Neill Blomkamp didn’t plan to spend the last year shooting the low-budget, high-tech horror movie “Demonic” around his own British Columbia home.
But that’s just what the director of sci-fi films such as “District 9” and “Elysium” did when he realized in early 2020 that the sci-fi thriller he planned to shoot in the deserts of New Mexico wasn’t going to happen for the foreseeable future.
“Going back a long, long time, I always wanted to make something that was a tiny, self-financed horror film,” Blomkamp says on a recent video call. “I just loved the sort of ingenuity of ‘Paranormal Activity’ and ‘The Blair Witch Project.’ And so for way over a decade, I always had it in the back of my head.”
With Oats Studios, which he and his brother Mike Blomkamp founded in 2017 to make short, experimental films, he knew how to work quickly on small budgets, Blomkamp says.
“We had hired a lot of crew members that were very able to perform in un-studio circumstances, where it was really up to us to just do stuff,” he says.. “And so around April of last year, when it looked like everything truly was going on hiatus until we could figure out to work in this environment, I kind of resurrected the idea.”
“Demonic” mixes traditional horror – there’s an ancient demon who possesses those who come onto its sacred ground – with futuristic terror – an experimental virtual-reality technology that allows one person to enter the consciousness of another.
Carly (Carly Pope) hasn’t seen her mother Angela (Nathalie Boltt) in the two decades since Angela was convicted of mass murder.
Then she’s approached by a high-tech medical firm that tells her that her mother is in a coma and that their new invention can allow Carly to virtually interact with her. Carly reluctantly goes into the simulation and very, very bad things soon follow.
“It’s been haunting this area for a very long time,” Blomkamp says. “Its lineage is ancient and accounts across anyone who ran into it. “
Horror and high tech
The horror side of things is simple – when a demon is after you, things usually don’t end well.
The technology that Blomkamp uses in “Demonic,” the still-new digital film technique known as “volumetric capture,” is complex.
Volumetric capture essentially surrounds an actor on a soundstage with cameras, filming them and compiling the images into a three-dimensional digital character that can be placed into whatever digital setting a filmmaker creates.
“I had had this interest in volumetric capture, which I thought would probably be better suited to Oats Studios because it’s so experimental,” he says. “And so when this feature idea came up, it was like, ‘Well, maybe there’s a way to incorporate that into a horror feature-length movie.
“But it would have to be written in a way that felt glitchy and kind of prototype-y, so that that the audience accepts the way it looks – because it’s not going to look better than the way it looks.
“And so the film really was those elements,” Blomkamp says.
It’s got that glitchy quality that Blomkamp describes and makes for an unsettling world that feels both real and virtual at the same time. Blomkamp says that “Demonic” is likely the most extensive use of volumetric capture in film to date.
“It comes out of an interest in cutting-edge technology and film technology that I think is going to become more prevalent,” he says. “It’s very weird because you’re capturing the actors in 3D, like a holographic sort of representation of them, in a geometric representation of them that’s not motion-capture at all.”
A pandemic production
Even as the pandemic threw the world into quarantine and lockdown, Blomkamp says it was still doable to get the movie made.
“It was kind of like a group of puzzle pieces that we were sort of putting together,” he says.
Blomkamp had just moved 250 miles east of Vancouver B.C. to the Okanagan Valley, which surrounds a lake of the same name and offered plenty of scenic locations.
He’d worked before with actors such as Pope, Chris Williams Martin who plays Carly’s friend Martin, and Michael Rogers who plays a doctor at the VR tech lab who is secretly a Vatican priest and exorcist. They were comfortable working fast and efficiently.
“We sort of built it out of those elements,” Blomkamp says of the smaller production “Demonic” required. “It’s more like getting your hands dirty and going back to the basics. And it’s kind of reinvigorating in some ways because you’re doing multiple jobs because there’s just fewer people.”
His brother Mike Blomkamp produced the movie and was in charge of all the COVID-19 protocols to keep cast and crew safe.
“I don’t think it’s that different to how it would be now, it’s just that when we were doing it it was so new that we had to sort of get the information from the unions,” Blomkamp says. “Nothing had really been drawn up because we were doing it at the point that the pandemic kind of began.”
The biggest obstacle arose when Blomkamp sought to arrange the volumetric capture he envisioned through the Los Angeles-based company Metastage.
“We couldn’t because the border was closed,” he says. “So I had to actually find a Canadian company that did the same thing, and ended up working with Volumetric Camera Systems, who built the rig for us.”
He expects to return to production on “Inferno,” the pandemic-interrupted project starring Taylor Kitsch as a New Mexico cop whose investigation of a murder in the desert soon turns toward an extraterrestrial presence, though a different film might jump the line and come first.
Either way, making “Demonic” was a refreshing return to his roots for the filmmaker whose feature career was launched when a short sci-fi film caught the attention of producer Peter Jackson and led to Blomkamp’s debut by expanding that short into “District 9.”
“I think it’s probably not a bad thing for filmmakers to oscillate between, like, super low-budget to high budget,” he says. “And kind of remember, ‘What are the fundamentals? Are there other ways that we could do this that would be cheaper?’ So yeah, I like processes equally, I guess.”
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