BY Joshua LeSuer

For Gregg Holtgrewe, director of "Dawning," there's nothing more sinister than insinuation, more wicked than a whisper. Which is why he's made a monster movie with no monster. Instead, there's "the presence," that nasty nothingness that lives in the crackle of twigs, the shiver of wind, wood settling in a house, creakings, groans, the little, creepy sounds that could be the pattering of ghostly feet or the grumbling of some ghoul or goblin.

"I asked myself what is the scariest thing I could think of? The answer: Whatever is left up to my imagination," Holtgrewe said. "I wanted to make a monster movie where the monster never shows up. It's like a Bergman movie. I kept asking myself, if Bergman was making a horror movie, what would he do?"

In "Dawning," a nuclear family going up in mushroom clouds visits Leatherface's summer home. A man shows up and has a fit on their kitchen floor. The family members wonder and whisper. The wind whispers. Other things whisper, too.

"This movie steers away from the hiply dysfunctional, indie family of 'Juno' and 'Little Miss Sunshine,'" Holtgrewe said. "I understand dysfunction and inner fears. There's nothing scarier than what we think people are saying about us."

This is the third crack Holtgrewe's had at "Dawning". He made it the first time in 2003, in black and white, for $800. In 2006, Danny Salmen ("13 Hours In a Warehouse") signed on to produce and act in the movie. The budget was upped to fifty grand. Holtgrewe was disappointed in the chop job the editors did on that version and said they could take his name off the movie or reshoot it a third time. The backers opted for round three, even ponying up another fifty thou.

While "Dawning" is far removed in approach from Minneap's great pop mythologizer, Jon Springer, Holtgrewe draws some parallels between his work and the man who gave us such demented genius as "Wood Witch," "Doll Face" and "The Hagstone Demon".

"There's a clinical coldness to his work, like Kubrick or early Polanski; he knows his tone and there's a real perversion of sexuality," Holtgrewe said. "It truly is his photography."

However, Holtgrewe points out that Springer is in love with monsters (like the doll with the gruesome bug eyes in "Doll Face" or the demon cat in "Hagstone"), whereas, for Holtgrewe, there's no scarier monster than the invisible man, the one under our bed and the one deep in our hearts.

The movie was shot at Salmen's mom's cabin in Hayward, WI. The shoot took only 11 days, nine at the cabin and two in Minneap.

The whole film pretty much takes place in the cabin, accepting the opening credit sequence, which smacks of "The Shining," one of the few clear derivatives in "Dawning". The whole place had to be tented, to produce artificial gloom, since the action takes place in a single night, and all the cameras had to be tucked away in corners. The only light sources came from lamps or overhead lights.

"We used a lot of William Wellman-type photography, keeping something going in the background and foreground, like Orson Welles did," Holtgrewe said. "Once a sense of space was established, we also tried to fill the frame with faces, like Tak Fujimoto does in 'The Silence of the Lambs'."

The sound design--by Chris Cunningham--is very organic. Lots of frogs, crickets, rustling grasses. There's only music at the very beginning of the film, the middle and at the very end. The score is mostly cello plucking, which adds a quavery, pensive quality to the film. Still, Holtgrewe wanted to be careful about adding too much music, such it's such a big manipulator of emotion.

During a screening of "Dawning," Holtgrewe was approached by the same fellow who repped "Hoop Dreams". He described it as an "artfully done, high concept thriller".

The most important thing for Holtgrewe isn't getting into festivals, but getting a sales agent. According to Holtgrewe, only five percent of the films sent into festivals like Sundance actually get accepted.

When asked to explain his film, Holtgrewe has a pair of quotes handy. One is from a reviewer: "'Dawning' broods on the finality of death.'" The other quote comes from his film. The son gives his father a copy of "Into the Wild". After describing the brutal subject matter, the father says:

"It sounds depressing."

The son replies:

"It's about more than that, but I don't know how to explain it."

"We all die," Holtgrewe said. "It's that simple, it's that horrifying, it's that complicated."

For more about Holtgrewe and co., go here: http://wholecrue.wordpress.com/

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