Since the release of 2009’s District 9, creator Neill Blomkamp’s name has been intrinsically linked with the science-fiction genre. He followed up the Academy Award nominated District 9 with both 2013’s Elysium and 2015’s Chappie. Blompkamp was also attached at one point to create a new Alien movie, one which would have seen Sigourney Weaver back in the saddle as Ripley, but sadly the project was not meant to be. Blomkamp’s latest feature, Demonic, sees the filmmaker stray away from his science-fiction roots as he branches out into the horror genre.
Demonic was thought up and shot in secret in Canada last year during the pandemic, and is a terrifying blend of technology and supernatural possession. It stars Carly Pope as a young woman who unleashes a terrifying demon as she enters the mind of her comatose serial killer mother. The film arrives in UK cinemas, and on Premium Digital, from the 27th August. Demonic also has the accolade of opening this year’s Arrow Video FrightFest event. With last August’s event having been cancelled due to lockdown restrictions, this will be the first film that the FrightFest family have been together within the same room in over eighteen months, making Demonic’s inclusion that extra bit special.
In the lead up to Demonic’s release, we caught up with Blomkamp to find out more about Demonic and just how close we might be to the highly hoped for District 10.
Other people have spent their Covid time learning an instrument, reorganising their film collection, making banana bread… you went ahead and made a feature film. What made you decide to do this?
Well, I feel like I just wanted to, I just wanted to use the time to be creative and make something. It didn’t really feel like a whole bunch of overly thought through complex decisions. It was just a case of, “well we’re all sitting around doing nothing, why don’t we go shoot something?” We kind of pieced the film together with the elements that we had access to, and grew it out of that. It’s very much the result of a bunch of puzzle pieces that we sort of put together in order to make something viable with the resources that we had at the time.
So it wasn’t a film that you were planning on doing pre-covid, it was something that came about during?
Yeah, exactly. I was always really inspired by The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. I always thought there was something so cool about filmmakers, basically using their own cash and going out and shooting something, and even at a low budget, having a very sort of a terrifying effect on the audience. So, in the back of my head, I think for years, I always wanted to do something like that and this was an opportunity to attempt to do that.
You’re better known to the masses for your work within science fiction, and whilst Demonic has some elements of sci-fi, it’s much more of a traditional horror movie. What prompted the switch, and how did you find it playing in a new playground?
Yeah, definitely. I mean you know, the thing that I was trying to do was different than the other three films,I was trying to create this unsettling feeling of dread that just sort of ran under the surface of the film the whole time. You just go into things differently, like your shot selections, and how you sort of architecturally build what you’re trying to make is completely different from the ground up, and that process was pretty fun. It was cool, it’s a fun genre to work in. There’s a whole bunch of stuff you could explore in there, that would be, I think creatively gratifying.
Dreams, the unconscious and potential possession, are the cornerstones of so many horror movies. Why do you think that audiences find these issues so terrifying?
I don’t really know. I thought about that a lot when I was making the film. I’m not really sure what it is on some deeper psychological level. I mean, even the concept of just watching horror films is a very strange concept if you think about it. Why would you pay money and use two hours of your time to feel uncomfortable? It’s a very, very, very counterintuitive strange concept, but there’s some kind of
catharsis that’s happening that audience members are getting from that process that they enjoy. I don’t know exactly what that is, and I spent a lot of time thinking about it. From a creative perspective, it’s you’re exercising the same muscle that you feel as an audience member. There’s something that is just gratifying about working inside of that world that you know, you’re trying to elicit those emotions from the audience.
Demonic has three distinct looks to it – the real world, the dream world, and the Therapol experiment environment. How did you go about creating and interpreting them in these different ways?
The real world stuff was much more… which is hilarious for a low budget film with no techno cranes, but it was way more controlled than the other films that I’ve done. So everything was much more static and composed and controlled. The virtual stuff was as loose and handheld as we could make it, just to make it feel immersive, like we were standing there with her. Then with the dream sequence I was trying to be as close to the real world stuff as we could get without totally throwing the audience off that it’s like obviously a dream. So that was sort of a hybrid of both approaches where there was like a little bit of handheld and a lot of steadicam, but again, all of that is pretty fun to just kind of experiment and play with and try to find the look and the feel for the film. Like I was saying before, everything is driven by a slower, cutting pace, more controlled shots, a very controlled score so that everything edged the audience closer to this feeling of dread. Even if you’re looking at sunny vineyards, there’s still this ominous feeling that runs through it and that was really the only thing that I was going for.
Your films always seem to feature some interesting non-human entity. First we had the aliens in District 9, then Chappie, and now our demon creature. It really is an unsettling monstrous thing that belongs in a nightmare. Where did the idea for the look of it come from?
You know there are some choices in filmmaking that honestly have zero intellectual background. Like there is absolutely no way for me to define why I wanted that thing to look like a raven. I literally don’t know. My guess is I was really into plague masks, which Sam in the movie actually wears for a moment, but I think the imagery of the plague mask is just a very fascinating silhouette and it looks like a bird. As soon as I thought ‘bipedal crow thing’ that was to have mangy goats’ hair and stuff on it, I felt that it would be satisfying to look out. There’s this amazing concept artist that I work with, Eve Ventrue, and she pretty much illustrated it perfectly the first time that I sent her a note about what I thought it looked like. As soon as I saw it I was, “that’s awesome. I mean that’s definitely the creature”, but I honestly don’t know where it comes from. To be honest I was wondering whether the audience would think that the beak was kind of goofy or not, but I just committed to it.
You’ve worked with Carly Pope a few times in the past, but she seems to be a frustratingly underused actor. What does she bring to her performances that makes you want to keep working with her?
When I shot a lot of the Oats Studios stuff with her, I just loved working with her. She’s incredibly versatile and she’s super easy to work with, and she’s just very talented. She has a very good idea of story, which you want from an actor, because you really want them to understand the bigger picture and she’s really good at that. The way that the film came about, like I was saying earlier, with this whole Covid thing, the way that we sort of puzzle-pieced the film together… like a sanitarium. At the end of the movie, for example, my brother sent me a link to that place. It’s in the same province that we live in, but it’s a couple hours from there. It was like, “okay well we need that in the third act, that has to be in the third act. So like how do we work that backwards?” and there was an element of that with Carly where I knew that under the pressure of a lower budget environment, just how much she would give to it. When you mix that with how talented she is, it just felt like a no-brainer, and she would just become part of the team and like basically be a filmmaker with us. That’s what happened and I had an incredibly good time shooting it with her. I wish more people were aware of how good she is, so hopefully Demonic helps with that.
In Demonic you give the Catholic church a very unique, and literal spin on the term ‘Soldiers of God’, what was the thinking behind this shake-up?
One of the ideas…if I ever made a – not a sequel – but if I ever made another film in the same world as this, if you were to scale up the concept, if you look at if you look at people in history that have done terrible things, sometimes it can be incredibly powerful people, right? If you look at World War Two, I mean, there’s millions of examples, but what if what if those people were possessed? In this gentrification idea of this horror world, what if someone that powerful was possessed? How would they be exorcised? How would you go after them? That thinking led to the Vatican basically having this Black Ops unit that can scale up to the size of, you know, Robert McNamara in Vietnam. That’s really an idea that was living off to the side and then I have this other virtual reality possession idea and I just merged them. They were scaled down because of the nature of the budget and the size of the film, but in a way it works because it’s more mysterious and weird. I love the idea of the Vatican buying up tech companies. I think it’s a really interesting concept.
Earlier this year you confirmed that the District 9 sequel is being written, how’s that process going?
We’re still writing it. It’s going well. I’m working on that and another larger science-fiction script, I mean larger than Demonic, similar size to something like District 10. Those are the two thing’s I’m working on at the moment and it’s going well. It took me a long time to figure out what the key ingredient was that necessitated the idea of a sequel. I didn’t want to make a sequel just for the sake of making a sequel that never really felt right, and then I saw a documentary on this incredibly well-known topic and it sparked something that I was like, “okay that feels like I would like to see that in the world of District 9.” That was a couple of years ago and we started working since then.
Demonic is releasing in the UK in August, what do you hope the audience will experience when they settle in to watch it?
It’s definitely not traditional, but the goal was to try to create something that felt unsettling and full of dread. So that’s really all I’m trying to do. If they feel unsettled while they’re watching it and they just feel a sense of fear, then I’ve done my job. That was the goal. I hope they do.
Signature Entertainment’s Demonic opens FrightFest 26th August, is at UK Cinemas and Premium Digital on 27th August, and Blu-ray & DVD 25th October.
