SATOR filmmaker Jordan Graham on the indie horror film’s eerie and mind-blowing real-life inspiration

10 days into shooting what would become the indie horror film Sator, everything changed for filmmaker Jordan Graham. Due to budgetary constraints, Graham handled nearly every aspect of the film’s production, including writing, directing, editing, producing, scoring, and even building the cabin that serves as one of the main sets in the film. All in, the film took a whopping seven years to complete, but it was that one day of shooting with this actual grandmother that sent the film spinning off in a completely new and unexpected direction.

Shooting a scene for the film at his grandmother June Peterson’s home, Graham thought it would a nice touch to incorporate her into the film with a small cameo role. “It was just going to be a quick, improvisational scene,” says Graham. “But then I go to the house with my actor, and I told him that you’re going to pretend to be the grandson, and you’re going to meet her on camera and talk about spirits, because she’s spiritual person, that might get her talking. And she started talking about the voices in her head and something called automatic writing.”

What his grandmother began describing in that scene was her relationship with a supernatural being called “Sator” that she first met in 1968, and had been a part of her life ever since.  “She met Sator in 1968, and spent a lot of time with him” explains Graham matter-of-factly. “And I did research after that very first day, and realized that this is what I want to incorporate in the film. And then I went back to my grandmother and tried getting her to talk about this more. And you can’t predict anything that she’s going to say, you can’t tell her what to say. And a lot of the stuff she did say didn’t work with the story I was already trying to tell. So, I would have to take week-long breaks to try to rewrite and try getting this to work in the film.”

The concept of “Sator” was not new to Graham; his grandmother, her mother, and her mother’s mother had all been known to hear voices that had resulted in stays in psychiatric hospitals, and his great-grandmother had committed suicide. But the reams of automatic writings and the voices in her head were a revelation and captured a deeper sense of his grandmother’s decades-long connection to Sator.

“I’ve always known [about] Sator my entire life,” says Graham. “But it was just a guardian of hers. That’s it. I didn’t know anything about the automatic writings or the voices in her head until she decided to share it the day that we were filming. It was just by chance [that] she decided to talk about that. When dementia got really bad, she couldn’t stay in that house anymore. So when we moved her into a care home, I went and helped clear out the house and in the back closet, I found a whole box of these [automatic writings]. I found that box when I was in post-production. So, Sator wasn’t even involved in this film until post-production.”

“And so when I found that box, I found a 1000-page journal, and it documented every single day with him,” explains Graham. “And so when I found that, I was like, “Oh shit, this is what I need to put in the movie somehow.” And dementia was already starting to take over. And so then it was like a race against time to be like, “Okay, let me get as much as I can out of her.” And the first time she spoke, she talked all about him, which was great. And the very last day that I recorded with her, it took like 40-minutes just to get her to say three lines or get her to talk, like, say three sentences about him because he was like, wiped from her mind. But by then when I saw that, I was like, “This is a gold mine.” I thought I had something really, really, unique here. And it’s like, well, I have the real person that can talk about this in this film already. So let me see what I can do with it.”

Incorporating home video footage of his grandmother, Graham retooled the film into a slow-burning horror film about Sator, a demonic creature stalking a troubled family in the woods. Starring Michael Daniel, Aurora Lowe, Gabriel Nicholson, and Rachel Johnson, the film is a beautifully-shot haunting feature that only becomes more unsettling once you uncover its real-life inspiration.

Retooling the film so late in the process after years of build-up forced Graham to have to retrofit footage from his initial plan for the film into something that could accommodate Sator’s presence in a fluid way, without spoiling the restrained tone and atmosphere of the film. “I hate exposition scenes,” Graham admits. “There are certain things that I needed to get across. Since I did have two different stories, there were a few scenes that I shot, some dialogue with the cast, that couldn’t work because of what my grandmother started to say. Like, there’s a scene where Pete [Michael Daniel] and Adam [Gabriel Nicholson] are sitting next to what looks like ruins, and Pete is doing most of the talking. But since his mouth has a beard covering it and he’s kind of grumbly, I dubbed that whole thing over with completely different dialogue. What he said originally had nothing to do with the new story that I was telling.”

“In the future, I want to make more accessible [films], it’s still going to be artsy, it’s going to be atmospheric, but I want things to be sped-up a little bit, and I don’t want to leave things too vague,” Graham continues. “But I don’t like exposition, and if I can get away with the characters not explaining it, then I’ll do that.”

With its deliberate pacing and focus on a family’s battle with a supernatural entity, Sator brings to mind recent A24 hits like The Witch and Hereditary, even though the process of filming Sator began years before those films were released.

“When the trailer came out for The Witch, that got me excited because I was like, “Okay my film is right in that wheelhouse, this is great,” says Graham. “And then when Hereditary was announced in Sundance, I freaked out because that film is about the Graham family. That film was about the Graham family and my last name is Graham, and it has to do with a grandmother that’s dealing with the supernatural, and I freaked out. Because it’s like, “Man, he stole my film.” But then I read the script. I went searching for the script, read it, and it’s like, “Okay, this film is completely different.” I really like his film. [Hereditary director] Ari Aster is now an influence on me as far as how I want to be with writing. I love his writing. [Robert Eggers’] The Witch definitely was a huge inspiration as far as colouring the film. I actually had screen grabs of The Witch next to mine, and used that as kind of a reference for colouring the film.

While Sator has occupied Graham’s life for years, he envisions revisiting his grandmother’s experience with Sator at some point down the road, albeit in a very different format, likening it to a drama as opposed to a straight-ahead horror film.

“Her journal is massive,” explains Graham. “And I transcribed or digitized every page of everything, it’s in the cloud right now. So eventually, [before] I decide I want to take on that project, I want my career to move forward first. The horror-ish sci-fi-ish genre is where I want to stay, it’s the best, I feel like, to get myself out there. And then, eventually, I will want to go to [his grandmother’s story]. But it’ll be more of a drama with that particular story.”

Following Sator’s digital release, Graham has put together a number of extras for an upcoming Blu-ray release of the film that will shed light on its unique production history.

“I am writing some articles that are a deep dive into the making of,” says Graham. “I did a very in-depth commentary about my process with everything. Yellow Veil is working on a Blu-ray release with a certain company that I can’t [disclose] yet.”

Now that Sator is finally out in the world, Graham admits that he is happy to move onto other projects, although he isn’t necessarily abandoning his fascination with the dark corners of humanity just yet.

“I have other films that I’m writing, I need to get away from Sator, he’s done a lot in my life already,” says Graham emphatically. “And I need to kind of put that away. I spent two years writing one script. It’s inspired by the child abductions that happened in Belgium in the 90s. But since that film has a very heavy subject matter, I’m writing something a little bit more fun. It’s still dark, but it’s more fun. It’s about an impossibly long shipping container, and it has kind of a cosmic horror vibe to it. [Laughs] That’s all I’ll say about those projects.”

Sator is available on video-on-demand now.