By WILLIAM J. WRIGHT
Filmmaker Neill Blomkamp, best known for such high concept sci-fi extravaganzas as District Nine and Elysium makes his first foray into the horror genre with DEMONIC. In leaving futuristic vistas and alien visitors behind, Blomkamp has made his most intimate film to date. Shot largely under the radar with a comparatively limited budget at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, DEMONIC is a character-driven study of estrangement and guilt that brings the tried and true horror theme of demonic possession into the 21st century through a unique fusion of the supernatural and technology.
Carly Pope (Arrow, Elysium) stars as Carly, a woman struggling to pick up the pieces of her life after an unthinkable incident drives a wedge between her and her seemingly psychotic mother Angela (Nathalie Boltt). However, Carly’s troubled past comes screaming into the present when an old friend arrives with shocking news. Soon, she discovers there are far more diabolical forces at work in the decades-long rift between mother and daughter than mere insanity. Ultimately, their unlikely reunion holds terrible consequences that stretch beyond their shattered relationship.
Recently, Pope sat down with Rue Morgue to discuss her complex role in DEMONIC, her thoughts on the horror genre, and the challenges of shooting a film in the middle of a worldwide pandemic.
DEMONIC is a very frightening and intense film, and I guess fright is as good a place to start as any. Are you a horror fan?
Look, I definitely like to feel things. [Laughs] And I will watch a horror movie, absolutely, but I typically have to do it when I’m not home alone, when I know that I have some time to have a palette cleanser after the fact. I have a pretty delicate constitution when it comes to horror, so I definitely like it. I like the thrill. I like the adrenaline, but I still have to probably sleep with a nightlight on and my teddy bear close by!
In years of interviews, I’ve discovered that even people who say they’re not big horror fans have at least one scary movie they love. What’s yours?
The first film that really messed me right up when I was a kid was a film called The Watcher in the Woods, and I have not been able to watch it since because I was so traumatized by that film. It hit all my “NO” buttons. It hit all the spots that, to me, activated pure terror. That’s a film that I feel, at some point, I must rewatch. I’ve rewatched the trailer, and I kind of sit there going, “No, no, no, no, no.” There’s something very visceral about that film that got me good! With that said, I love The Changeling, which is from that time as well. I love The Orphanage so much. I love The Others…a good ghost story will always get me, but I’m not a megafan of the genre to the point where I’ve seen every horror film and I know everything about them. So doing DEMONIC was an exercise in learning how to jump into that world and still try to make it my own and connect it to a real core-center of reality…it was so much fun because this was my first time doing a horror film.
How did you get involved with the film?
Neill [Blomkamp] and I had worked together a number of times before, starting in 2011, when we shot Elysium. I was only involved in that movie very minimally – maybe about a week on set. I hadn’t seen or worked with Neill again until he started Oats Studios, which was his foray into doing his own short-form content. He put together this studio with the intention of having full control over the content he was putting out and wanting to experiment with different genres or different ideas and see what sort of landed and what fits. So I had the pleasure of working on a number of the Oats Studios shorts which got us back together in a filmmaking capacity in 2015 or 2016. And then we had sort of worked together for a few years there. I think the last film that we did together was a short called Adam: The Prophet, incorporating some motion capture and some facial capture and that kind of technology.
The next I heard from him was an email at the beginning of 2020 saying, “I’ve kind of got a loose idea for a lo-fi horror film. Would you be interested in doing something like that?” I said, “Yeah. For sure!” Then, he said, “I’ve got some other things that I’ve got to do this year.” Little did he know dear ‘Rona was waiting in the wings! He said, “I’ve got to do these other things, but this is a concept that I’m really keen to shoot whenever we can make it work.” And I said, “Just know that I’m totally in, and I’m happy to oblige when the shoe fits.”
And then, the pandemic shut things down, and his project got postponed. He kind of circled back on the effort and said, “I really want to shoot this now, and I think we can if we keep it small and we keep it contained, what do you think?” And I said, “If you can figure out how to get me from America back into Canada and you can figure out how to operate a set in these unprecedented, strange times, then I am entirely committed and can’t wait.”
Let’s talk about your character in DEMONIC. How did you prepare for such a complex role as well as maintain such a high level of emotional intensity in some very fantastic situations?
Thank you for seeing that or recognizing that, and I’m glad to know that has translated. I really wanted to look at the core concepts of the elements of forgiveness, the elements of passed-down trauma, the elements of a strained parental relationship, and the idea that if somebody was nearing the end of their life, in spite of their differences, what would you want to do to resolve or repair that? My main focus was trying to come at it from a human conceit or a human response. And then, of course, you layer in all the other stuff on top of it, but I felt like, with regards to the mother-daughter relationship, there was a lot to mine there. I sort of decided early on that it was important to be as open and as vulnerable as possible in order to let the experiences that are happening to Carly happen in real-time so that the audience can experience them like that as well. I tend to toughen up or harden or put some armor around me and push off if I’m scared or feeling vulnerable, and I feel like I had to break that barrier down in order to stay open and available to just be led along this journey. It was really meant to be felt by the audience at the same time that it’s happening to Carly because she’s like a fish out of water going right through this from start to finish.
Was the role as physically and emotionally draining as it looks on screen?
Well, this is the weird thing. I expected it to be. I expected it to be entirely impossible! I expected to be in a heap and a puddle of tears and eyelashes at the end of the day. [Laughs] I expected to be just ruined. [But] I was energized the entire time. It was so much fun. We would go from laughing hysterically to crying hysterically, and I truly credit that to Neill and feeling very, very comfortable and very, very safe under his guidance. There’s no nonsense with Neill. I’ve always known that, but this was a long-form excursion into that. He’s there to make a good film, and he likes to have a laugh, and the people around are all friends, and we’ve all worked together before in certain capacities from cast and crew alike. There’s something about that familial environment that just creates a real ability to open up. I felt that magic happen which, again, I was not expecting at all. I thought it was going to be me chain smoking, listening to sad music, and punching myself in the face a few times before going in! Obviously in jest! [Laughs]
I did expect to have to brutalize my emotions a little bit in order to get there, but that just wasn’t the case. It was just a seamless process of being able to access what was needed, but also just let it go and move on. We just had a good time. It was really just fun to shoot the film.
How do you feel about DEMONIC’s depiction of mental illness?
Personally, I’ve been through trauma and have been diagnosed with PTSD and have definite anxiety that I contend with all the time. So it’s always important for me to feel like what I’m putting out there [as an actor] is not misrepresenting anything. When I was building the character of Carly, I really felt like I was able to draw a lot on my experience in order to understand what it’s like to isolate yourself after trauma, in order to understand what it’s like to withdraw and enclose. Because I understood it and lived it, I felt okay about portraying it.
To me, the metaphor there is about intergenerational trauma and how it’s passed down in the family line. That was an interesting field to navigate, and I hope that it doesn’t upset anyone who identifies with having a mental illness. I hope that there can be some things [in the film] that speak to people or that people can identify with. I can tell you that was not the intention going in, to make a film about mental illness, at all. That was certainly not something we were intending. It’s really just a supernatural horror film with a sci-fi bent. So, the story’s there, but if there are aspects of it that either help people see something or feel seen and that’s a positive, then I hope we’ve done our job. Hopefully there are no triggers there for people, either, because trauma is a very real thing.
The familial dynamics of the film are very relatable. I think that aspect of the film is sure to connect with many in the audience.
That’s the thing, right? For me, that was a really compelling nugget of the film – what’s going on between mother and daughter and how do you resolve or rectify or contend with that when you have this other looming force?
DEMONIC represents a real fusion of the supernatural with technology. Is this where you think not only the horror genre, but our modern mythology and culture are going?
I’m not the right superfan to ask about the genre. I don’t know if I have much authority in terms of speaking to it, but I will say, the world over, we’ve had to learn how to engage with technology a whole lot more over the last couple of years with the pandemic. It is interesting to see that that will undoubtedly influence storylines or the ability to shoot things differently to capture visual worlds. There is an entire imaginative and future element to where everything’s heading that I can only imagine people will want to mine and craft. I don’t know. I’ll still put my hand up for a good old-fashioned ghost story for sure.
What do you think DEMONIC says about where we are right now? Do you think the pandemic thematically seeped into the production in any way?
So we [did] a pandemic-shot film that is not set in the pandemic. There was an intention to make it so. There was no sign of the pandemic [in the film]. That was the intent – to not have any inklings of the world shutting down. That said, thematically, of course, there’s an element of isolation. We see Carly as being an incredibly separated person and a disconnected person which does speak to the time. A lot of people have felt very isolated and very disconnected and very separate. Seeing her so frequently by herself, I think, is sort of emblematic of that, but equally, she sort of has to connect via technology in order to resurrect this relationship with her mother and resolve this relationship with her. I do think there are [parallels] thematically, but I’m not sure that was the intent going in, but I would trust that Neill in all his brilliance would have thought of these things. This film set out to be a pretty linear story. That was the idea, but I think we can extrapolate some themes that of course do relate to what we’re going through now as a society.
DEMONIC from IFC Midnight comes to theaters on August 20 and VOD on August 27th.
