and Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen Chat About Their Unique Low-Budget Independent Horror Film

Reading Time: 10 minutes

Haunters of the Silence is a truly unique low-budget independent horror. Directed, produced, and written by the husband-wife team of Tatu Heikkinen and Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen, it follows an unnamed main character as they fall into and through a dream-like series of terrors.

The film is visually stunning and takes on a very David Lynch-like tone in its tight runtime of just over an hour. It’s a difficult film to describe, but truly one that should be experienced. It is available to stream on Tubi.

I was thrilled to get the opportunity to talk to Tatu and Veleda about their creative backgrounds, how the film came to be, and what they’re working on next.

The interview below has been edited for length and clarity. For the full, uncut discussion, click the video below to watch on ScreenAge Wasteland’s new YouTube channel, ScreenAge Wasteland Exclusives.

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Valerie Morreale: Welcome to you both. I wanted to start by asking both of you what kind of inspired you to get into film.

Tatu Heikkinen: Well, for me, I started out making little short films as a teenager with my friends. Just kind of stupid, absurd comedy things. And then later, I got into horror, but around the time I turned 18, most of my friends got into other interests. So I kind of stopped doing film-related things for quite a while, actually. And it wasn’t until a few years ago, when we got the idea of making our own movie, that I really got back into it.

Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen: And for me, I’ve been a photographer for years, and I’ve always wanted to extend that into video, but had no idea how. And then it turned out that he knew how to do that. So it just worked out perfectly. He helped me take that leap.

Tatu: Yeah. Our skills complemented each other really well.

The movie definitely shows your photographic eye. I mean, every shot in it is just really gorgeous to look at. That leads into my next question, which is, what filmmakers would you say you found kind of inspiring?

Veleda: Definitely the Adams Family, we have to say, because it was after watching The Deeper You Dig that we were like, wait, they did it. It was just them. They produced, they created this amazing piece of art. Why can’t we try that? So definitely them. There was a film also called The Sound of Insects that was just incredibly beautiful to watch. And I used to photograph through fabrics and just using fabrics, so I would say that was a huge inspiration.

Tatu: It’s pretty much the same ones for me. Definitely the Adams Family, Toby Poser, John Adams, and Zelda and Lulu Adams. Their film was probably the catalyst that made both of us realize that you can make a proper, really good-looking, good-sounding, professional movie with a very, very small budget and very few people.

Veleda: That’s probably my biggest inspiration. And then also, not that we modeled it after that, but hopefully we will in the future, but directors like Tarkovsky and Béla Tarr and I love those really slow-moving cinematic gorgeous where you could take a still from any moment in it and turn it into a print. That’s really inspirational for me.

Tatu, you mentioned when you sent the movie to us at Screenage that it was based on your real-life experiences with sleep paralysis. I just wanted to ask you both how it came from that to the idea of, oh, this should be a movie.

Tatu: I think after we saw The Deeper You Dig, we got the idea that maybe we could make a movie, but it was kind of hard to come up with the proper idea for what kind of topic we tackle with basically no budget. I’ve had those experiences with sleep paralysis and I figured that that’s something that gives you a lot of creative freedom to, you know, overcome budgetary limitations. I guess the subject eventually just picked itself as I started writing the first version of the screenplay.

Veleda: Also, I would want to say we’re also huge fans of the Newkirks who are behind Hellier, and so that kind of content was very much pretty much a daily part of our lives.

Tatu: So that really got us to thinking about supernatural things and how we could incorporate that into art. Yeah. Yeah, the Newkirks are a husband and wife team who host a podcast called The Haunted Objects Podcast. And they’ve made a TV show called Hellier that really deals with supernatural phenomena from a really unique point of view. And we definitely drew a lot of inspiration from their ideas of the supernatural. Their documentary, The Unbinding, I would highly recommend watching. It’s also on Tubi, so maybe make a double feature out of that and Haunters of the Silence.

I noticed on IMDB that this is both your first film. So I know you talked about your experiences with short films and photography. Did you have any other kind of background before like making this movie?

Tatu: Well, I went to…it’s not really film school. My degree is officially called Bachelor of Arts and Culture, but it mainly dealt with video and videography. And so, other than that, I also did a small internship for a sound studio. I didn’t really enjoy my time there, but it taught me a lot about sound design. I think that was one of the things when we started working on this film, I knew exactly how to handle the sound design aspect professionally, so I wanted to put as much effort into that. And I knew that Veleda had the photography down. So basically, we knew that we could make a film that looks great and sounds great. So those were the two things that we put most emphasis on. And I had absolutely zero prior experience with any of this.

Veleda: Actually, a lot of the shots in the film are photos that we overlaid film grain over to make it look like it’s video. There’s a series where you see these abandoned buildings. Those are actually photos I took in a ghost town in Montana years ago.

I was also thinking of the scene in the tunnel where the hat man is pursuing. That did look like it was kind of photos with the overlay there. And it’s such a cool sequence.

Tatu: Yeah, for that scene, we shot a couple of different versions of it. We did do one where it was a normal video, and then we did a version where it’s a series of photos. And in the end, the photos portrayed an interesting kind of jarring effect, and it kind of ties in with the stop motion sequence towards the latter part of the film.

I also want to ask about the soundtrack because I do feel like this film is sort of a marriage between the cinematography and the soundtrack to tell the story. So you mentioned your internship, but I was just wondering what the creative process was like in terms of creating that composition to go along with the cinematography of the film and tell that story.

Tatu: What I did at my internship was mainly editing the sound, so I didn’t actually get to learn any of the recording part there. But I’m also a musician by my background and I played in a lot of bands over the years. So the sound design and the soundtrack, I created them together.

Veleda: We record all of our own sound effects, like the creepy things that you hear. We have just endless recordings of different animals. And every time we’re going somewhere and something makes a cool creaking sound, we’ll record it. So we just have a huge library and stuff like that, that he’s wonderful at manipulating.

Tatu: Yeah, something that I can definitely point out is that every sound in the movie is recorded by us. We didn’t use any sound library stuff.

I mean, it sounds very grounded, like in the setting and world of the movie, all of the sounds don’t feel like they were pulled from a sound library. They all feel very authentic to the setting. What would you both say is your favorite like shot or sequence from the film?

Tatu: That’s a good question. I haven’t really thought that. That’s a good question. I guess for me, it would be the whole ritual drumming part. And the one with that kind of ties in with the goat skull and the human skull. And I like that whole thing there.

Veleda: Yeah, I guess I would probably go with the same one, honestly. And actually, that was, I think that was the first scene that we wrote down on paper. I knew I just wanted to have, like, a scene that depicts this ritual drumming as a metaphor to entering a trance state and a grounding, you know, like a grounding ritual. I think it’s probably the most ah effective scene of the film, at least for me.

It’s definitely an effective scene. One that I particularly liked is where it’s kind of flashing back and forth and every time it flashes to the Hat Man, he’s a little bit closer.

Tatu: I’m glad to hear that. Yeah, I’d say another scene that I think turned out much better than I was expecting it would be when the sheet starts levitating over me towards the end of the film. And that was actually based on another person’s sleep paralysis experience, not mine, that of John Hom, who did some of the sound soundtrack for the film and also plays the Hat Man. He had an experience with sleep paralysis and that was his experience.

My only other question I had written down is just that I would love to know what you’re both working on next, if you have in mind what your next project would be.

Veleda: We actually have a few different things we’re slowly working on. The first one we’ll start actively working on right now is we want to do kind of a throwback to old silent films. I have a custom converted infrared camera, so we’re going to be shooting with that because it just makes everything creepy when you shoot with that.

Tatu: We’re kind of still in the early stages of the script, but as of now, it’s going to be taking place in the late 1800s, so kind of a period piece about a botanist who goes to the woods in Oregon to chart out the kind of plant life and then supernatural things might or might not happen. But that’s kind of the premise because Veleda is an amazing herbalist and we wanted to do something that dabbles into that realm. As I was researching horror films, I couldn’t really find a horror film that had a main character who’s an herbalist or botanist, so yeah, it just seems like something new, maybe something unique.

Yeah, that seems like untapped territory to me. There are so many interesting ways to go with that.

Veleda: I’m really excited to do video with the infrared because it is, by nature, experimental, because until you’re doing it, you don’t really know what you’re going to get. So that’ll be fun.

We’re also working on a documentary about my mom, so that’s not horror-related at all. She’s in the process of re-editing and rewriting a book that her dad was working on when she was a little girl. Now she’s decided all these years later that she wants to finish it. So we’re just doing a nice little documentary on that.

And then the third one, we actually started last fall and ran out of autumn, so we have to pick up again. Since he’s from Finland, it’s going to be about a character who comes over from Finland and weird things start happening. We’re still very much working on the script for that.

Well, super exciting that you’re working on a bunch of stuff. I’m particularly excited that you’re working on a silent film project. We actually had a conversation on one of our podcasts after we watched The Passion of Joan of Arc, just remarking that so much can be done with silent film. And it’s sort of a shame that we aren’t still making silent films because there are so many excellent silent films out there.

Tatu: Yeah, we both love silent films, and we’ve been watching a ton of them lately. We would really like to try and create a bit of that aesthetic mixed in with modern horror elements. We want to make the film look and feel like it was maybe made in the late ’20s or early ’30s, but also utilize editing and filming techniques that were not accessible at the time. But we do want to do the whole, you know, intertitles with texts, and no dialogue, which is not a huge jump from Haunters of the Silence since there’s only one piece of dialogue in that film. So people who were hoping for a more dialogue-heavy film will unfortunately be disappointed. (laughter)

I just wanted to kind of allow you both to describe Haunters of the Silence to those who haven’t seen it yet, in terms of like describing what kind of experience they could expect watching it?

Tatu: Abstract, surreal, hopefully hypnotic. There is this kind of theme of hypnosis in the film and we were kind of attempting to kind of cast this spell of hypnosis on the viewer with the film. Hopefully, it works for some people. I know it’s a type of film that’s not gonna be for everyone because it’s so experimental and slow-moving and maybe hard to follow, but I think it’s more supposed to be taken as a sensory experience rather than as a story.

Veleda: Also very much for people who are into practical effects, since that was something that we were both very into.

Absolutely, I was just honestly kind of shocked when you both included in your email that this movie cost under $3,000 to make, with how incredibly good it looks. And I know that that’s like partially due to your skill and talent, but also due to the practical effects that you use throughout the film.

Veleda: Yeah, most of that money just went towards a small amount of props and some camera equipment. Luckily, we owned most of what you see in there anyway, and we just filmed in our own house.

Tatu: That was really, really nice for the process, just being able to make this movie in our house because reshoots were so easy.

Veleda: We could basically just pick any day that we felt like reshooting something. We didn’t have the issue of having to just pick from shoots of a certain day. We could redo scenes at any time. And we actually did spend a lot of time reshooting the film. After the first draft of the film was ready, we ended up reshooting more than half of it.

It works out that your house, at least in the film, appears to be in this sort of remote location, which sort of adds to this grief and isolation theme, so it works out that it just like fits perfectly in what you were trying to do.

Tatu and Veleda: Thank you.

Did you have anything else you wanted to plug? Any social media, anything like that?

Tatu: I can plug our DVD version of the movie, which is available to Savo Krelian Productions, which is our production company. It comes with the DVD and the soundtrack on CD.

We are big fans of physical media at Screenage Wasteland!

Tatu and Veleda: Well, so are we!

Tatu: And social media, you can find the film on Instagram. It’s @hauntersofthesilence on Instagram. And Veleda is on Instagram as @veleda_thorsson_photography.

Thank you both so much for taking the time to talk a little bit about your film and your creative process. This has been super, super fun. And thank you, Screenagers, for sticking with us the whole time. And we’ll see you all in The Wasteland.