Bruce Goodison decided to direct 'Black Cab' after finding "humanity" in the script.
The movie maker has been at the helm of dramas such as 'Leave to Remain' and 'Our World War' but while he doesn't normally go for the genre of horror, he decided to take a chance on the new film - which follows a couple who are kidnapped by their taxi driver - because he could see the "moral core" within the antagonist.
He told Pop Horror: "I don’t normally do genre work, as in ghost stories, etc. But what I look for in everything I do is the humanity, even in really bad people, and even more so in really bad people. I find people who do bad things more interesting than the people they do them to, in many ways because you learn more about human nature by looking at what bad people do.
"When I read the first 20 pages and could see that Nick [Frost's] character has a strong moral core in the way he’s behaving towards Patrick, who is a horror. I mean he really is a nasty, nasty, nasty, nasty man.
"I love what Nick’s character was doing so he has this moral core, but then obviously goes on to do something so horrendous for very good reasons because something very horrendous has happened to him in his life with his child and with his wife. "
Bruce noted that the supernatural element of the film didn't "fill [him] full of horror" but noted that it was all simply an "extension of the madness" within the story and wanted to use the notion that terror is within everyone as a "starting point" for the production.
He said: "And the fact that it has ghosts didn’t really fill me full of horror, which I know it should have done because it’s a horror film but it was more that they were an extension of the madness. And because it’s a road movie is another gift, isn’t it? You’re going from this illuminated city into this very, very scary countryside where there’s this folkloric story, this ghost story. For me, I wanted it to be rooted in something that felt coming from character. AMC, Shudder, Nick’s company, were all happy for me to do that with it. But obviously, it could have been taken in a different direction, but for me, horror is always in us. It’s not outside of us. That was my starting point."
'Black Cab' is now streaming on Shudder.
