Kate Siegel’s Directorial Debut ‘Stowaway’ Serves Up Lo-Fi Sci-Fi Nightmares

"It's almost like one of those cooking shows where you get a basket, and it's got anchovies, powdered sugar, and this and that, but all of us got the same basket, and everything you see is what was cooked up," explains acclaimed actress, writer and now director Kate Siegel as we discuss her contribution to the iconic horror anthology V/H/S franchise.

V/H/S/Beyond is the seventh installment of the series of anthology films that launched in 2012. Streaming on Shudder as of Friday, October 4, 2024, it features six new bloodcurdling "tapes" that combine horror and sci-fi. Siegel's segment, Stowaway, tells the story of a young conspiracy theorist who heads to the Mojave Desert to document sightings of lights in the sky. She makes contact with what appears to be an alien craft and quickly becomes trapped inside and far from home.

Before V/H/S/Beyond, Siegel, known for Hush, The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass, wasn't particularly looking to get behind the camera.

"One exciting thing was talking to all the other filmmakers and finding out how they got involved. Everyone had a different story," she recalls. "Mine was an incoming call. They called my team and said, 'Has Kate ever wanted to direct?' and I said, 'No, I'm very tired. Why would I want to do that?' They then called back, and my manager said it was a great idea. Mike, my husband, said, 'You have to do this. You're ready,' so I did." Siegel's husband and frequent collaborator, Mike, is the director of Doctor Sleep and The Fall of the House of Usher, Mike Flanagan.

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"I had my first meeting, and suddenly, these ideas kept pouring out of me. I thought we could do one with Muppets, we could do one that's a musical, and they were like, 'Listen, we love your passion. Go away and come back with a pitch, and we'll go from there.' Over the next few days, Mike and I developed an idea; I came back in, pitched them the movie Stowaway, top to bottom, and then we were off to the races almost immediately."

V/H/S/ filmmakers, who have previously included The Guest's Adam Wingard, Pearl's Ti West, and Ready or Not's Radio Silence trio, have limited money to manifest their visions. Still, as Siegel muses, "The budget is what the budget is, and they leave you to your own devices once they've said yes. There's a ton of creative and artistic freedom."

Stowaway's human star is former videogame journalist Alanah Pearce, who was all in on the five-day shoot.

"The days when we're in the desert, there was a particular shot that Kate wanted, and we had to wait because of the dusk that we were looking for," she says. "That was especially fun because it turns out the snakes come out at dusk, so we had a snake wrangler on set. Otherwise, where everything was shot on the sound stage, we had a lot of flexibility with regard to time. We didn't need any particular lighting in there, but a lot of it was making sure things look right. I don't feel like I had to crunch especially hard for the five days of work. Everyone was really flexible, but it was very quick."

Siegel was also happy to clear up confusion about Pearce's character's name, which has been reported as Halle Halley as if it were some clever play on words. It's not.

"There's no last name," she laughs. "I don't know how this is happening. There's a funny story there that it's basically a mistake. It's supposed to be Halley's Comet, but on the day we went back and forth, I just went, 'Say Halle.' It just came out. I wasn't thinking because I had a million other things in my mind, so it's supposed to be just Halley."

Siegel, Pearce, and Stowaway's crew had to get creative to make their segment of V/H/S/Beyond as convincing as possible. That meant they had to face the challenges, some of which they manifested in creating the tense narrative head-on.

"Pretty much everything was practical effects other than the nanobots," the actress explains. "Where I'm in the wall is all practical. The very final shot took us three hours to shoot, and it lasts about three seconds. It's half a fake face of silicone that I was stuck inside in the back of a wall. They did half of my makeup before I would get inside that little weird wall compartment. Those parts were really easy. Everyone keeps asking me how long it took to do the makeup, and it was maybe two and a half hours or three hours."

Siegel adds, "For a lot of the time, we were shooting an actual infrared, which means any tone that is red or pink or flesh-toned completely flattens out and becomes white," the director explains. "What happened was we'd have to get Alanah in place, we'd have to get the infrared lights on to get the camera mounted, look at the build in camera, then I'd have to call over the special effects artist, and be like, 'Where you've shaded this red, you have to go back in and shade it blue and green.' We needed her in there because I had to see her over and over and over again. It was a lot to ask of Alanah, and she handled it quite beautifully. I've been in prosthetics for long days where I was not as well-behaved as Alanah."

The journalist-turned-actress won't deny it.

"Being inside that wall was very uncomfortable," she says with a laugh. "It was not a comfortable experience, but Kate, realizing that I was stuck inside this wall for three hours, was legitimately giving me head rubs and neck massages because it was a lot of effort to get me out of the wall to then get me back in again. It was so impressive to see it from the concept phase, which was a little weird clay version of me, and then actually seeing it combined with all of the makeup was a really cool process."

"There were also several dummies of me and different versions of my head. There's a part where it hits warp speed; I was lying on the ground, and then we swapped in a dummy that had multiple versions of my face built together. It was bizarre walking around the set and just seeing corpses of myself. I would go to get my lunch, I would walk back to set, and then there was a mangled version of me on the floor. It's an extraordinary experience. We had two dummies, an extra head, and then dismembered bits of corpses."

Then, it was a matter of creating the rest of the alien craft, but Siegel knew exactly who to call.

"Calder Greenwood, our production designer who I adore, is a visual artist," she reveals. "He is called The Cardboard King. That entire set is made out of paper mache and cardboard, which is interesting because infrared lights, some of the bulbs we use, got very hot, so there was some concern about whether we were going to set our set on fire. A lot of what you see was guitar strings, paper mache, cellophane, and lighting tricks, and that whole constellation on the back wall is where we took a screwdriver and poked holes in the cardboard, then set infrared lights behind the holes so they would flare."

The final piece of the Stowaway puzzle was creating the sounds of space, which created the atmosphere in addition to the aesthetics.

"Part of the challenge of found footage style stuff like this is that when done in its purest form, there's no score at all. It's all sound that is created in the moment," Siegel explains. "If you've ever watched a horror movie with the sound off, it's not scary, so we had to create a soundscape in the ship that had to do with the static, the clicking, and a buzz that turns on with the infrared. It's a sound that feels real but also allows for fear. My favorite moment that demonstrates that is when we set up this nanobot sound that starts like wind chimes a few times. Then, by the time we get to this big, sweeping shot where it's gathering parts to rebuild, this sound that you thought was beautiful has changed and is dreadful. You realize what that means. To me, that's what the movie is about. It's about asking, 'What if everybody does everything right? And that's the horrible thing that happens.'"

The filmmaker concludes, "We also used some Theremin because I love that for creepy tonal effects. The aliens were a combination of bat sonar, whale sounds, and the clicking of mandibles, which I really like. We needed footsteps and wind, and that was just footsteps and wind. The nanobots are wind chimes, but my sound designer, Trevor Gates, really went wild. He's an incredibly talented sound designer, and I told him to go as experimental as he wanted, and he did, God bless him."