James DeMonaco Opens ‘The Home’ and Talks Social Commentary, Pete Davidson & More [Interview]

Evil never gets old in The Home, and neither do horror movies for filmmaker James DeMonaco.

“I think horror is the best genre to watch with a crowd,” DeMonaco tells me. “I also think it’s a great vessel to smuggle sociopolitical commentary, like John Carpenter and George Romero did. It’s still fun to get people thinking.”

The Home stars Pete Davidson as a graffiti artist sentenced to community service at a quiet retirement home. In DeMonaco’s words, “While there, he begins to suspect that something strange is going on. He discovers a sinister plot at the center of this very creepy home.”

As the creator and driving force behind The Purge franchise — including a new film in the works — DeMonaco is no stranger to injecting social commentary into his work. The Home continues that tradition, albeit with a more subtle approach.

“I think I’ve crossed the line into preaching in the Purge movies. I’ve let my emotions get the better of me, and I didn’t want to do that here. I wanted it to be subtle. I don’t think people want to be preached to. I think you can present some ideas and let people think about it for themselves,” he admits.

“It’s an interesting process, because you don’t want to overdo it. You don’t want to proselytize, so editing becomes quite important in gauging on if you’ve gone too far and if we can do it in a way where we’re presenting and letting people make their own judgments at the end of the day.”

DeMonaco sees The Home as “a great metaphor for climate change and what’s happening to the planet.” He explains, “You know, we’re mining this planet. We’re taking the resources away. It’s something I’m paying attention to now that I have a daughter. You start thinking of the future, what previous generations have done to the planet, what we’re leaving with the next generation.

“As we were developing the script, we started to see this metaphor. What’s happening to certain characters in the movie kind of mirrors what’s happening to the planet and what previous generations have done to this generation. And so we said, ‘Let’s do it, but let’s do it in a subtle way.’”

The project was conceived during COVID alongside co-writer Adam Cantor, a friend and up-and-coming writer who appeared in two of DeMonaco’s previous films, The Purge: Election Year and This Is the Night.

“We were talking about movies quite a lot. We’re both very neurotic people, so COVID was freaking us out deeply. We didn’t know the true extent of the virus at that time,” DeMonaco recalls. “Elder care facilities were in the news a lot here in New York, because there was a lot of mishandling of the virus response inside them.”

He continues, “Adam and I were speaking about them. We both had strange experiences when we were young with family members who were in these facilities. The elder care world is sad, somewhat creepy. All these weird emotions come with it simultaneously.”

Meanwhile, with the world at a standstill, DeMonaco’s wife encouraged him to try yoga. He turned to YouTube, resulting in his feed being inundated with longevity content. “I thought it was a weird little fad, but I learned it was more than a fad. It was this huge surge of these longevity experts teaching you how you can live to 120. If you really go down the rabbit hole, it’s creepy stuff,” he says.

“The elder care stuff that was in the news at the time, coupled with what I was discovering about this obsession with longevity, and then my own thoughts on climate change all kind of coalesced into the psychological horror of The Home.”

During the writing process, DeMonaco and Cantor thought of Pete Davidson for the lead. A fellow Staten Islander, DeMonaco knew the “Saturday Night Live” breakout when he was just a teenager bussing tables at a local Italian restaurant.

“He came over to me after the first Purge. He was like, ‘Oh, I heard you’re the guy who wrote The Purge. I’m a big fan. I want to be an actor.’ He was a great, very soulful young man who experienced a lot of hard stuff in life.”

Both cinephiles and horror fans, DeMonaco and Davidson stayed in touch and even started writing a movie together just before the pandemic. “It’s kind of an action-comedy. It’s got some drama, though it’s violent. Pete would star. We’re going to jump back into that in September, which we’re really excited about.” They’ve recruited Cantor to join in the writing process.

“When Adam and I were writing The Home, we thought of Pete,” DeMonaco says. “In a weird way, Max is dealing with grief and trauma in his youth and so is Pete. We thought there was a parallel, and I just knew Pete could do drama. He did a little bit in The King of Staten Island and Big Time Adolescence, but I knew him as a human, and I knew he was a good actor who could do anything.”

He adds, “We pitched him to the studio. They seemed to be into it. They had some reservations at first, but as soon as they got the first dailies they were like, ‘Wow! He can handle it.’ We paired him with this cast of amazing theater actors from New York, and he effortlessly started playing with them. I just love the guy. It was a great experience to work with him.”

The Home reinvents itself several times throughout the movie to keep the audience guessing. “That was premeditated in the writing of it with Adam and I. We wanted to take people down this path and then smash them in the face a couple of times with nice twists. I think that’s a great way to watch a movie,” notes DeMonaco.

“Often in movies that are fooling the audience, I feel like the payoff is not as good as what has come before it, so we really wanted to make sure that the third act one-upped what we thought was happening. It took a lot of time to plan with the script.”

The final twist is a highlight for DeMonaco. “The last 25 minutes is my favorite thing I’ve ever put on film. It’s incredibly visceral, bloody, and fun. I think you’ll be cheering in that last act in a way that I haven’t done in any of my films before.”

The Home opens in theaters on July 25.

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