“Math Is The Devil’s Work”: ‘The Cellar’s Brendan Muldowney And Cast On Mixing Math With Supernatural To Make Horror – SXSW Studio

The Cellar writer-director Brendan Muldowney joined stars Elisha Cuthbert and Eoin Macken to discuss the film at Deadline’s Studio as SXSW.

“It came from a short film I made in 2004, called The Ten Steps,” says Muldowney. “and the math… what was the quote we had the either day?”

“Math is the devil’s work,” says Cuthbert.

The Cellar takes place in Ireland, where a family moves into a new house they purchased from an estate auction. When their daughter Ellie (Abby Fitz) goes missing in the cellar after a power outage, Brian (Eoin Macken) believes she ran away but Keira (Elisha Cuthbert) attempts to find out what really happened.

“Her drive is her children,” says Cuthbert. “Once [Ellie] goes missing, you do whatever you can to try to save her or find her.”

“Initially Brian doesn’t actually believe Keira,” says Macken, “cause when you’ve got someone missing and you think it’s something to do with the supernatural, how do you explain that?”

The film was shot in a house in Ireland, which Macken says was haunted to begin with. “Dylan [Fitzmaurice Brady], who plays Steven, didn’t believe me when I told him the house we were filming in was haunted,” says Macken, “and it was haunted… He didn’t believe me that it was haunted and then we went on this little walk through the corridors at nighttime and we heard some stuff and then he believed me, and that for me was the most fun.”

Click the video above to watch the full discussion with Muldowney, Cuthbert, and Macken.