An Interview with Tatu Heikkinen and Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen, Creators of Haunters of the Silencee

by Mike Haberfelner

February 2026

Tatu Heikkinen on (re)Search my Trash

Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen on (re)Search my Trash

Your new movie Haunters of the Silence - in a few words, what's it about?

Tatu: Haunters of the Silence is about a recently widowed man whose grief leads him to experience sleep paralysis.

From what I know, Haunters of the Silence is the first feature film for you both - so how did you come up with the idea to make a feature, and how did you prepare for it even?

Veleda: We saw a film called The Deeper You Dig by the Adams Family (Toby Poser, John Adams, Lulu & Zelda Adams), and we were really impressed how one family was able to encompass so many facets of filmmaking and create something on their own with a very small budget. That was really the catalyst for us wanting to make our own feature film with the resources that we had available.

Tatu: We wrote a loose script and drew a very basic storyboard for the overall plot of the film, but we ended up coming up with a majority of the film’s content as we were filming it. We even had a finished cut of the film that we ended up scrapping and re-shooting almost entirely once a different story had started to take form.

With Haunters of the Silence being a horror movie, is that genre at all dear to you, and some of your genre favourites?

Tatu: We both love horror films, especially folk horror, which we tried to draw some elements of into our film.

Veleda: Some of my favorites in the horror genre are Hagazussa, Sator, the original Wicker Man, Men, Hereditary, The Ritual and Hellbender. A recent favorite would be the Adams Family’s newest film Mother of Flies.

Tatu: I’d say mine are The Shining, Begotten, Where the Devil Roams and Nosferatu (the 1922 version).

(Other) sources of inspiratiion when writing Haunters of the Silence?

Tatu: One of the biggest inspirations was the poetry of Madison Julius Cawein, whose poem Haunters of the Silence gave our film its title. That poem really set a lot of the initial atmosphere that we wanted to portray in the story.

Veleda: For me, it was my background as a photographer and the desire to translate that into video form. I was hugely inspired by filming techniques using fabric, that can be seen in Lars von Trier’s Medea, Aleksandr Sokurov’s Mother and Son, as well as Peter Liechti’s The Sound of Insects: Record of a Mummy.

Tatu: And of course, for me personally, my own experiences with sleep paralysis were the catalyst for wanting to make this film about this subject matter in the first place.

Haunters of the Silence basically follows nightmare logic in its narration and is thus often associative when it comes to storytelling and at times veers off into the absurd and the surreal - so how easy or hard is it to not literally lose one's plot telling a story this way?

Veleda: I would say the hardest part was narrowing it down to what we really needed to portray, since we had so many different ideas that we could’ve explored.

Do talk about your movies approach to horror!

Tatu: The horror in our film is more about atmosphere, and the weight that each sound and silence carries. We wanted to sort of lull the viewer in a trance, not unlike the hypnotist in the comic strip that you see throughout the movie.

Veleda: It also factors in ideas of emotional isolation that the character experiences after losing his wife.

Tatu: And some of the hauntings that the main character experiences are not necessarily evil or bad, even though they might manifest in frightening forms at first. The film is really about him coming to terms with his losses, old and recent.

A few words about your overall directorial aoproach to your story at hand?

Tatu: A lot of the scenes were directly referencing my own sleep paralysis experiences, so that really set the direction of the film.

Veleda: I was trying to create visually interesting shots of mundane objects, and small slices of time.

Tatu: And like you pointed out, the film very much follows nightmare logic, so the nice thing was that we weren’t really confined to a specific sense of reality or continuity.

Tatu, you play the lead in Haunters of the Silence - so what can you tell us about your character, what did you draw upon to bring him to life, and how much Tatu Heikkinen can we find in him?

Tatu: I was basically portraying an alternate reality version of myself, so the character in the film definitely shares a lot of my traits. As you notice, the main character does not say a single word during the movie, which ties into me being Finnish – as us Finns are known to not be very talkative. As for the parts where I’m experiencing sleep paralysis, I just tried to harken back to my memories of actually being in that state.

Veleda, what was it like to direct your husband, and would you ever do it again?

Veleda: It was awesome. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and would love to do it again. We’re very good at bouncing ideas off of each other and my desire for capturing visuals is very complimentary to Tatu’s style of storytelling. We both work from home and spend a lot of time together, and we genuinely enjoy each other’s company and creating together.

What was the collaboration between the two of you like, generally speaking, and along what lines did you share your workload?

Tatu: We both participated in writing the story and we shared directorial duties.

Veleda: My history as a photographer made it where I had very strong opinions on how I wanted the shot compositions framed.

Tatu: Veleda did all of the cinematography while I edited the film. We both contributed to the soundtrack, and we also had our friend John Haughm compose music for parts of the film. We had a few guest stars in voice acting roles and musical contributions, but I’d say the two of us made more than 90% of the film together.

A few words about the shoot as such, and the on-set atmospere?

Tatu: We love working together, so outside of some technical issues every now and then, it was a pretty smooth process.

Veleda: We just communicate really well.

The $64-question of course, where can Haunters of the Silence be seen?

Tatu: In the United States it is available for streaming on Tubi. A DVD + soundtrack CD release will be coming in early March of 2026.

Anything you can tell us about audience and critical reception of Haunters of the Silence?

 Veleda: We’ve had some great responses from film critics and peers.

Tatu: It’s been really interesting hearing other people’s interpretations of the themes and symbolism in the film. With each review or comment about the movie, we learn something new about it ourselves. 

Any future projects you'd like to share?

Tatu: We started working on our second feature film late last year, but as the film takes place mainly outdoors during autumn, we simply ran out of filming time, as winter rolled in. We plan to continue shooting it this coming fall.

Your/your movie's website, social media, whatever else?

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Anything else you're dying to mention and I have merely forgotten to ask?

Veleda: We’d love to know if anyone could identify the music box tune that plays during the end credits. It is from a stuffed animal music box that my parents gave me when I was 4 years old, and I’ve managed to hold on to it for all these years.

Thanks for the interview!

Thank you so much for your interest in our movie!

© by Mike Haberfelner

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