Interviews
[Interview] ‘The Devil Inside’ Filmmakers Speak On Low Budget Horror & Bold Finales!
It was hard to stay on top of things with the holidays looming over the release of The Devil Inside (review). Thankfully, Evan Dickson was lucky enough to land a last-second interview with director Brent Bell, co-writer Matthew Peterman and producer Morris Paulson to speak about the found footage exorcism flick.
The below chat, which is excerpts from the conversation (the best of, if you will), tackles everything from the film’s budget to the conclusion that has more than a handful of critics and fans up in arms.
And as always, make sure to write your own review to tell all of Bloody what YOU thought! BD: You guys made this movie for about a million dollars correct?
Morris Paulson: A little bit less than that.
BD: Matt, did you approach Brent with the idea?
Matthew Peterman: I’ve been working with Brent on films for about a decade. We’ve been a team for that long and Morris is our partner now on this film and for the future. And we were working on ideas about five or six years ago when we read an article that said the Vatican had started a [school] for exorcism. This process started way back then. We wrote a traditional hollywood script and got frustrated with that process.
Brent Bell: Then Morris, who has been our friend for over a decade suggested we film this independently, more documentary style. And make the movie in Europe, just the three of us without anybody else bothering us. And I’m really glad we did it that way, I love it.
BD: The film has a lot of creepy imagery and a visceral nature to the exorcisms. Was it a conscious decision to show more than the average found-footage film?
Brent Bell: I think the difference between this movie and most found footage films is that it’s not just like the guy from Cloverfield running around with a camera. With our film we tried to create an actual documentary. And that guy is there to make a film. He’s there to get the shot, and she’s there to let him get the shot. They’re there to make a film and document what they’re seeing. It’s not as much about trying to answer why the camera is there because the camera’s there for a very good reason. Like any good documentary filmmaker, like Michael Moore, they’ll do anything they can to get the shot. That’s a little different from what you normally see in a found footage film.
BD: With Suzan Crowley playing Maria Rossi, that’s a pretty intense role. How did you cast her?
Brent Bell: We saw quite a few people but she was literally the first person. Her picture was great. And then at the first reading it was like “wow!” No one came close to her. It’s hard to find someone in her age range that can be that fearless and completely out of her mind. And she just stood out from everybody. It was a clear, immediate, choice.
Matthew Peterman: When you’re casting a film like this all you’re worried about is talent. Their level of talent and how good they are. There’s no other agenda. You’re not worried about how famous they are or what kind of cache they bring. You just try to find the best actors possible and that’s what we did with this.
BD: It made 2 million dollars in previews last night, double your initial investment. How does that feel?
Brent Bell: We’re excited about the initial success but what we really want to focus on how excited the audience gets. And that’s what we’re hoping to see in the next couple of weeks.
Matthew Peterman: You always hope for the best, we all do whenever we embark on a creative project and rarely do you get the chance for it to actually happen. It’s really great that people get to see the movie. No matter what they think, it’s great to just put it out there.
BD: For the possession you use a unique makeup effect. How did you settle upon the general look of that?
Brent Bell: Pretty much everything in the movie we tried to do real. In camera. And kind of subtle and believably. You do kind of want to subtly indicate the person is possessed but if we did it with their heads spinning around or their eyes glowing or something crazy, that really takes you into the realm of unbelievability and we wanted to be as authentic as possible.
*SPOILER WARNING**
BD: I’m reading a lot of reaction today about the card with the url at the end. When was the decision made to make it kind of a more “interactive” experience?
Brent Bell: That was something that happened towards the end with Paramount. It was interesting, it was kind of a provocative thing. When you’re doing an independent horror film that [people] aren’t just trying to get their money back real quick and make a really cool film you can take chances like that. I don’t think we ever expected that Paramount would release a film with something quite as bold as the way the movie ends. And their idea was this website, and we thought it was kind of cool to continue the story on this website, nobody’s ever done it before. Good or bad, it’s kind of unique.
Matthew Peterman: One the one hand, a lot of the internet is like “oh that’s cool!” And on the other hand, and what I think you’re referring to, is people are saying it’s kind of bullsh*t. You know what I mean? You make a bold choice and you stick with it. I know for us, we all flirted with different ending for the film and we settled for this kind of abrupt ending that we all really believed in. Because with this film, we’re trying to make it feel like real life and very realistic and life doesn’t always follow a perfect three act structure like film does. They’re very fabricated. The stories always have a very Hollywood ending. And we’re doing the antithesis of that. I know some people love it and some people f*cking hate it but it gets people talking. We’re just trying to make it realistic. Not every situation ends perfectly or the way you want it to end.
Evil Dead Rise final girl Lily Sullivan finds herself coated in blood once more in SOULM8TE, but this time as the killer.
In Blumhouse’s new horror movie, arriving on Digital on August 1, Sullivan stars as Sara, an Artificially Intelligent android whose sole purpose is to serve as the perfect partner for her owner, David (David Rysdahl). But impossible beauty standards and programming safety measures that have been tampered with set this love bot to destroy mode when her relationship with David becomes threatened.
Director Kate Dolan (You Are Not My Mother), who rewrote an original draft from Rafael Jordan (Salvage Marines), based on a story by James Wan, Ingrid Bisu and Jordan, drew inspiration from ’90s erotic thrillers like Fatal Attraction.
They became a guide of sorts to Sara’s villainous turn, Kate Dolan explained to Bloody Disgusting. “All those old movies, when I was re-watching them to prep, I was writing the script, I was like, ‘Damn, these women are really just being driven into these scenarios by these men, these hapless men who are just treating them so badly. These men should really be getting their just desserts.’ But I think that was something we had as a guide for Sara: what really makes her into that femme fatale or that evil woman is just the impossible task of being a perfect woman and trying to balance being the Madonna and the whore and all these different kinds of aspects of being a woman and not being able to compute that. That’s what drives her crazy.
“That was always what really drew me to the story: of how to reframe that femme fatale or that villainous woman of the erotic thriller and do something new with it and something different.”
Lily Sullivan agrees: “She felt like a contemporary evolution of those characters. It’s like processing it all and then putting it through in an output. But it was so fun to try to find the old Hollywood archetypes of women in the 1990s, where it is built around fantasy, projection, desire. Then you’re just, even as the actor, then going through makeup, going through costume, where it’s all of these things that are kind of messed up about the blonde wig, the covering your whole body in paint so you can’t see any of your imperfections, or getting your teeth whitened and a push-up bra, and you’re just like, ‘Whoa. Why am I so angry? Why do I not feel enough? And why am I actually, literally, the male gaze right now?’ I was like, ‘Booked.'”
It turns out, though, that it was the impossible ideal of perfection that Sara represents that terrified Sullivan. She credits Dolan for helping her take on the intimidating role, one she was extremely hesitant to tackle at first.
Sullivan explains, “To do it, I’m like, someone’s going to meet your freak. We’re both choosing to do this. But at first I met Kate, and I felt like I told her all the reasons why I couldn’t do it or shouldn’t do it or why I was worried instead of being like, ‘Yeah, I’d love the role.’ I just weirdly had this verbal diarrhea of freaking out that I was like, ‘I don’t think I can.’ But then usually when you are that scared, it’s usually an indication to walk towards it. But really for me, it was Kate.“
Once she was on board, though, Sullivan grabbed the role by the throat. “Then also just again, to walk into the inky, gross, shadowy stuff of being a woman where I’m like, ‘How about I go over-hypersexualize the hell out of myself?’ But I’m going to make it uncanny valley. I want you to feel as silicone as much as you can. So I’m going to bring my Jim Carrey version of it, The Mask work, the Jacques Lecoq method of finding it through physicality. So there was so much nourishment in the challenge of it. Even reading the words when I was reading Kate’s writing, I’m going into Palisade mode. I was like, ‘I’ve got to go figure out what that language even means.’ And, ‘It better be as jarring as I possibly can.’ We love David, but we judge him for being able to project a whole life onto this wonky woman who’s forced to be there.”
Dolan reveals she did a lot of research into AI, and our home uses of it like Amazon’s Alexa, which informed Sara’s soothing voice and mannerisms. It also informed Sara’s parent company and new owner, David. “I was reading a lot about why that’s appealing, but also bias within the tech industry and how it’s predominantly male-led,” Dolan says. “So, you’re getting a lot of men of a certain background and life experience all thinking that this is the right thing to do.”
The director uses the ’90s thriller framework as an abstract metaphor for how we’re currently engaging with AI now, and “how people engage with them and what you get from that back.” That didn’t just inspire Sara’s look and design, but her methods of murder.
“The kills were very much like, I won’t spoil anything, but it was always ways that the men would be taken down a peg, then emasculated, or just put in a chokehold; literally, it was the kind of concept behind a lot of them,” Dolan explains. “And then it was just like: what would be most fun? What would be really fun to do? What would be fun to film and fun to watch as an audience? I mean, they were great fun, and all our male cast were very eager and excited to have these death scenes. That was the most exciting day on set when they were getting ready to be completely eviscerated.”
If it’s not already apparent, it feels strange to consider Sara a villain when she has no actual agency, though there’s no question she’s the terror of SOULM8TE. And Sullivan had a blast taking on the baddie role. Especially when it came to eviscerating the pursuit of perfection and anyone who dares to get in Sara’s way.
Sullivan teases a favorite kill of hers as she recalls the joy of playing a horror movie psycho, “Even loving the stiletto in the mouth referenced from The Last Seduction, just sets the heart. Even just having the plastic apron as I’m sawing the man’s body like a cello, little wink at American Psycho. It was so fun making a film about AI that’s super tech-based. Obviously our whole lives are bombarded by it, and it’s quite nauseating. If you’re going to make a film about AI, this serving is fun, it’s twisted, but it’s also freaky. And the freak show circus is already here, unfortunately.”
Lily Sullivan and Kate Dolan behind the scenes
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