Demonic Filmmaker Neill Blomkamp on Bringing the Ambitious Horror Story to Life

The coronavirus pandemic presented filmmakers around the world with countless challenges, as health and safety protocols made shooting even the most standard of sequences immensely difficult, inspiring some creatives to take unconventional approaches to storytelling. Neill Blomkamp, for example, enlisted some of his frequent collaborators to star in Demonic, which blended together themes of horror and sci-fi to put a new spin on a possession story, which included utilizing volumetric capture techniques to safely film sequences while also giving a unique look to the experience. Demonic is available in theaters and everywhere you rent movies beginning on Friday, August 20th.

“This movie was highly unusual, in process, because it was a bunch of separate elements that were floating around in my head and COVID and the fact that nothing else was getting made was the galvanizing thing that made me move forward with it,” Blomkamp detailed to ComicBook.com of the development process. “It’s much more of a bunch of separate puzzle pieces brought together and, because of the low-budget nature of it, doing what we can with the stuff we have access to. I think the primary thing is this idea of wanting to use volumetric capture as a way to represent the inside of a simulation, that it could be the inside of someone’s mind. And the science-fiction elements of that mixed with demonic possession, I think it was that core idea of mixing those two things that was the main thing that made me want to make the film.”

In the film, “A young woman unleashes terrifying demons when supernatural forces at the root of a decades-old rift between mother and daughter are revealed.”

Despite the various challenges of the film, one advantage was that Blomkamp could visualize the otherworldly look of the film early on, instead of it having to undergo an intensive post-production process.

“You don’t actually establish anything, other than the lighting. The vol-cap looks the way that it looks. We didn’t really curate that look,” the filmmaker described of the aesthetic. “The curation was more in the process of choosing to do it with volumetric capture, if that makes sense. We knew what it would look like and that’s the only way it’s ever going to look. All of those glitches and errors and stuff, were just built into the way that it was captured.”

He continued, “The thing that we did have control over was the lighting. The lighting took a long time to dial in. Like, when she goes back to the house, her childhood home the second time, there’s a weird, ominous, red glow and this more of a nighttime feel. It’s completely arbitrary, it’s whatever we wanted it to look like, so we took more time there creatively. We also downgraded what the buildings look like, because the buildings were obviously not captured the same way the actors were captured. They came in at high resolution, it was proper photogrammetry, that were crushed down to look like the actors did. I knew what it would look like, I committed, because I loved the look, and I wrote the script in a way that that glitchy, prototype nature of the technology could be justified.”

While this filmmaking approach might have expedited some elements of bringing the film to life, Blomkamp noted that attempting to film a movie during a pandemic came with countless challenges.

“No, I don’t think there were any benefits. The only thing that is that the film wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t filmed in the pandemic,” the filmmaker shared of the production. “It was the perfect opportunity to do this idea of ‘let’s shoot our own self-financed thing,’ which was always around, in the back of my head. For the last decade, it’s been in the back of my head. Other than that, I would say everything was harder than it normally is, obviously. It’s not fluid. It’s a much more controlled environment to shoot your movie in.”

Demonic is available in theaters and everywhere you rent movies beginning on Friday, August 20th.

Are you looking forward to the new film? Let us know in the comments below or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things horror and Star Wars.