Cuckoo Director Tilman Singer On His Genre-Defying Horror Movie & Where The Idea For His New Creature Feature Came From

Summary Cuckoo is Tilman Singer's unique take on the creature feature genre, intertwining horror, comedy, and action.

The film features a dreamy, fairytale-like atmosphere while exploring themes of grief, family dynamics, and sinister secrets.

Singer's evolution from Luz to Cuckoo showcases his ability to mix genres and create a visually striking, emotionally complex film.

Cuckoo is filmmaker Tilman Singer's second feature, but you can't tell by looking at it. Set in the German Alps and shot on 35mm, the movie has a dreamy quality to it, almost fairytale-esque in its story about American teenager Gretchen, who moves with her father's family to a secluded resort in the off-season. This resort is home to more than just tourists, though, and as Gretchen becomes increasingly paranoid after experiencing several run-ins with a strange, humanoid creature, things naturally go haywire.

Cuckoo stars Euphoria's Hunter Schafer as Gretchen, with Jessica Henwick as her stepmother Beth and Dan Stevens as the mysterious and insidious resort owner Herr Konig. Gretchen is still grieving the loss of her mother and grappling with the desire to return home, as she feels out of place with her father's new family, which includes her half-sister Alma, plagued with mysterious medical issues.

Related 2024 Is One Of The Best Years For Horror In My Lifetime The horror genre has been having one of the best years it's ever had, with over a dozen critically-acclaimed scary films coming out in 2024.

Tilman's first feature Luz was his film school thesis project and serves as his take on the possession movie. Cuckoo, on the other hand, is his idiosyncratic version of the creature feature, taking the titular bird and turning it into something even more sinister that lurks in the German woods around the resort. Coupled with a deliriously unhinged performance from Stevens, Cuckoo is both pulpy fun and a skin-crawling creepfest.

Tilman Singer on Cuckoo's Inspirations & How Luz Helped Him Evolve His Process As A Filmmaker

The Director Also Talks Defying Genre Conventions & The Action-Filled Ending

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The idea for Cuckoo came to Singer when he was finishing up work on Luz, which was released in 2018: "The idea literally grew out of a mood I was in at the time," says the director, "I wasn't well then because I thought nobody [would] watch [Luz]." While watching a documentary about the cuckoo bird, though, everything came together for him:

I watched a documentary about the cuckoo bird and how they breed and that they put their eggs into the nests of other bird species. And then I had this shot of host parents feeding a cuckoo chick that is not theirs. And they don't abandon nests, they just keep on doing that. And that was kind of beautiful — beautiful in a horrific way. I couldn't let go of this image. So after a while, I thought like, how am I projecting this on humans?

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Cuckoo represented a major step up for the director, though. Jumping from a film school project to a full-on Neon production, the scale of the project was immediately larger than what Singer was used to. On those differences, Singer says, "There's a big difference just in terms of time spent, and how you have to deal with it — the energy, the strength, the stamina that you have shooting for a longer time."

I could take some of that with me for the shoot of Cuckoo, although Cuckoo was longer and even more stressful because everything grew. But I think what I could take most is my own way of shooting films [and] how I think about scenes. I usually think about scenes in shots. I have a shotlist fixed sort of. I can improvise to a degree on set, but I have this sort of guiding shotlist in my mind with the cinematographer, Paul Faltz, right? We have this figured out and, sticking to that and knowing exactly what we want as a movie that's already in our heads, that was really, really helpful to have.

Though Cuckoo is billed as a horror film, Singer pulls from many genres to make it all come together. Stevens' over-the-top villain adds a sinister flavor to Cuckoo, but it's also played for laughs at times and though there is a creature lurking in the shadows of the mountains, the film features bump-in-the-night scares and guns-blazing action hand-in-hand. "I love scenes that are funny and tragic at the same time, or scary and funny," Singer says, "There's the story on the surface. But there's more to [it], however you want to look at it — if it's above or below or it's in the ether or whatever it is."

When it comes to the film's action climax, which features a bloody and balletic hospital-set scene, it's just one of many shifts in Cuckoo. Of the ending, Singer held back from diving into spoilers, but he did say that the film was always heading to this showdown:

I think it was always heading in this direction. I'm sure there were slightly different endings in different drafts that I wrote, but I personally just get so much pleasure out of when tastes — whatever it is, tone or genre — mix with each other. And I love mixing genres too. You can feel the movie in all kinds of different ways, right? And disrupting that straight sort of storyline on the surface with different tones and different genres. That sort of hint at like, hey, yeah, you can also feel a different way about this, or think about it a different way.

Cuckoo hits theaters on August 9.

Check back soon for our interview with Hunter Schafer, Jessica Henwick, and Dan Stevens.