Ian Tuason’s debut feature undertone opened in March after a critically acclaimed festival tour that landed an A24 distribution deal. Thanks to a savvy marketing campaign positioning the film as “the scariest movie you’ll ever hear,” the feature raised a box office of $9.3 million on its opening weekend on a $500,000 budget, a domestic run that ultimately surpassed $18 million, and led to a genuine cultural conversation about the power of sound as a horror device. The film follows Evy (Nina Kiri), a paranormal podcast host who returns to her childhood home to care for her comatose mother and begins receiving audio recordings of a married couple, Jessa (Keana Lyn Bastidas) and Mike (Jeff Yung), whose encounter with the demon Abyzou spirals from eerie curiosity into an inescapable nightmare. Audiences debated it, social media dissected it, and horror fans embraced it as the kind of low-budget, high-concept gem that marks an era.
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“I won’t say much, but the next one is the story of Mike and Jessa,” Tuason told Phantasmag. “So we can see them now.” That confirms the next movie is a prequel, shifting the perspective from Evy’s podcast studio directly into the recorded nightmare that started everything. Tuason also revealed that the prequel exists within a larger trilogy plan, stating, “I’ll leave the third one a mystery, but I am talking to A24 about it. It looks like it’s going to happen.” According to the filmmaker, he’s moved by the deliberate ambiguity of the first film. “There are a lot of questions that I left open,” Tuason said. “I want to answer them.”
Undertone Deserves All the Love It Gets
The critical praise that propelled undertone to cult status is rooted in Tuason’s disciplined filmmaking philosophy. The filmmaker developed the film around a single location and restricted the visible performances to Kiri; almost every other character in the film exists solely as a voice, a decision that forces the audience to fill the visual void with their own imagination. Furthermore, rather than relying on jump scares, undertone weaponizes the listener’s imagination against them in ways that a conventional monster or a well-lit threat simply cannot.
That discipline extends to the film’s thematic architecture. Evy is pregnant, and the audio files she receives document a mother being targeted by Abyzou, a demon from Jewish and Middle Eastern folklore specifically associated with the killing of children. Meanwhile, her own mother is dying in the room above her, surrounded by Catholic iconography. Tuason never announces the connections between these elements, trusting the audience to feel the weight of what he has built. That restraint is increasingly rare in a genre that has grown dependent on third-act exposition dumps to justify its scares. Finally, the willingness to leave the film open-ended, to prioritize atmosphere over resolution, generated the passionate word-of-mouth that turned the indie movie into a success.
Are you excited to see Jessa and Mike’s story explored in the undertone prequel? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
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