‘Ick’ Director Joseph Kahn on Returning to Filmmaking, Fighting for Creed Rights and Crafting a Modern Disaster Movie: ‘When the Monster Comes, We Don’t Get Along’
What do Eminem’s “Without Me,” Lady Gaga’s “LoveGame” and Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” have in common? They all have music videos directed by Joseph Kahn, who, after a seven-year hiatus, returns to cinemas with his new creature-feature comedy “Ick,” in theaters now.
Kahn updates his Y2K swagger for a 2025 audience in his narrative comeback, which acts as a VFX-fueled meditation on nostalgia, disaster films and Gen Z’s cultural dominance. Starring Brandon Routh, Malina Pauli Weissman, Mena Suvari, Harrison Cone and Taia Sophia, “Ick” follows Hank, a high school it-boy turned high school janitor. As Hank and Eastbrook’s graduating class are consumed by visions of an unfulfilling tomorrow, they largely (and hilariously) ignore an invasive alien entity known as the Ick, which threatens to destroy their futures altogether.
Days before the wide release of “Ick” on July 27, Kahn sat down with Variety to discuss his return to feature filmmaking, the power of post-irony and how getting rights to Creed proved almost impossible.
I started thinking about “Ick” right as “Bodied” was released to the public. And I wanted to make a creature feature. That’s all I knew. I worked with Sam Laskey, the writer, and we came together and made “Ick.” The script was written by about 2019, and I planned to make it in 2020. But then COVID happened. The entire industry shut down for two years. I was originally planning to do this as a mainstream studio feature, and the business completely changed and kind of died and got twisted. My family actually moved out of L.A. for a bit. For two years, I was living in Texas, and then I decided I can’t wait any longer. I think around 2022, I said, “Okay, fine, I’m going to start making this.” I didn’t want to make it with the masks and all that stuff. Because that adds about 25% to the budget. So I literally waited for COVID to be over before I made the movie.
I’ve been making music videos for 35 years, so I got to see generation shifts. I saw Boomers to Millennials, Millennials to Gen Z, and I’ve seen Gen Z now switching over to Gen A. I’m fascinated by that process. On a certain level, “Ick” was a response to my previous movie, “Detention,” which I made about 12 years ago. I remember the focus at one point was all about youth Millennials, how messed up they are, how they don’t respect anything. Now they’re saying the same thing about Gen Z. I know at a certain point, this is all just fear-mongering from one generation to another. So I thought it would be really fun to make a movie about a Millennial aging. When you do fish out of water stories, you exaggerate the water around them. So, from Hank’s perspective, walking back into high school 25 years later, he’s covered with the cultural context of Gen Z. That’s where a lot of my “woke jokes” come in, because that’s the perception of a Millennial to that world. He’s still clinging on to these old songs in his old life and his old girlfriend. The movie, on a certain level, is about moving on.
I call it post-irony, and that’s my sense of humor. What I mean by post-irony is that you don’t know if it’s ironic or not. I think the studios have to signal to everyone that they are being funny and don’t trust the audience to make that decision. And frankly, there’s a lot of the audience that can’t make that decision, because it takes a certain mentality and certain sophistication. The studios aren’t in the business of catering to that particular audience; they need the biggest, lowest common denominator possible. Which I completely understand, but it does cut off a certain level of entertainment for certain types of people. These are people who have seen a lot of these movies and can take a little bit more complication. If there’s a joke where I don’t know if that joke was serious or not, to me, that’s a beautiful sweet spot. There are certain types of winking at the audience that you don’t know if I winked at you. To me, that’s the thrilling part, because you decide whether you think it’s funny or not, and you get to decide what the politics and the meaning of all that stuff are.
People used to always accuse me of having an MTV style. But here’s the thing, I’ve been making music videos for 35 years, which is pretty much since the beginning of MTV. So, do I have an MTV style? Or does MTV have my style? I do have an editorial rhythm and a way that I place the camera, and this is simply the way I tell stories. I feel like every generation is more attuned to my language on a weird level. Gen Z speaks my language a lot more than my own generation did, because Gen Z grew up with editing tools and camera phones. The funny thing about the Gen Z audience, a filmmaker from their point of view isn’t just someone that points a camera at someone, they point it at themselves. They spent their entire lives making films. So that sort of editorial rhythm is something that’s very natural for a person that’s grown up with these tools. For some audiences, this film will come off way too fast, but I truly believe that for other audiences it will be natural and rewarding.
I was thinking about how the modern generation deals with tragedy, like big tragedies. When you actually watch it happen, the world freaks out for two weeks and says, “Everything has changed.” And yes, things do change, but ultimately, things go back to normal. People still live their lives. Now, that can either be an incredible act of stupidity or it’s an act of survival. I don’t know which. I’m a filmmaker. I’m not a sociologist or a historian, so the best thing I can do is satirize this stuff and have fun with it. I don’t even attempt to give you the answers. I’m just giving you the emotional simulation of what it’s like to live in that particular world. That’s what “Ick” is. “Ick” is a simulation of how we deal with monsters in our own age. That was written in 2018. It was not a reaction to COVID. When COVID happened, I had to go back and add a few more COVID jokes in there, because that’s the elephant in the room, and you need to confront it. Back in the day, even up to 9/11 for the most part, if something big and crazy happened, there would be a unifying element to society. Not today. That’s part of the satire of “Ick.” When the monster attacks, we don’t get along; we grow apart.
Definitely “War of the Worlds.” I would say there’s “The Blob.” I would say “The Thing.” It’s a fusion of a lot of different things. The Ick is a very interesting creature because it has elements of Dracula. It has elements of zombies. It’s a super monster. It’s an amalgamation of them.
The obvious thing about the VFX is the Ick VFX. But there’s a lot of minor things that people will not realize are VFX that helped make this movie for a very small cost. Like, it’s immensely small. If I made this movie through a studio, it’s a $100 million movie. A lot of that has to do with my ability to apply visual effects in ways that people would never expect. Then I shot it mostly on real sets, which is a huge advantage these days. Because I shot in real towns and real gyms and real high schools, it gives it a much more complex look, because you’re not suddenly going into a virtual world. I hate to give it away, but there’s a whole sequence in “Ick” that’s green screen. For instance, the one with the car flipped upside down, nothing is real. That’s a CG car, that’s a CG exterior, that’s CG everything. And that’s an eight-minute sequence. If I had to really flip a car upside down, that’s a safety issue. A car can collapse and kill your actors, so you’re bracing it with all this steel and things that we can’t afford. So all I did was I hung two chairs upside down, and they would get in them. And then the rest is all CG.
I actually did not go into the movie intending to put in this monster of a soundtrack. I wrote it thinking, just tell a great story. But then, as I told that story, and as [Hank] was pining for his girlfriend from the 2000s, I realized this music is going to be important. It was actually a bit of a debate in my head, because the music that he would listen to is pop punk. A pop punk soundtrack combined with a creature feature? How does that make any sense? Pop punk is a depressing subject matter done in an extremely happy way. And I was like, “Okay, does that even make sense in a horror film?” But I was like, “Well, it’s a funny movie.” So that it essentially turns it into “American Pie”, interspersed with my “Walking Dead” thing. I think it’s weird, but, you know, that’s never stopped me before.
Creed. It was the hardest. It was written in the script. It was an actual plot point. As I wrote it, I sent my music supervisor, Bud Carr, on a quest to get Creed and track Scott Stapp down. Up until the week before we premiered at Toronto, we did not know if we had it. Only in the last minute did we get that right. I was prepared to, like, reshoot the scene and say Nickelback or something, but I couldn’t find any band that really had that sort of cultural impact as when she says “Creed.”
Kahn updates his Y2K swagger for a 2025 audience in his narrative comeback, which acts as a VFX-fueled meditation on nostalgia, disaster films and Gen Z’s cultural dominance. Starring Brandon Routh, Malina Pauli Weissman, Mena Suvari, Harrison Cone and Taia Sophia, “Ick” follows Hank, a high school it-boy turned high school janitor. As Hank and Eastbrook’s graduating class are consumed by visions of an unfulfilling tomorrow, they largely (and hilariously) ignore an invasive alien entity known as the Ick, which threatens to destroy their futures altogether.
Days before the wide release of “Ick” on July 27, Kahn sat down with Variety to discuss his return to feature filmmaking, the power of post-irony and how getting rights to Creed proved almost impossible.
I started thinking about “Ick” right as “Bodied” was released to the public. And I wanted to make a creature feature. That’s all I knew. I worked with Sam Laskey, the writer, and we came together and made “Ick.” The script was written by about 2019, and I planned to make it in 2020. But then COVID happened. The entire industry shut down for two years. I was originally planning to do this as a mainstream studio feature, and the business completely changed and kind of died and got twisted. My family actually moved out of L.A. for a bit. For two years, I was living in Texas, and then I decided I can’t wait any longer. I think around 2022, I said, “Okay, fine, I’m going to start making this.” I didn’t want to make it with the masks and all that stuff. Because that adds about 25% to the budget. So I literally waited for COVID to be over before I made the movie.
I’ve been making music videos for 35 years, so I got to see generation shifts. I saw Boomers to Millennials, Millennials to Gen Z, and I’ve seen Gen Z now switching over to Gen A. I’m fascinated by that process. On a certain level, “Ick” was a response to my previous movie, “Detention,” which I made about 12 years ago. I remember the focus at one point was all about youth Millennials, how messed up they are, how they don’t respect anything. Now they’re saying the same thing about Gen Z. I know at a certain point, this is all just fear-mongering from one generation to another. So I thought it would be really fun to make a movie about a Millennial aging. When you do fish out of water stories, you exaggerate the water around them. So, from Hank’s perspective, walking back into high school 25 years later, he’s covered with the cultural context of Gen Z. That’s where a lot of my “woke jokes” come in, because that’s the perception of a Millennial to that world. He’s still clinging on to these old songs in his old life and his old girlfriend. The movie, on a certain level, is about moving on.
I call it post-irony, and that’s my sense of humor. What I mean by post-irony is that you don’t know if it’s ironic or not. I think the studios have to signal to everyone that they are being funny and don’t trust the audience to make that decision. And frankly, there’s a lot of the audience that can’t make that decision, because it takes a certain mentality and certain sophistication. The studios aren’t in the business of catering to that particular audience; they need the biggest, lowest common denominator possible. Which I completely understand, but it does cut off a certain level of entertainment for certain types of people. These are people who have seen a lot of these movies and can take a little bit more complication. If there’s a joke where I don’t know if that joke was serious or not, to me, that’s a beautiful sweet spot. There are certain types of winking at the audience that you don’t know if I winked at you. To me, that’s the thrilling part, because you decide whether you think it’s funny or not, and you get to decide what the politics and the meaning of all that stuff are.
People used to always accuse me of having an MTV style. But here’s the thing, I’ve been making music videos for 35 years, which is pretty much since the beginning of MTV. So, do I have an MTV style? Or does MTV have my style? I do have an editorial rhythm and a way that I place the camera, and this is simply the way I tell stories. I feel like every generation is more attuned to my language on a weird level. Gen Z speaks my language a lot more than my own generation did, because Gen Z grew up with editing tools and camera phones. The funny thing about the Gen Z audience, a filmmaker from their point of view isn’t just someone that points a camera at someone, they point it at themselves. They spent their entire lives making films. So that sort of editorial rhythm is something that’s very natural for a person that’s grown up with these tools. For some audiences, this film will come off way too fast, but I truly believe that for other audiences it will be natural and rewarding.
I was thinking about how the modern generation deals with tragedy, like big tragedies. When you actually watch it happen, the world freaks out for two weeks and says, “Everything has changed.” And yes, things do change, but ultimately, things go back to normal. People still live their lives. Now, that can either be an incredible act of stupidity or it’s an act of survival. I don’t know which. I’m a filmmaker. I’m not a sociologist or a historian, so the best thing I can do is satirize this stuff and have fun with it. I don’t even attempt to give you the answers. I’m just giving you the emotional simulation of what it’s like to live in that particular world. That’s what “Ick” is. “Ick” is a simulation of how we deal with monsters in our own age. That was written in 2018. It was not a reaction to COVID. When COVID happened, I had to go back and add a few more COVID jokes in there, because that’s the elephant in the room, and you need to confront it. Back in the day, even up to 9/11 for the most part, if something big and crazy happened, there would be a unifying element to society. Not today. That’s part of the satire of “Ick.” When the monster attacks, we don’t get along; we grow apart.
Definitely “War of the Worlds.” I would say there’s “The Blob.” I would say “The Thing.” It’s a fusion of a lot of different things. The Ick is a very interesting creature because it has elements of Dracula. It has elements of zombies. It’s a super monster. It’s an amalgamation of them.
The obvious thing about the VFX is the Ick VFX. But there’s a lot of minor things that people will not realize are VFX that helped make this movie for a very small cost. Like, it’s immensely small. If I made this movie through a studio, it’s a $100 million movie. A lot of that has to do with my ability to apply visual effects in ways that people would never expect. Then I shot it mostly on real sets, which is a huge advantage these days. Because I shot in real towns and real gyms and real high schools, it gives it a much more complex look, because you’re not suddenly going into a virtual world. I hate to give it away, but there’s a whole sequence in “Ick” that’s green screen. For instance, the one with the car flipped upside down, nothing is real. That’s a CG car, that’s a CG exterior, that’s CG everything. And that’s an eight-minute sequence. If I had to really flip a car upside down, that’s a safety issue. A car can collapse and kill your actors, so you’re bracing it with all this steel and things that we can’t afford. So all I did was I hung two chairs upside down, and they would get in them. And then the rest is all CG.
I actually did not go into the movie intending to put in this monster of a soundtrack. I wrote it thinking, just tell a great story. But then, as I told that story, and as [Hank] was pining for his girlfriend from the 2000s, I realized this music is going to be important. It was actually a bit of a debate in my head, because the music that he would listen to is pop punk. A pop punk soundtrack combined with a creature feature? How does that make any sense? Pop punk is a depressing subject matter done in an extremely happy way. And I was like, “Okay, does that even make sense in a horror film?” But I was like, “Well, it’s a funny movie.” So that it essentially turns it into “American Pie”, interspersed with my “Walking Dead” thing. I think it’s weird, but, you know, that’s never stopped me before.
Creed. It was the hardest. It was written in the script. It was an actual plot point. As I wrote it, I sent my music supervisor, Bud Carr, on a quest to get Creed and track Scott Stapp down. Up until the week before we premiered at Toronto, we did not know if we had it. Only in the last minute did we get that right. I was prepared to, like, reshoot the scene and say Nickelback or something, but I couldn’t find any band that really had that sort of cultural impact as when she says “Creed.”