When a newly widowed father moves into a duplex with his son and new girlfriend, unexplainable events start occurring that lead the family down a dark and dangerous path. The Evil Next Door is a one-hour and twenty-seven-minute long spiritual horror. In the vein of classic ghost haunting tales, the film, about a family trying to stay together despite all of the trauma they've been through, is written and directed by Swedish filmmakers Tord Danielsson and Oskar Mellander in their American debut.

During our conversation, the avid Final Draft users covered everything from the realities of rewriting as screenwriters, doing the work even when you don’t want to, and translating horror from script to screen.

But first, I asked the filmmakers about their writing process as a team.

“Working as a duo, the main thing is before you start, you have to work on the beat sheet and have the character arcs worked out before you begin writing”, says Danielsson.

In regards to writing the ending of the film, the filmmakers strayed from their original path. Mellander explains, “The ending was slightly more complex and we had to do a tiny reshoot to simplify it.”

“We rewrote the ending in the editing process”, adds Danielsson. "When it comes to editing a movie, that’s the last step in the writing process. We soon realized the ending needed more than we were able to shoot in the first version. [But] we felt like the audience needed more closure, which was more ambiguous in the first draft.”

As both writers and directors on the project, the filmmakers had the luxury to redesign their production to fit the very narrow budget.

“We wrote a shooting script while we were actually writing," explains Mellander. "Because we had so little money, we had to do so much planning, so not much changed from our script to the screen.”

“One thing that did happen was some scenes became scarier when we filmed them than how they were in the script,” Danielsson adds. “That actually became a problem during the editing process. We had to move some things around because the scares had to come in the right order in the movie.”

“We switched and cut them differently to keep the horror bigger and build to the end,” concludes Mellander.

When asked what advice they would give their younger writer selves, the filmmakers had similar
answers.

“The most classic advice maybe is writing is rewriting. Write the crappy version and then make it better. Put in the work, it will get better,” advises Danielsson.

“How it looks in the first version doesn't ever matter to anyone but you. No one will ever see it. Just do it; don’t think too much before doing it. I hate writing scripts, it's horrible,” laughs Mellander. “Just write things. How can you get better if you don’t practice?”

Internationally known as The Other Side, Americans can watch The Evil Next Door in theaters and on demand June 25th, 2021.