Judging by the trailers and clips promoting the film, Black Swan looks a little bit like The Fly on ballet flats: dancer Natalie Portman takes on the main role in a production of Swan Lake, only to discover herself slowly being transformed - quite literally - by the role. Although pirouettes and point shoes seem like an unlikely source of suspense, Darren Aronofsky, the film's director, told FEARnet that the dance world produces plenty of material that would fit surprisingly comfortably into horror fans' favorite films. "If you actually look at ballet, the ballets themselves are incredibly dark and gothic," Aronofosky told me at a recent press conference in Los Angeles.

Needless to say, "dark and gothic" aren't the only ingredients that go into horror movies. But rather than capitalizing on gory clichés or slasher-movie conventions, co-screenwriter Andres Heinz went back further into the genre's eclectic history for material that would both feed the story and a sense of otherworldly suspense. "Roman Polanski has been a huge influence on me," Heinz said. "Specifically I had watched Repulsion and was fascinated by this psychological breakdown process, and a few weeks later, I couldn't get the movie out of my head. I [also] happened to be reading The Double by Dostoyevsky, and suddenly the entire story came to me very quickly and melded into what became The Understudy, that was the original script."

"I had some experiences in the theater world, so I set it in the off-Broadway world and it was about an actress who is suddenly thrust into the lead role," Heinz continued. "The pressure created by this creates this kind of fracture in her psyche and she has this kind of psychological breakdown where she believes that her understudy is undermining her."

Meanwhile, Heinz' collaborator on the screenplay, Mark Heyman, went back to one of cinema's greatest films about dance for some additional inspiration, and then incorporated some inspiration from films from other genres where young ladies endure identity crises for the purpose of an audience's entertainment. "[Bergman's Persona] was one of the films, and The Red Shoes were on a constant playlist as I was writing," Heyman revealed. "And a little bit of Carrie."

Although no high school gyms go down in flames in the film, Black Swan carefully explores many of the ideas in De Palma's masterpiece, especially the idea of developing feelings and abilities that you can't quite control. Heinz explained, "It comes from accessing a darker self. That's where seeing this double haunting you is this symbol of your darker self coming to haunt you, in a sense." Heyman concurred, indicating that the story of Swan Lake itself provided plenty of inspiration for the psychological journey Portman's character experiences – even more so, surprisingly, once she left the stage. "Swan Lake has a double in the black swan and white swan, and in the ballet that's exactly what's happening," Heyman said.

"This woman has been disguised to look like the white swan so that the prince will fall in love with her instead," he continued. "Symbolically, the story [of Black Swan] very much became about how the journey of someone who's a white swan how they become a black swan." Heyman said that the dynamic that emerges from Portman's character and her understudy, played by Mila Kunis, offers both a visceral and metaphorical dimension to her transformation. "Mila's character is really almost like a spirit guide in terms of like taking someone down that rabbit hole to like unearthing their darker self. And I think for Nina's character, that anxiety about the double is the fear of giving over to that side of yourself."

Another element of Black Swan that gives its subject matter a sinister edge is Matthew Libatique's cinematography, which not only catapults audiences into the middle of the production's cacophony of movement, but creates a jittery sense of uneasiness that elevates the film's tension. Although Aronofsky used a similar technique on his previous film, The Wrestler, he said that using a more visceral visual style changed the dynamic of the story and made it darker and more disturbing. "The whole cinema verite, handheld approach to The Wrestler was a big risk to bring over into this ballet film because I had never seen a kind of suspenseful film that had this kind of handheld camera," Aronofsky admitted. "I didn't know if it works. I was always really worried that if in a really scary scene everyone would wonder why Natalie wouldn't turn to the cameraman and go, 'Help,' or something."

Perhaps not unlike Portman's character, albeit with hopefully more upbeat results, Aronofsky said he finally just had to go for it and hope things worked out. "I didn't know if it was going to work, but then we sort of went, 'Fuck it. Let's just go for it, because it's never been done,' and I really enjoyed the camera moving. Having a man hold the camera, I could really move the camera in ways that you can't in any other way." He explained that the contradiction between the florid spectacle of the choreography and the intimacy of handheld camerawork ultimately served to distract the audience from the fact that they were in fact watching a horror film – until it's too late, of course.

"The result of that is that it's got this very naturalistic feel which I think actually is kind of cool, because it makes people feel like they're watching a very different type of movie that can't ever freak out like the way that it freaks out," Aronofsky said. "Yet, it gives you that kind of immediacy of being in that other moment, and being in this other world with little hints like she's peeling her finger, and things are going to get really freaked out. In general it just feels like a documentary in the beginning before it freaks out. So it kind of worked out for us."

In spite (or maybe because) of Aronofsky's success in engineering a subversive psychological thriller in the guise of a movie about ballet, the director demurred when asked how much ne enjoys toying with genre conventions. "I'm not really much of a genre guy," he insisted. "This was my best attempt at a genre film and I just don't know really or I just haven't been able to do that. I think that audiences don't need that anymore where you just need a very specific genre, and as long as it's fun, it's okay and entertaining. So that's what we were going for, something that keeps you excited and keeps you going and is hopefully memorable so that you talk about it with other people and hopefully they'll go to the movies."

"I think it's very different, which I think people who are bombarded by so much different types of media are hungry for - just a very, very different experience."