Erlingur Thoroddsen was obsessed with horror films long before he was allowed to watch them.

The Icelandic filmmaker, who grew up just outside Reykjavik, wasn’t like most kids his age. Rather than playing soccer, he was inside watching American TV shows where he learned to speak English, and building the foundations for the talented filmmaker he would become.

But still, there were those horror films on the periphery.

“I’m not sure exactly where my love of horror began, but I was always intrigued by the stuff that I wasn’t supposed to watch,” Thoroddsen explained. “I remember going to the video store when I was a kid and being drawn to the horror section. I would look at the covers and the pictures on the back and imagine what the film might be like.”

A few years later, Scream was released and not only did he get to see the film, but it also made an immediate and lasting impact on the youngster. He obsessively tracked down all the film’s referenced in the movie and watched them and before long, he was making movies, himself, with his dad’s video camera.

“My friends and I were running around in the back yard with knives and ketchup making short films,” he laughed.

Something else was also happening to the burgeoning filmmaker at the same time, however. He was just beginning to realize that he was gay. It was a pivotal moment in the young man’s life and he says, to this day, that he feels a link between his queerness and his love of horror films.

Iceland isn’t a bad place at all to grow up gay. In the last 20-25 years, they have been remarkably progressive in their lawmaking and their protections to the gay community. In fact they were one of the first countries in the world to legalize gay marriage, and their annual Pride festival boasts attendance in excess of 100,000 people.

“Our government has been very forward-thinking when it comes to gay rights, and that focus is now shifting to trans rights,” the director explained. “It’s such a small country and it has that feeling that everyone knows everyone else and we were quick to realize that we were all in this together.”

By the age of 15, he and his best friend, who also came out of the closet a couple of years later, had rented a camera and put all their effort into creating their very first serious film.

They presented it to their school, charging $2 for admission, and by the end of the night, they had made $400 and Thoroddsen knew for certain that filmmaking was his destiny. After high school, he earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Literature in Iceland and then moved to New York to attend film school at Columbia University where he received his Master’s Degree.

After leaving university life behind, Thoroddsen wasted no time. He’d soon written and directed several short films including Little Death, Bumps in the Night, and Child Eater which he would later turn into a feature film.

And then came Rift.

Beautiful, romantic, and terrifying, Rift is a queer horror film with few peers.

Late one night, Gunnar (Bjorn Stefansson) receives a disturbing phone call from his ex-boyfriend Einar (Sigurður Þór Óskarsson). Fearing that Einar intends to hurt himself in some way, Gunnar makes the journey to where Einar’s staying, hoping he’s not too late.

Upon his arrival, Gunnar finds Einar is okay, at least on the surface, but he cannot shake the feeling that something more is going on, and as the two men are haunted by their past relationship over the course of the next several days, they also discover that other dangers are lurking just outside their front door.

Rift is the kind of film Hitchcock would have made if he were alive and making films today. The line between danger and passion is razor-thin and the tension is beautifully calculated throughout.

It’s a remarkable feat considering the speed with which it was created.

“I started writing in October of 2015 and we were shooting by March of 2016,” Thoroddsen said. “Bjorn had been playing a lot of tough guys roles on stage and Sigorour had been repeatedly cast in childlike roles and they were both looking to do something different so I found them at the perfect time in their careers. We premiered the film less than one year after I started writing.”

The film blurs genre lines, and the writer/director was intensely proud of how the final product and how it was received.

Turning his eye to the future, Thoroddsen says he feels a certain responsibility to continue infusing his films with LGBTQ characters and story lines, but he also says that those characters and situations must grow organically from the material.

“In Iceland, we have very few films every year and almost none of them have queer characters so I feel the need to get up and do something about that,” he said. “There’s something that compels me to do it. I’ll always try to squeeze in some gayness where I can, but for some stories it just doesn’t fit and I can’t force it.”

For now, the filmmaker, who is currently living in Los Angeles, has numerous projects in development including a feature that will take him back to his home country this winter.

Rift is currently available on both Shudder and Amazon Streaming and some of Thoroddsen’s short films are available on YouTube. You can check out one of these shorts, titled The Banishing, and the trailer for Rift below!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xiuuWmraVM