Buzz Blog

Delicate Arch—a 2024 psychological thriller/horror feature from Utah native writer/director Matt Warren, and filmed in Utah—is now available for rental and purchase on platforms including Apple and Amazon, and streaming on Screambox. Warren spoke with City Weekly about his artistic origins and how Delicate Arch was born.

CW: What is your artist origin story?
MW: The earliest sort of creative talent, inasmuch as I was that talented at it, was drawing and illustration. That goes back to my earliest childhood that I was sort of excelling beyond my age at drawing. That continued pretty much until I went to college, and it sort of fell off a bit. But I thought, growing up, that I was going to be an artist, like a painter or a comic-book illustrator. My interest in film really took off in the mid-’90s, and it was sort of a few different elements coming together. Part of it was Sundance, and growing up in Park City, and growing up in that go-go Sundance of the mid-’90s; it was sort of an intoxicating environment to be in. In college, I went to the U to study graphic design, because I thought that was how you could make a living as someone who could draw. I pursued that for a year or two, but all the friends I made at the U were film majors. I soon realized I was pretty much daydreaming constantly about making movies.

CW: What was the origin of the idea for Delicate Arch?
MW: I have been a horror hound since way back since way back in the day. One of the things besides Sundance that influenced me was Joe Bob Briggs on TNT. Once I decided to be a filmmaker, I always thought about making horror films; … it’s always been a reliable space for independent filmmakers, and something there’s always a demand for. … [The idea] was really the combination of two different things. One was, in college, my friend group went down to Arches and hiked up to Delicate Arch and had a similar camping outing as was depicted in the film—but not as dramatic, in either the supernatural aspects or in the character drama. And part of that trip was, we made a short film that was basically the same as the one made by the characters in the film. Something about that short film sort of stuck in my mind, as did the camping trip itself.

CW: On the Delicate Arch website, you identify a number of films that were influences, including the documentaries by Rodney Ascher [who has been at Sundance with films including Room 237 and A Glitch in the Matrix], but I was also thinking about meta-narratives like Stranger Than Fiction.
MW: I can’t overstate the importance of Rodney Ascher and especially A Glitch in the Matrix to this film. As for Stranger Than Fiction, I was in Los Angeles [around that time], working with a writing partner. And we would really try to dive in and get our hands on every hot script that was emerging. We would get these screenplays and print them out and read them. Stranger Than Fiction was one of the first ones I remember. But that was really how we were trying to write for a while, with these really high-concept ideas, that post-Charlie Kaufman era.

CW: You also identify The Cabin in the Woods, which fits in to dialogue in the movie about understanding the archetypes of horror movies. How did you manage navigating self-awareness without feeling like the movie was becoming too self-referential?
MW: This is one of those things in the film that I think works, and that I’m very proud of for being able to balance in terms of tone. Nine times out of ten, when things are playing with these tropes, in sort of a post-modern manner, it’s through the lens of comedy. I think [Delicate Arch] is funny because the characters are funny, but I wanted to treat their situation seriously. I love all these characters and I took them and all their wants and needs seriously.

CW: In terms of the fate of one character in the movie, there's a kind of auto-critique about filmmaking.
MW: As far as the filmmaking part of it goes, I love movies, and I love being a part of making movies, but personally I get so tired of movies that are a "love letter to movies." I get so tired of that. I described Delicate Arch as a hate letter to movies. Let’s examine our relationship to this thing.