How the fear of losing one's parents led to 'Undertone' horror movie
How the fear of losing one's parents led to 'Undertone' horror movie
Brian Truitt, USA TODAYFri, March 13, 2026 at 1:15 PM UTC
0
Ian Tuason has always been good at terrifying people. As a child, neighbors on his Toronto street would ask his mom to stop letting him tell scary stories because their kids weren’t sleeping.
That knack hasn’t been lost as an adult – the Canadian director just added a new skill set, using immersive sound design to help create the found-audio horror movie “Undertone” (in theaters now). It's the freakiest film you’ll hear all year, but there was emotional hardship involved, too, as he wrote the movie during the “darkest time of my life” caregiving for two dying parents.
“It feels miraculous and feels like alchemy. I feel like I'm a mystic now,” Tuason says of the “healing” process of making “Undertone.” “Just be as honest as you can and magic happens.”
Join our Watch Party! Sign up to receive USA TODAY's movie and TV recommendations right in your inbox
A series of mysterious audio files causes supernatural chaos for podcaster Evy (Nina Kiri) in the horror film "Undertone."
The movie stars Nina Kiri as Evy Babic, the cohost of a popular paranormal podcast and recovering alcoholic who’s nursing a bad breakup and taking care of her comatose mother (Michele Duquet). Evy records her pod with remote cohost Justin (Adam DiMarco) in the middle of the night – she’s the skeptic, he’s the believer – and for their latest episode, they’re listening to 10 mysterious audio files emailed to them.
One by one, they listen to the increasingly unnerving sounds of a pregnant couple being haunted by a dark force, which begins to invade Evy’s existence in chilling fashion.
Tuason began his filmmaking career doing 360-degree immersive YouTube horror shorts, including 2015’s viral “3:00am,” and was working on a screenplay about paranormal enthusiasts investigating the phenomenon of songs being played backward when COVID hit. Both of his parents received terminal cancer diagnoses around the same time, so Tuason moved back into his suburban childhood home to care for them while also working on what would become “Undertone.”
Advertisement
“I was just writing my life and what I was struggling with,” Tuason recalls. “You're pretty much in a constant state of fear: Are they gone yet? What is it going to feel like when they do go? But then there's other emotions, too, that I didn't realize like guilt. You start wondering if you could have done better. It's so stressful that you want to leave. But then you feel guilty for wanting to leave. I kind of explored that.”
Director Ian Tuason works with star Nina Kiri on the set of "Undertone." Tuason filmed his debut movie in the same Toronto house where he was caregiver for his two dying parents.
Tuason’s mom died first and then his dad two-and-a-half years later. “I was writing the entire time, and then when it was done, I guess I was in shock. Because I didn't even realize what kind of mental anguish and self-created suffering I was putting myself through,” Tuason says.
After a year of developing his script, “I kind of healed a little,” he says. But when Tuason decided to film “Undertone” in his childhood home and production began, “all those emotions started coming back. I drank again. I couldn't help it. I went sober for a bit and then once we started shooting, I was like, ‘I need a drink.’ ”
While he’s sober now and “it turned out great and I'm happy with it,” the director adds, “Yeah, it was very hard.”
1 / 0Stephen King's career in photos: Look back at the ‘King of Horror’ and his books
Bestselling author Stephen King, shown in a 1970 file photo.
Since the Sundance Film Festival premiere of “Undertone,” Tuason has connected with fans who’ve experienced caregiving for their parents or who “are kind of dreading that day that it happens,” he says. The filmmaker has also been tapped to relaunch the popular “Paranormal Activity” franchise and is planning “Undertone” to be a trilogy.
So would his parents appreciate his horror success? Tuason says his parents – mom was an engineer, dad was a medical tech – immigrated from the Phillippines to Canada and “weren’t really big on the arts. Filipino parents, they always want you to be a doctor but I was good at scaring kids.
“At a certain point, they knew that I was heading in that direction, and they were just proud of anything I did.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Undertone' horror movie boasts extremely personal backstory
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
