IN THE PAST decade, Jon Wright has directed an alien invasion (with his 2012 cult hit Grabbers) and an AI uprising (with 2014’s Robot Overlords). But it all started with goblins. “My grandfather had a farm in the Irish countryside, and he believed in the fairy folk,” the Belfast-born filmmaker tells Empire. “He tried to build a wall on what he believed was a sidhe, which is an invisible sort of homeland for the fairies. Every morning when he got up, the wall had been knocked down. My granddad was quite a funny man, but I think he was serious about this.”
Long inspired by this story of vandalic pixies, and the book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales he’d feverishly read as a kid while staying at his grandparents’ remote farmhouse (“The uncensored pre-Victorian versions where punishments are meted out in quite a savage way”), Wright has, with Robot Overlords screenwriter Mark Stay, concocted a home-invasion fantasy horror steeped in personal folklore. He elevator-pitches Unwelcome as “Straw Dogs meets Gremlins”, in which nice English newlyweds Hannah John-Kamen and Douglas Booth inherit an Irish cottage beset both by unfriendly human locals and by even less friendly, non-human ‘Redcaps’. Or, as Wright puts it, “this bizarre bunch of goblins”.