‘The Home’ Director Wanted To Show A Different Side Of Pete Davidson

***WARNING! The following contains major spoilers for the film!***

While Pete Davidson is widely known for his standup specials and eight-season tenure on Saturday Night Live, filmmaker James DeMonaco hoped to show the 31-year-old comedian in a different light with The Home (now playing in theaters), a horror-thriller set against the backdrop of a retirement community hiding dark secrets.

“We knew Pete could do more than comedy,” says DeMonaco, creator of the lucrative Purge franchise, who co-wrote the new film with longtime friend and collaborator, Adam Cantor. “We knew Pete as a man. We knew him as very soulful person. And I’m like, ‘Pete’s got more in him than what people see on SNL.’”

DeMonaco and Davidson have known each other “for a while,” owing to the fact that they’re both Staten Island natives. “His mom’s house is half a mile away,” notes the former. The two first met around the release of the first Purge movie in 2013 while Davidson worked as a bus boy at a local Italian restaurant.

“The owner, introduced me to Pete said, ‘This is a young comedian who wants to be an actor,’” DeMonaco remembers. “He went on to SNL, but we always stayed in touch and were actually writing a comedy together right before COVID. Then COVID hit and we really didn’t see each other. I think we played Call of Duty Zombies during the pandemic. He had also written a wonderful comedy version of The Purge that I was trying to get going with Blumhouse and Universal.”

That project never got off the ground, but DeMonaco was determined to work with Davidson at some point, and the opportunity finally arose via The Home. The comedian headlines the piece as Max, a product of the foster system trying to avoid jail time by accepting a job as a custodial worker at a retirement home.

At first, the elderly residents — like Lou (John Glover; Gremlins 2: The New Batch) and Norma (Mary Beth Peil; Dawson’s Creek) — appear warm and welcoming, but as time goes on, Max begins to suspect that the place is more than just a place for senior citizens to spend the remainder of their golden years.

“Pete brings a lot to the table,” DeMonaco says. “I think he had an avenue into Max’s trauma and loss since he’s experienced great loss in his own life. He was able to find the wayward soul that Max had become and [relate to the way in which the character expresses himself]

through graffiti. Pete often expresses himself through art. There was parallel there, and that’s why Adam and I knew Pete was right for this character.”

The idea behind the film was partly inspired by Robert Altman’s 1977 psychological thriller, 3 Women, starring Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall. “When you watch the movie, it’s very ill-defined, but it takes place at this kind of weird desert spa with old people,” DeMonaco explains. “It freaked me out as a little boy. The whole movie feels like a dream [and] I love movies that feel like you’re watching someone else’s dream.”

At the same time, he and Cantor wanted to subvert the longtime cinematic trope of elderly characters being portrayed as “very cute and cuddly,” à la Ron Howard’s Cocoon. In a way, The Home is Get Out with octogenarians. “We were like, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be fun to do something where the old people aren’t the cliche depiction of cute and cuddly? [What if] there was something nefarious behind [them]?’”

The bulk of production took place at a recently-closed old age home run by nuns in Denville, New Jersey. “It was very creepy and I think it was haunted,” says DeMonaco, who was able to forestall the building’s demolition just long enough to film the movie. “It had just been abandoned, so there were still a lot of personal effects,” he adds. “We would find very ominous things like little plaques on the wall [commemorating] where someone died. It was around for 100 years, so it had great history to it. That detail is very hard to recreate.”

Despite the serious nature of his role, Davidson always insisted on doing a comedic take, just in case DeMonaco found a place for it in the final film, with the director joking, “We could probably edit together a pretty humorous film here, which would be fun to watch.”

And since this is the creator of The Purge we’re talking about, there also had to be a little sociopolitical commentary thrown into the mix, “without being preachy and proselytizing,” affirms the director, who added in a subplot about a destructive hurricane, as well as an eerie educational video from the Cold War period extolling the wondrous benefits of drilling for oil (you’ll know it when you see it).

“I guess the idea of climate change and previous generations raping the [environment] was on my mind,” muses DeMonaco. “My daughter was turning a teen at the time and looking out for her future. I think it all coalesced into this weird idea about a crazy retirement community.” The Home standing as an allegory for older generations ruining the planet for future ones is “there for people who want to feel it,” DeMonaco continues. “And hopefully, it’s just a fun genre piece for everybody else.”

When it comes to flaunting its horror colors, The Home doesn’t blink — quite literally. Unafraid to make you squirm, the film contains a litany of distressing imagery, the most notable of which is a needle going into Max’s eyeball (see below). While the needle was digital (for obvious reasons), the close-up shot of the clamped-open peeper was completely practical, necessitating the presence of two doctors and a nurse who were there to make sure there was no long-term impairment to Davidson’s vision.

“I wanted to get the big shot, which was the close-up first,” DeMonaco says. “Obviously, I wanted to do a wide so people would see that it’s Pete. Two minutes into the close-up, the doctor walks over to me and says, ‘You’ve got about another 30 seconds before we do real damage to Pete’s eye.’ So we had to get the clamp out of his eye. I never got the wide, but I do want the audience to know that that’s Pete Davidson doing [it]. It’s not a stunt eye, and it was very uncomfortable. Pete was very tense. We were all very tense, but there was no damage [done] to his eye, thank God.”

Another haunting image takes the form a creepy mask, which is not only a nod to The Purge universe, but also to DeMonaco’s childhood fears. “Since I was a small boy, I’ve been just absolutely terrified of anyone in a mask,” the director admits. “My mom said I couldn’t go into Burger King or McDonald’s. I guess they used to have Ronald McDonald and the Burger King character in the McDonald’s when I was very young, growing up in Brooklyn and Staten Island. She said I would literally run out screaming. I couldn’t go to circuses either because of the clowns. Not that they’re wearing masks, but it’s kind of a mask. I finally realized years later [that] there something about not knowing a person’s real [face]. I don’t like not knowing a person’s expression. I need to be able to read someone’s face [and] the mask doesn’t allow one to see the face.”

He continues: “I think we’re all feeding off our own fears, dreams, and nightmares as we make films. I was prone to night terrors growing up, and still am. I still often scream in my sleep, which is terrible for my wife. So I think masks have always been a part of my nightmare-scape.”

In the end, Max discovers that the old folks he’s been tending to are much older than they appear. The retirement community is actually the front for a sinister cult, one that counts Max’s foster parents — Couper (Victor Williams) and Syliva (Jessica Hecht) — among its members. For over a century, this clandestine group has extracted youth-sustaining substance from unsuspecting victims, including Max’s older brother who supposedly died years before, to extend their lifespans.

“There have been a lot of movies that suddenly drop a bomb, but what it really is, is kind of a letdown,” DeManaco says. “So we took a lot of time to sit [and think], ‘Okay, if we’re going to do this … I want to make sure I’m not disappointed by the truth.’”

As the aforementioned hurricane hits the retirement home, Max breaks free of his bonds and goes on a blood-soaked rampage, slicing and dicing his way through the terrified cult members in what DeMonaco calls a “brutal revenge fantasy” that is less Chad Stahelski and more Paul Greengrass. “I love watching the John Wick movies [but] my personal shooting style for action scenes is more dirty and gritty [like] the way [Paul] Greengrass shoots, where it just feels a little more raw and non-choreographed. Yet you have to choreograph because you don’t want someone to get hurt. So it’s very fine line where you don’t want to feel [the choreography]. I hope it plays both.”

The day they filmed Max’s killing spree was quite fun for DeMonaco, who got to dump copious amounts of blood on the iconic Pete Davidson, “although he really got into it,” concludes the director. “He got his revenge at the end of the shot when he came and hugged me and ruined my really cool shirt. But whatever. That’s okay … I hope the audience has as much watching it as we did shooting it.”

The Home is now playing in theaters everywhere. Click here for tickets!