Spring is a love story wrapped in a horror movie that shocks and surprises at every turn. It tells the tale of a young American travelling around Italy and falling for a beautiful woman with a dark secret. And the less you know about it going in, the better (unless you want to know all about it, in which case watch the following trailer or read our review ).

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Preacher

Almost Famous

Lord of the Rings

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The Talented Mr. Ripley

Jaws

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Rather than quiz co-directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead about plot specifics, we therefore asked them to write about what influenced the film in terms of story, look and tone. And their five choices are pretty surprising…Preacher is partially why we’re friends. Bonding over the first read, fantasy creative meetings about how we would shoot The Saint of Killers side story and the ‘Battle of Monument Valley,’ and mutual emotional support when we found out the brilliant team of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg had snatched it up first. We always aim for the same delicate balance of thrills, heart and humor (in short, humanity). We’re not spearheading the TV show, but no one can sue us for using the same tone in Spring (please loop in legal on this).We’ve watched Cameron Crowe’s directors cut three times. We show it to people for fun hoping for the same enthusiasm from it we have. It’s an example of a perfect Hollywood dramedy, and a rare example of optimism as emotional honesty - no one gets the girl, and yet you’re extremely happy with the much more real, human fate every character arrives at, all the while discovering that Penny Lane is so much deeper than your typical female Hollywood love interest. Spring’s precisely timed deflation of melodrama with human levity can be traced back to what Cameron Crowe accomplished here.We’ve covered the emotional bases already, so while LOTR has that, let’s talk about technical perfection. We’d argue that almost every fantasy film out there has trouble getting us into the world, but Tolkien and Jackson just make it seem like they’ve been there already and they’re merely trying to present us what it was like. In Spring we tried to marry practical and visual FX so it doesn’t feel so much like a “LOOK AT THAT!” thing rather than us just capturing what already happened to be there, and it was real rather than impressive. The practical and visual FX hold up to this day, and the cinematography and editing doesn’t feel like lame ol’ generic Hollywood Blockbuster #427 but rather a big-budget vision of an auteur (especially Fellowship). Watch it again. Does it hold up 100%? You’re damn right it does. No one says it’s great “for its time.” It’s just “great.”Something we tried to bring into Spring was the juxtaposition of the grotesque with the incredibly beautiful - Italian coastline, bloody murder. Lovely relationship, real monsters. We watched this film on a whim while filming Spring and noticed some fun similarities - it takes place on the Italian coast, so incredibly beautiful, and deals with brutal murder, and the juxtaposition of the two gives rise to a very interesting, nearly unplaceable feeling. It also gave our lead Lou Taylor Pucci an identity crisis: “Am I Matt Damon?”Peter Benchley is a guy that wrote about Nazi experiments and horrific mutant squid, but probably most famously wrote Jaws. No one thinks of schlock when they think of Jaws, or Jurassic Park, or The Shining, but ultimately all these started out as, essentially, genre fiction. Why do they work? They put the people first. Jaws doesn’t work without us caring so much about the dudes in the boat. The dudes in the boat are way more important than mutant shark. We spend a lot more time with our characters getting to know each other in Spring than we spend pointing the camera at our monster, and we suggest much more than we show (but we still show, c’mon, you gotta give ‘em what they ask for). People talk about Jaws working so well because the mechanical shark malfunctioned on-set, so you don’t see it so much and the mystery keeps us on edge, but what they mean to say is that you spend more time in the psyche of the people that we care about so much and not looking at some impressive effect that ultimately doesn’t add up to much beyond spectacle.Spring hits U.S. screens on March 20 and UK screens on May 22, you can follow the guys on Twitter @JustinHBenson @AaronMoorhead , and you can read our review of the film here