As TV audiences in the UK brace themselves for a gnome invasion with the UK release of horror-comedy series GNOMES on Disney+, Lead Director Matthias Hoene reflects on the challenges of making horror-comedy, the joy of creating murderous gnomes and working with Obsession star Inde Navarrette.
Q) GNOMES has been described as a mix of Gremlins and Hot Fuzz. As the lead director, how did you approach balancing the comedy with the genuine horror of a small town being terrorised by garden ornaments?
The challenge was finding the right cinematic language for two genres that often want completely opposite things. Comedy wants you to see. Horror wants to hide. Comedy thrives on action and reaction happening together, often played at speed. Horror builds through anticipation — withholding information, slowing things down and letting the audience imagine what might be lurking just outside the frame.
But underneath all of that, the characters had to feel real. However ridiculous the world around them becomes, their fear, relationships and emotions cannot be part of the joke. If we believe in them, we can throw as many homicidal garden ornaments at them as we like and, hopefully, the audience will come along for the ride.
Q) What do you think it is about garden gnomes that makes them so uniquely terrifying yet hilarious?
It’s easy to dismiss garden gnomes as chintzy kitsch, but they have a surprisingly long and troubled history. First appearing in 19th-century Germany as wood-carved and ceramic figures believed to bring good luck, they were sneered at by the horticultural establishment and embraced by working-class gardeners as cheerful, affectionate lawn ornaments.
What I love about gnomes is the contradiction. They represent innocence, happiness and a slightly chintzy vision of peaceful country life. So when they suddenly turn on us, there is something inherently funny and deeply unsettling about it. To me, they make perfect horror-comedy villains: cute enough to love, ridiculous enough to make us laugh, and just dangerous enough to make us regret ever putting one in the garden.
Q) The show relies on a blend of practical puppetry and visual effects. What were the biggest logistical challenges of making inanimate, tiny objects look actively murderous on set?
I grew up without a TV and spent my time reading books, building Lego spaceships, painting Warhammer miniatures, sculpting dioramas and making homage film posters with an airbrush and acrylic paint. I’ve always liked making things by hand. My first short film featured an animatronic mobile phone, for which I used servos scavenged from my remote-controlled car. Having inhaled films like Gremlins and Critters as a kid, I was very keen to give Gnomes that same handmade, crafted feel. We worked with creature designer and puppeteer Justin Dix and his excellent team, who sculpted gnomes by hand in clay, as well as 3D modelling and printing some of them. There is nothing quite as joyous as a hand-puppeteered killer garden gnome. There’s an immediacy to having the creature physically there on set — the actors can touch it, fight it, throw it across a room.
To make it all work we created the Gnome Unit - a guerrilla unit working in parallel with the main shoot, wrangling our little terracotta terrors while the main unit was off filming the actors. Of course, we also needed help from VFX, and often we used a hybrid approach: body and movement from puppetry; eyes and facial expressions from CGI. That allowed us to keep the physicality and imperfections of something handmade while giving the gnomes a much greater range of expression.
Q) You are well-known for directing Cockneys vs Zombies. How did your experience directing fast-paced, comedic zombie gore influence the way you directed GNOMES?
I approached the series with the same mischievous sense of play as Cockneys and wanted to push the show as far as we could. The first few episodes are very character-driven, but the show keeps ramping up - getting bigger, crazier and more outrageous - until the action explodes into an epic finale in episode six.
One of the elements that runs through all my work is that I try to give every story a lot of heart. And that extended to the gnomes themselves. I never wanted them to feel like one anonymous horde of monsters. That became part of the fun: however big and chaotic the action became, the gnomes weren’t just things attacking people. They were characters with their own personalities, grudges and particular enthusiasm for violence.
Q) GNOMES was created by Joel Kohn. How closely did you work with him to bring the scripts and overarching vision for the series to life?
The collaboration with Joel was fantastic. We developed the scripts together with our amazing writers, Tegan Higginbotham and Paul Verhoeven, and worked very closely throughout prep to establish the world, the tone and the rules of the gnomes.
As pilot director and co-showrunner, a big part of my role was establishing the overall cinematic language of the series - how we balanced horror and comedy, how the gnomes moved and behaved, and how the practical puppetry and VFX would work together.
Once we started shooting, Joel and I alternated between the main and second units. While I directed my episodes: 1, 2, 4 and 6, Joel would often be out with the Gnome Unit shooting gnome sequences. Then, while Joel or our other director, Sian Davis, were directing their episodes, I would shoot second unit for them. It was a genuinely collaborative way of making the show - and probably the only way we could have pulled off something this ambitious on the schedule we had.
Q) The series features an incredible lead cast including Asa Butterfield (Sex Education, Ender’s Game) and Megan Smart (Class of ’07, Black Snow). What do they bring to the comedic dynamic of the show?
It’s incredibly important to me to create a great atmosphere on set, and Asa was one of the best collaborators I could have wished for. He brought this wonderfully easy-going energy that everyone responded to and that made the set a genuinely fun place to be.
But underneath that chilled demeanour, he was incredibly hardworking. He would prep scenes with his co-stars the day before and came to set ready to play. He brought an enormous range to Arnold Kipps — brilliant comic timing, but also a real emotional truth that grounds all the insanity happening around him.
Megan brought tremendous warmth and emotionality to the show, and her chemistry with Asa is fantastic. Gnomes is, at heart, a love story, and from the beginning Asa and Megan felt like two people who had known each other for years. That gave us the freedom to push the comedy and the craziness around them because the relationship at the centre always felt real.
Tess Haubrich (Alien: Romulus) had to spend four hours a day in make-up to become our Gnome Queen. But when she finally stepped onto set and started casting her spells, it wasn’t only the terracotta armies that were entranced — I could hardly bring myself to say cut either.
However absurd the world became, I never wanted the actors to play the absurdity. They played their characters and relationships for real — and we let the homicidal garden ornaments take care of the horror comedy.
Q) Your next feature film is the survival horror thriller INVERTIGO. What can you tell us about it.
INVERTIGO is a rollercoaster survival thriller about five teenagers who become trapped on an unfinished rollercoaster during a thunderstorm in Florida.
The film stars Inde Navarrette and Tim Roth, and we’re currently in post-production, with the release planned for 2027.
It’s an edge-of-your-seat thriller, but what I’m most excited about are the characters and the performances. You put five young people hundreds of feet in the air, take away any obvious means of escape and then start applying pressure — physically and emotionally — and you very quickly find out who they really are.
We shot the film with Tea Shop Productions across Bangkok, London and Florida, and I can’t wait to share it with the world when it’s ready.
Q) What was it like working with the cast, especially with Obsession star Inde Navarrette.
I remember watching an early screening of OBSESSION at Fantastic Fest in Austin, and my producer James Harris recommended I check out Inde. No surprise, I was blown away by her performance, and when she responded well to the script, we set up a meeting and I offered her the role straight away.
Inde is a very collaborative and giving actor, and we had a lot of fun developing her character during prep and on set. Everyone knows she has oodles of charisma and that the camera loves her. But what is really magical to watch is how instinctive and effortlessly natural she is as an actress
The INVERTIGO shoot was incredibly demanding. We often filmed eight metres up on a steel rollercoaster, at night, in torrential rain, and I could sometimes only give direction through a megaphone. Despite all that, Inde pulled out amazing performances over and over again. More than that, she was so giving and supportive that everyone around her was able to do their best work too — and I think that really shows in the rushes and in the finished movie. She deserves all the success and recognition coming her way, and I can’t wait for everyone to see her in INVERTIGO next year.
Q) What is it about the horror genre that you particularly like?
Horror is the ultimate morality tale. I love that horror can be anarchic, mischievous and incredibly visceral. It bypasses the intellectual part of your brain and goes straight for the nervous system. You can physically feel an audience holding its breath, tensing up, and then releasing all of that tension together.
That’s one of the things I love most about cinema. I want to take the viewer somewhere, make them forget for a while that they’re sitting in a room looking at a screen.
Q) Finally, looking ahead, what other projects are there in the pipeline?
I had an enormous amount of fun making GNOMES, so I’m excited to do more television, particularly as a showrunner and pilot director. We have a few projects we’re pitching at the moment.
On the feature side, I’m in prep for the wellness-retreat horror film Transformation with Stone Village (Station Eleven), and character-driven battle royale Best Enemies with Parallel 42, as well as another top-secret project with Tea Shop and Capstone..
GNOMES is currently streaming on Disney +.
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