Makers of scary thrillers got their start in St. Paul

As Minnesota-born filmmakers, the Dowdle brothers have been compared with the Coen brothers. The Dowdles hail from St. Paul, and their specialty is frightening people.

The brothers credit their mother for their interest in horror movies.

"As kids, Drew and I and our mom would watch all kinds of scary things, from Hitchcock's 'Psycho' to 'The Omen,'" recalled John Erick Dowdle.

"I saw 'The Omen' at like 5, I think," said Drew.

The brothers have spun that interest into a joint career. John directs, Drew writes, and together they produce, overseeing just about everything else. They started with horror movies. Their early film "The Poughkeepsie Tapes," supposedly the home movies of a serial killer, was a hit on the festival circuit. That led to a zombie movie, "Quarantine," and then "Devil," about a group of people who have the misfortune of being trapped on a stalled elevator with you-know-whom.

John calls movies like these "empathy machines."

"You are all empathizing with one character that is most likely going through something you have never gone through," he said. "But you get to experience someone else's experience communally, with other people, and there is something really magical about that."

And, if the Dowdle brothers are involved, scary as all get out. Their 2014 film, "As Above, So Below," was a supernatural thriller set amongst ancient bones stacked in the catacombs below Paris. Their new film, "No Escape," is a thriller that plunges an American family abroad into the chaos of a coup. It opens nationwide tonight.

The film grew out of a trip to Thailand John Dowdle took a few years ago. He arrived just hours after the military had overthrown the government.

"And there were armed guards everywhere we went, and as our car was pulling into the hotel they were searching under it for bombs," he said. "And there was this presence, and this nervousness, and I began thinking, what if you brought kids here? How scary would [it] be if I had little kids with me?"

He took the idea back to Drew, who wrote a script about a family caught in a coup in an unnamed Asian country. They signed up actor Owen Wilson, who is best known as a comedian, along with Lake Bell, who is also known for her comic work.

But Wilson and Bell are dead serious as the mother and father who are trying to keep their two little girls safe from a murderous mob. At one point they get trapped on top of a building and realize they are going to have to jump for it. Not only that, but they are going to have to throw their daughters between the buildings.

It's just one heart-stopping moment in a movie that never lets up.

Some critics have questioned the way the movie focuses on the American family, even as locals are dying all around. Drew Dowdle says the point of the film is to tell the story purely from the family's perspective as its members struggle to survive in a situation where they understand almost nothing.

"Our commitment to the subjectivity on this movie was absolute, from the very beginning" he said. "We didn't subtitle the language because our lead characters in the movie don't understand that language. So where that country is, and what part of the world, is really a secondary detail to us. We're telling the story of this family."

Even as "No Escape" opens, the brothers are already working on four other projects: two films and two TV series.

"The two things we are writing for TV are both eight-hour, limited series," Drew said. "And that's exciting to us because it's really, you know, an eight-hour movie, essentially. And audiences are really liking those, and there's just so many buyers for that material now."

Drew and John Erick Dowdle aren't sure which project will come together first, but they hope to announce it before the end of the year.