Meltdown: A Nuclear Family's Ascension into Madness

I grew up hearing stories of my grandmother serving in the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force during WWII. I’ve always been fascinated by how jarring it must have been for her to return home. She held a position with a great deal of technical responsibility and oversight during the war, only to return to a society that hardly allowed her to be anything more than a housewife. This domestic tension, and the look in my grandma’s eyes as she talked about her time overseas, fueled the inception of this film. I knew I had to dig into what lay in between the lines of her stories, the emotions she boxed up and never shared with a soul before she passed away. So I looked to Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and Ibsen’s A Doll’s House to inform the internal struggles of Ruby.

Whenever my grandparents visited, they would play classic 40s and 50s films. Through the repetition of seeing the same films, I began to see subtle breaks in the perfect Hollywood facade. I’m continually fascinated by the films of Douglas Sirk; an ocean of social commentary and brilliant irony lay underneath his seemingly simplistic yet luscious, romantic melodramas.

Gaspar Noé and other directors in the New French Extremity showed me how jamming the frame full of madness and chaos can create a revelatory psychosis. I became obsessed with psychedelic horror’s ability to externalize the repressed, and this is where this film’s stylistic idea was born. What would happen if I combined the suffocating setting and repressed characters of a typical 1950s suburban film with the liberating power of the French Extremity? While tonally, the work of Noé and Sirk seem drastically different, I felt that they were two sides of the same coin, both using excess to subvert and comment on the status quo.

So, at its core, Meltdown captures the unique experience of experimental horror, but with the foundation of a traditional narrative structure that mainstream audiences are familiar with. My goal is for this film to be someone’s jumping-off point into far more extreme genre films.