Written and directed by the aptly named Butcher Brothers, The Hamiltons is a twisted coming-of-age horror about a parentless family with a hideous, deadly secret. It’s also one of the starkest, most imaginative and compelling fright flicks in years. We took the duo to task about their evident desire to play with both the genre’s rules and viewers’ heads.

One of the key elements as to why The Hamiltons works so well is that you’ve applied such a strong emphasis is on the story and filled it with well-fleshed-out characters.

We wanted to make a film where the number-one thing was that if you took the horror element out of the film, you still have a great story. Our influences are David Lynch, David Cronenberg and Roman Polanski, guys that were coming out with stuff in the 70s and early 80s that really pushed the envelope – and often on small budgets, so they really had to go for story to take it to another level.

While we thought there are currently some great horror films out there, the vibe we were really feeling was that once one of them becomes a hit, 10 other films copy that style. So there ends up being nothing new, just a bunch of films full of shock value, violence and gore. We wanted to go back to the old-school way, where it was more about the story ideas and stuff that’s so creepy it generates that underlying feeling of something being just not right.

There’s a great ambiguity with The Hamiltons. It kicks off looking like it’s all going the ‘torture-porn’ route, but you very quickly slip into a style that’s refreshingly removed from that genre.

When we came up with the idea for the story we wanted to do something whereby you were actually living with the villains. We wanted to play with people’s emotions, to mess with your head and make you feel for the bad guys. We achieved that by allowing you to see everything from their perspective, to experience what they’re going through. Instead of just doing the shock and torture thing, we wanted to build up the creepiness by trapping you in a claustrophobic setting with a family of deranged killers.

What really attracted us to the idea was that you’re going through this parallel world where the Hamilton family are just trying to be normal and live in society, and illustrating how scary that is. The fact that these people could be living next door to you and shopping at the same stores as you, that they could be with you wherever you go is, to us, far scarier than if we had made a movie that was a complete bloodbath.

You deal with that concept of danger being something that can be right there on your suburban doorstep with unnerving ease.

We’re both byproducts of suburbia. Growing up in it caused our view to become a little bit disfigured, which is something I think we’ve brought to the film. The fact that you don’t know what the people who live next door to you are about. You don’t know what they’re building in their garage, or whether that guy is mean to his wife, or if their kids are abused. We wanted to explore that theme and the fact that the real horror is not necessarily the monsters you do see, but the monsters you don’t see. The things that could be potentially happening just out of sight are much more frightening and realistic.