A cautionary tale for clinging to the past

Those people who brought you the history-soaked W: A Return to Oz (Plymouth rave documentary), know what it’s like to delve into the past. Director Daniel Howard-Baker takes that deeper, and more personal – for middle-aged fathers, at least (hands up – you know who you are) – in Calling You. Daniel shares the origins and inspiration for the film that features dance, music, drama with a healthy dose of horror.

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Middle-aged men falling into a coma-inducing idealised notion of the past… where did you get the idea for Calling You?

The idea came from my general fascination with liminal spaces, particularly their storytelling and cinematic potential. These are spaces that are often described as visual manifestations of a ‘transition’ from one stage of life to the next. It can come in many forms – empty office buildings, car parks, shopping centres, airports, hospital waiting rooms, and soft play areas (explored in a previous short I made a few years back Ball-pit. Wednesday. Lemonade.), the list goes on!

However, in the case of our new film, the setting is a school at night. It seems liminal space films are on the rise; with the upcoming A24 Kane Pixels film Backrooms coming out this May, audiences are hungry for films with that visual language in cinema, and so am I!

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I knew I wanted to make a short film based in a school hall at night. I wrote a few drafts, each with different stories, characters and varying levels of Lynchian madness. But after listening to dance music (mostly early EDM 70s and late 90s / early 00s Europop), the characters become concrete, and so did the story.

Calling You: the schoolhall becomes a battleground of two opposing nostalgia

What can you tell us about the story of Calling You?

Mike, an estranged single middle-aged father, takes an experimental drug that induces a coma and produces in his mind an alternative reality inspired by his memories. Whilst potent and addictive, abuse of the drug or staying too long in the alternative reality may result in permanent coma or death. Throughout the film, his daughter Layla attempts to awake him up from his coma.

In the film, especially with our soundtrack, we wanted to play with the idea of ‘sensory overload’ with the characters and viewer and also a way to drive the plot. In the real-world scenes, adult Layla uses real visual and auditory objects in order to disrupt Mike’s versions and wake him up.

As both Louis Holder, my DoP, and I have diagnosed ASD, we strive to write and shoot characters and stories that pertain to a neurodiverse audience. The two characters Mike and his daughter Layla can be seen as neurodiverse in their desires and behaviour, particularly when it comes to their opposition or conflict with sensory triggers.

Additionally, both characters also represent different childhoods or nostalgias (distinct music / gadgets / sounds) – for Mike it is the early 70s, whilst with Layla it is the late 90s / early 00s. So in the school hall, it becomes a battleground of two opposing nostalgias. But in shorthand, the film aims to be a cautionary tale for clinging too much to the past, in which if you stay there for too long, you’ll never leave.

Calling You is a psychological drama with surreal and sci-fi elements – how have you captured that with your filmmaking?

Initially going into the project, I wasn’t quite sure which genre it strictly followed. For me, when writing anything, thinking of what genre of the film is almost peripheral, but if it happens to fall into certain genres or a successful (or even unsuccessful!) blend of different ones, then so be it. I suppose I’ll be curious to know what genres the audience thinks or feels it falls into and whether we’ve done it right! What’s certainly true is the psychological drama element, where 1/2 of the film takes place in Mike’s mind and all its unconscious horrors and entities.

One could see the sci-fi elements in the fictional drug I proposed and the ramifications of such medication. But above all, I believe the film falls into the broad umbrella genre of ‘fantasy’, which itself can have strong alliances to other genres such as horror or drama or romance. Not so much a fantasy with alternative high-mediaeval worlds such as Lord of the Rings, but fantasy that has more ties with human psychology and the wonders and dangers of its imagination and desires.

Calling You: a fantasy with that has ties with human psychology

How did you get the cast together?

It was as simple as a few call-out posts on social media, focusing on local South West Facebook groups. We were quite lucky with our casting and their chemistry on set, all of whom were great to work with. Each of the actors had their strengths that I believe pertained well to their respective characters.

The trailer for Calling You is beautifully eerie, what inspired the look of the film?

Our inspirations for the look of the film can be split into two categories: horror in all its vibrance and shadow (in the school / dream sequence) and kitchen-sink drama in all its washed-out beige colours (real-world / house scenes).

For ‘horror in all its vibrance and shadow’ we were inspired by horror films such as Coraline (2009), Insidious (2010) and Skinamarink (2022) or other non-horror examples such as Gaspar Noe’s work – Climax (2018) and Enter the Void (2009) – and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives (2013). These are films that embrace darkness and shadows in the edges of the frame with their intended colours standing out. Whilst we don’t see a lot of that in the trailer, as we want to keep certain scenes under wraps for the time being, in the school scenes we wanted to have that true darkness. But when we do see colour, it truly stands out of the screen, making that world look dangerously enticing.

By contrast, we were inspired by the colour palette and lighting of Mike Leigh’s films – Secrets and Lies (1996), Life is Sweet (1990) and Hard Truths (2024) – as well as The Holdovers (2023), Life on Mars (2006-7, TV series) or Certain Women (2016) for the real-world / house scenes. Here the colours and darkness bear no resemblance to the nocturnal dwellings and sequences of Mike’s mind but present the true and dull colours of the world in which the characters navigate and converge through every frame. In those scenes, the main focus is the characters and how they clash with the dull real world as their stage.

Calling You: embracing darkness and shadow

Where can we catch Calling You?

We will be screening the film for the first time on the 3 June at the Everyman Cinema Plymouth, alongside a 4th Plymouth screening of W: A Return to Oz, a South West rave doc we produced last year. A link to get tickets for that can be found below: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/hbproductions/2093032

After which it will start its national film festival / community cinema run, with more possible screenings in Plymouth. Updates on screenings, selections, awards and BTS stuff can be found on the film’s socials and website!

Thank you!

Watch Calling You with a screening of W: A Return to Oz at Everyman Cinema, Plymouth on Wed 3 June. Get your tickets