Interview with Thea Hvistendahl - Director of ‘Handling the Undead’

Zombies seem as constant and persistent in our pop culture as they are in the mindless pursuit of their next meal. I don’t think there is a soul among us who is a stranger to zombie media… right? Whether it’s the timeless classic 28 Days Later, or even something as recent as The Last of Us, they follow our zeitgeist steadily and relentlessly. As much fun as they are, the tropes can get tiring, even for a fan of the genre, which is part of what makes Thea Hvistendahl’s directorial debut Handling the Undead all the more compelling. Equal parts eerie and thoughtful, and in screenwriting partnership with the author of the novel, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Hvistendahl pushes the audience to consider something much scarier than any living dead we’ve seen before… what if you knew and loved the reanimated?

Handling the Undead, now acquired by Neon after premiering at Sundance 2024, follows three stories of shattered relationships as each family or individual has recently experienced the greatest loss anyone can experience in losing a loved one. A mother, a partner, and a little boy have left their families far too early, and after a mysterious electrical surge, are seemingly brought back to life. In what might be the most realistic response any of us might have in a situation like this, the undead either find their way back home, or are brought home by the people they left. In many ways, things feel back to normal. A woman does her partner’s hair and puts on her makeup. A mother prepares a meal for her young son. Birthdays are celebrated. 

Hvistendahl discusses a key point in the book being an instinctive reaction in the “zombies.” In an exclusive interview with FilmSlop, she told me, “In the book, the undead, what makes them react in bad ways is when the living think bad thoughts, or get anxious, or nervous, and that’s what happens in the film too. They’re not really mean, they’re reacting to instinct.” If this were to ever happen in real life, she thinks the best thing to do would be to “just think nice thoughts… but that's, of course, impossible,” she says with a laugh.

We don’t really ever know why, or the exact mechanics of how the undead reanimate, and really, we don’t need to. We don’t know how the rest of society treats them, or even if a full apocalypse ever ensues, because an experience such as this would be as apocalyptic as it gets for the affected families in the film. “It’s something about going into a film… and the minute you open that box and answer questions like, ‘Why did it happen? What do we do?’ It’s a net opening up with holes you need to patch up to explain. In the end, I found out that it’s not that interesting, or then it has to be about that, and it cannot be so much about the characters,” Hvistendahl explains.

A film with such heavy subject matter is not for everyone, but the weight is the very thing that drew Hvistendahl to the project in the first place. “It really was the atmosphere of the novel and how it blended supernatural with the very realistic take, and how it’s more focused on the drama and the relations between the characters, and how it uses the undead just as a tool to look at what’s happening between the living.” As a champion for the devastating conversations that occur post-loss, she hopes that the film can be a catalyst for such exchanges. “I think in preparing for this film, I understood more about how grief can feel or how deep it is. I think most people actually like to talk about it, but everyone is very afraid to either bring it up themselves or to ask the questions. Then it just happens that no one talks about it.”

Some movies simply transcend their genre. On the surface, Signs is about aliens visiting Earth, but if you’ve seen it, you know that it’s really about lost faith, and finding it again. Godzilla Minus One is about a huge lizard with laser eyes… but really it’s about resilience and hope and a country fighting for survival following a world war. So too, is Handling the Undead a zombie movie with the bones of the classics we know and love, but in every way is about how human beings forge through loss and grief, and isn’t that something we all need? 

Handling the Undead by Thea Hvistendahl is in select theaters now.