Creepy kids have been a staple of horror movies, from The Village of the Damned and The Bad Seed to Children of the Corn and The Ring. The Hole in the Ground (read our review) has its own creepy kid. Chris (James Quinn Markey) lives with his single mother Sarah (Seana Kerslake) in a remote house. Out back there is a forest, and a giant crater. Something from the hole in the ground replaces Chris with a changeling, and Chris spends the rest of the movie creeping Sarah, and the audience, the fuck out.

The difference in Chris before and after is subtle.

“One was human and one was othery,” Markey succinctly stated to us.

Director Lee Cronin elaborated, “The idea was it’s this kid with a specific personality and then just a little tick on the clock to the right, where he’s just that little bit off. If we went too far, it becomes a different thing. You lose that casting of doubt we were trying to play with.”

Sometimes Sarah looks under Chris’s bedroom door and sees him moving not quite human-like. Cronin directed Markey’s body language to change.

“If the changeling monster is pretending to be Chris and then Lee wants me to change totally into the monster, he would shout ‘monster mode’ or something like that,” Markey said.

“I would then just clear my head and fill it with, ‘I need to be a monster now.’ Do things roughly but also act it out. That worked really.”

Cronin had some subtle tricks to make Markey look more menacing too. “Whenever he is what we would call the altered Chris, or the other, all of his clothes were one size too small with a second set of wardrobe that made him just feel subtly bigger so everything feels a little bit squeezed on him as well. As alike Chris he is, there’s always just something that’s a little off. And you were great at not blinking as well. The master of not blinking.”

There is a line in the film, “Children can be angels and monsters.” Chris literally becomes a monster, but any parent can probably relate to seeing both in their children.

“I think that’s one of the metaphors,” Cronin said. “Less than that being a metaphor, it’s the idea that that’s true. That’s the thing and if you can play with that little bit of truth, it gives you a chance to be playful and to use some horror around that. I think that was one of the things that was at play, but then also then just that big theme of doubt as well. Looking at somebody that you know how they look, you know how they move, you know how they sound, you know how they smell but then you’ve just got this doubt that something is off, that something’s not quite right. None of us are parents here. I have a lot of nieces and nephews. Seeing their struggles with their kids as well, that they can be both a blessing and a curse I suppose.”

The Hole in the Ground is a DirecTV exclusive starting January 31, and opens in theaters March 1.