NEILL BLOMKAMP
The Chappie chap is going back to basics.
IT WAS 2015 when we last saw a Neill Blomkamp film on the big screen. The South African, who made his name with 2009 sci-fi District 9, has spent the last half-decade making experimental short films with his company, Oats Studios. His return to feature-length filmmaking — Demonic, a supernatural horror about a demon that possesses people and forces them to murder — was triggered largely by last year’s lockdown.
“It’s genuinely a child of the pandemic,” the director says. In early 2020 Blomkamp was due to start filming Inferno, a sci-fi with Taylor Kitsch, when all major productions shut down. He found himself at a loose end. “It was born out of, ‘How do we go into the backwoods and shoot something while we’re waiting [for the world to reopen]’?”
By design, things moved quickly. “The script was written in under two months,” he says, followed by “I think, 22 days, 24 days of shooting” in British Columbia, Canada, where Blomkamp lives. It originated as a found-footage horror, in part because of how simple those films are to produce. “I was always a huge fan of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. I was also a fan of the way that those filmmakers just went out and shot something in their backyard.” When a production company doubled the budget, “we decided to shoot it more traditionally”.
Blomkamp enjoyed playing with horror tropes. “One of the things that was fun about doing the film was working in a different subgenre to what I’m normally in,” he says. “A sense of dread brewing under the surface was something I wanted to try to capture.” He researched demons and possession for the script, and was surprised to learn that “the Catholic Church still has courses on teaching priests how to become exorcists”.
This being Blomkamp, some sci-fi elements have snuck in, with characters entering a ‘simulation’ inside a coma patient’s mind, in an effort to confront the inner demon face-to-face. “We wanted to use volumetric capture as a technique somehow,” Blomkamp explains, referring to the technique similar to motion-capture, only without the use of suits or dots. “It’s three-dimensionally capturing actors in full hair and make-up. You can’t alter anything. It’s like the opposite of normal visual effects.” The end result is uncanny and aptly creepy — like a horror version of The Sims.
As for Blomkamp’s big-screen absence, the filmmaker is reluctant to draw a line between this film and his last, the robot sci-fi Chappie (which was a critical and commercial disappointment), or offer whether this film is in any way a response. “That’s a complicated question,” he says. “I would say that, on an artistic level, re-evaluating the reason for creating your own films… I definitely spent a lot of time thinking about that after
Chappie, for sure.” The reason for creating
Demonic? To scare the pants off you.
DEMONIC PREMIERES AT FRIGHTFEST (26-30 AUGUST) AND IS IN CINEMAS AND ON DIGITAL FROM 27 AUGUST