Brooklyn 45 On Shudder Is A Taut Throwback Ghost Tale

Posted in: Interview, Movies, Podcasts, Shudder | Tagged: Brooklyn 45, shudder, Ted Geoghan

This episode of Castle Talk, Jason Henderson chats with Ted Geoghan, writer and director of Brooklyn 45. The film is a taut, often violent real-time supernatural thriller film

In this episode of Castle Talk, Jason Henderson chats with Ted Geoghan, writer, and director of Brooklyn 45. The film is a taut, often violent real-time supernatural thriller film about a group of military veterans holding an impromptu séance in the parlor of a Brooklyn brownstone at the close of World War II. The film came to Shudder on June 8th. The cast includes Anne Ramsay, Ron E. Rains, Jeremy Holm, Larry Fasenden, Ezra Buzzington, Kristina Klebe, and Lucy Carapetyan. 

The We Are Still Here and Mohawk director talked by early morning Zoom while holding his baby boy, who often piped into the interview to offer welcome commentary. 

Brooklyn 45 is an unusual project because Geoghan designed the film to feel similar to a play, taking place mostly in one room and harkening back to similar real-time stories like Hitchcock’s Lifeboat and Rope. The result is a kind of what Geoghan calls “staginess” that doesn’t equate with falsehood so much as a particular style that we don’t see much. He describes creating “dance cards” for each of the actors to plot out where they’d need to stand from moment to moment to keep everyone in the right place for the shots.

Geoghan also explains that the supernatural film, which includes gun violence, ghosts, and a lot of blood, features special effects done the old-fashioned way entirely, “in camera,” using Haunted Mansion ride-style glass plate effects and sleight of hand. 

Geoghan also discusses how the script, underneath its trapped violence and ghostly visitations, is really a meditation on war. It’s not against war or for war, Geoghan says, but it shows how war affects people, from the character of the woman who served as an interrogator, to the colonel afraid of blood, to the gay man accused of war crimes.

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