Neil Blomkamp’s Demonic Reveals First Look Photos

Neil Blomkamp’s new supernatural horror film Demonic has released some first-look photos for fans to see. As you can see below, these first images certainly help “Demonic” live up to its title. The film will be released on August 20th and turns the strained relationship between a mother and daughter into a supernatural phenomenon of those “Inner Demons” becoming something much more literal. Aside from the milestone of Blomkamp (District 9, Elysium) jumping from the sci-fi genre to horror, Demonic has been generating buzz over the fact that Blomkamp shot the film during the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, where so many other film productions fell apart.

Speaking to EW, Blomkamp laid out more of what Demonic’s story is all about:

“The main character is a girl whose been estranged from her mother,” Blomkamp says. “During the course of the film she gets sort of reunited with her mother and we learn about some crazy back story that she wasn’t aware of. I would say it has a crossover between science fiction and horror.”

The filmmaker admitted that franchises like Paranormal Activity were great inspirations for how to make a horror film under the super-tight constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic:

“The whole planet was shutting down and the plans that I had for other bigger films were put on hold. Living out here in this slightly more rural area I was thinking we should self-finance something so that we could make something cool. For a long time, I’ve been really interested in films like Paranormal Activity, and lower budget stuff that is pretty terrifying, and so we just started working on this concept. It grew and it got bigger than films like Paranormal Activity but it was cut from the same cloth really. So that’s what it is. We made use out of a lot of the locations out here and just shot it through the summer.”

The cast of Demonic (including Carly Pope, Chris William Martin and Michael Rogers) were largely a group of people that Blomkamp has worked with before:

“The cast was a group of people who I really like, everything coming from this feeling of wanting to get people to together and shoot something that we were in control of,” Blomkamp said. “It made me look through the catalog of actors that I had worked with [on] our experimental Oats Studios YouTube stuff. I worked with Carly Pope on a few Oats pieces so I immediately thought she would be great for female lead. It was a pretty cool close-knit group of friends working on something.”

Demonic will be released in theaters on August 20th, before hitting VOD/Digital on August 27th.