‘The Plague’ Director Charlie Polinger on Making Audiences Squirm by Revisiting Their Childhood and How a Film About Bullying Plays in Trump’s America

“Sometimes I’m so fucking glad that I never have to be young again.”

Film critic David Ehrlich’s brief review of Charlie Polinger‘s “The Plague” on Letterboxd succinctly sums up scores of sentiments shared on social media. The film, which opens in theaters on Dec. 24 via Independent Film Company, is an unconventional horror tale about a young boy named Ben (Everett Blunck), who is new to the social structure of an all-boys water polo camp. Other children, under the direction of their cruel peer Jake (Kayo Martin) and with very little adult supervision, alienate shy young Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) by saying he has the titular disease. Things get uncomfortable from there.

The casual viciousness of children is the centerpiece of the film, which has triggered audiences who grew up in the same era as Polinger. After he directed a 2018 short film named “Sauna” with similar themes, he caught COVID and was quarantined in his childhood bedroom. While there, Polinger went through his journals and was reminded of the genesis of the “Plague” game and the memories of people he hadn’t thought about in ages.

“I’ve been surprised every step of the way, even just how cross-generational and cross-cultural that sentiment of youth seems to be,” he says. “I had that experience looking at these journals, where it was a sensory portal bringing me back to a time that I had really buried. It was very intense and visceral and overwhelming. I think that the movie has that effect on other people, where it’s like that smell, that candle that brings you back to certain times in life. That takes you on your own journey, and anyone might apply something personal to the movie. People come up to me after screenings and talk to me about their experiences, very personal stories.”

Although the film is a period piece set a few decades ago without cellphones, it’s being released at a time when the country is run by President Trump, who frequently uses bullying to set the national tone. Polinger says that although his film is informed by specificity, it can speak broadly to many different cultural touchpoints.

“My feeling about films in general is, when you’re making something that feels as honest as possible and personal, those things usually apply in larger political ways,” he says. “I think there are dynamics of how bullying works, but also how social hierarchies are developed, and myths are made. ‘The Plague’ is kind of a myth. In the beginning, it’s clearly a very dumb game and a dumb joke, and it’s not taken very seriously. But because everyone else chooses to take it seriously, because everyone else is doing it, it starts to become something increasingly real because the collective has made it so.

“Jake, as a ringleader, will look at you like you’re crazy if you don’t take it seriously,” Polinger continues. “You want to fit in with Jake because it’s too scary not to have his approval, because he’s so charismatic, and he’s bonding with everyone else by making fun of the outcast. So you don’t want to be that person. You play the rules of the game, and suddenly they become crystallized. I think that paradigm applies to bigger social structures, political things … in general, authoritarianism. There are cycles of this throughout history that are built around the same human instincts that, hopefully, this film is exploring through a more personal lens.”

After “The Plague,” Polinger is set to adapt a high-profile property, helming a feature-length version of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Masque of the Red Death,” starring Oscar winner Mikey Madison. Polinger is excited to start filming his unique vision of the classic text.

“It’s definitely inspired by the short story, but it goes into a completely new story,” he says. “So it’s a very bombastic, irreverent, dark comedic tale, set in this medieval, slightly fantastical world. It’s not a modernized version of it at all. It’s high energy, it’s out there and very different in many ways on the surface from ‘The Plague,’ but also exploring claustrophobic group dynamics — just from a very different genre and tone.”

Watch the trailer for “The Plague” below.