20-05-2025
How ‘The Plague' Director Charlie Polinger Used the Horror Genre to Capture the ‘Chaos and Anxiety' of Male Adolescence
'The Plague' filmmaker Charlie Polinger simply wanted to make a film that actually reflected his adolescent experiences.
'I see a lot of movies about 12 year old boys that are often either a little more 'Goonies'-style biking around at night [that are about] this kind of carefree feeling or a little more bro-y hangout kind of movies. My sense of being 12 was it was more like [a] social anxiety hellscape,' Polinger told Executive Awards Editor Steve Pond at TheWrap's Cannes Conversations in partnership with Brand Innovators.
'You see that [represented] more commonly, I think, in movies about women or about young girls, [movies] like 'Carrie' and 'Raw' and 'Eighth Grade.' You don't see it as often in films about boys because there's a certain vulnerability to [being] the object of terror or to [feel] insecurity in your body. There's sort of a fear of that vulnerability being shown [when it is] centered around masculinity,' Polinger observed. 'I thought it could be exciting to kind of take a genre that I've seen more with women and apply it to a story about boyhood.'
The resulting film, 'The Plague,' marks Polinger's feature directorial debut. It follows Ben (Everett Blunck), a young boy at a water polo summer camp for boys headed by an adult male instructor (Joel Edgerton). Ben quickly finds himself torn between his fear of being ostracized and his conscience when the camp's other boys begin to bully Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), a fellow campmate whose skin condition prompts his bullies to declare that he has 'the plague' and run screaming loudly in the other direction whenever he comes near.
'I'm actually a very bad swimmer,' Polinger revealed with a laugh when asked how he conceived the film's story. 'It came from experiences I had going to some all-boys summer camps, and my experiences at those and my experiences being that age in school and in general — and wanting to tell a story that felt like it really immersed the audience in the subjective experience of being a 12-year-old boy and all of the sort of chaos and anxiety that comes with that.'
Polinger wrote the film while he was staying at his parents' house during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it was not until Edgerton agreed to star in it years later that Polinger was finally able to put 'The Plague' together. 'I think at first [Joel] was actually inquiring about directing it, and I was like, 'I really have to do this one,'' Polinger recalled. 'He was [then] generous enough to offer to act in it and help produce it, just to help get it made. That was really the thing that took us over the edge and [helped us find] the financing.'
While Polinger notes that 'The Plague' is not a 'traditional horror film,' the thing that always excited him about the project was the chance it would give him to immerse viewers in its young protagonist's perspective — where things that adult viewers might not think are a big deal feel like they have 'like and death stakes.' 'That's where the genre stuff came from,' Polinger said, before revealing that he even looked at war films for reference.
'Every single glance and every whisper feels dangerous,' the director explained. 'I really was just trying to think about how Ben, the protagonist, would feel in any given moment, and [I tried to] find ways to cinematically evoke his interior state through the external world.'
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