Neill Blomkamp on Demonic, his surprise new horror film shot during lockdown

It’s been five years since we last had a feature film from South-African-born writer-director Neil Blomkamp. Blomkamp came out of the gate strong with his incredible feature debut District 9 in 2009, a thrilling sci-fi blockbuster that channeled the political situation in South Africa through a fascinating alien lens. Next came the Matt Damon-starring sci-fi adventure Elysium, followed by the disappointing robot-meets-E.T romp Chappie in 2016. After years of announcements of Blomkamp’s potential involvement in major IP properties including Aliens and Robocop that never materialized, Blompkamp is now back with Demonic, a sci-fi/horror mashup unlike anything the filmmaker has released so far.

Demonic stars Carly Pope as Carly, a  woman recruited by a shadowy government agency to undergo a mysterious new treatment to help her estranged mother Angela (Nathalie Boltt). Angela has fallen into a coma, and her physicians enlist Carly to participate in a new technology that will allow her to communicate with her mother while in her coma state. But once she is inside her mother’s mind, she comes face-to-face with an evil force that led her mother to commit an unspeakable crime years earlier, one that has now turned its deadly sights on Carly.

Shot during the lockdown, Demonic is an unexpected left turn from a filmmaker who has traditionally delivered sweeping sci-fi epics. A traditional horror story crossed with a near-future sci-fi plot, Demonic is a lean slow-burning thriller that Blomkamp nevertheless made extremely complicated with his use of volumetric capture to represent Carly’s computerized dream-like descent into her mother’s memories.

We spoke with Blomkamp about how Demonic came about, the incredibly long and difficult process of using volumetric capture in the film, and how he envisions the future of both filmmaking and video games. (He did also confirm that he is working on the script for the long-awaited District 10). Demonic is out on August 20.

Bad Feeling Magazine: It’s been quite some time since we’ve had a feature from you, so it’s great that Demonic is on its way. Apparently, the idea came to you during lockdown; how did everything come about?

Neill Blomkamp: When everything else looked like it was pausing, I wanted to just keep busy with something. And I was always really into this idea of Paranormal Activity in the way that the filmmakers just went out and shot something in their own house and just sort of made it happen. I thought that was really cool. And so, for a long time, I’ve wanted to do something like that. And you know, the timing was just never right. And then, with everything clearly being halted for a moment, it felt like a good time to resurrect that idea. And then, in terms of what the actual film would be about, I had a bunch of different disparate things that I was interested in, that I really just put into a melting pot and combined, and the result of it is Demonic.

You’ve said that initially, you were planning to do a found footage film; how did that evolve into what we see in Demonic now?

It probably would have been that, but that’s when it was entirely self-financed. And then AGC [Studios] came on board and doubled our budget. And when that happened, I was thinking I could either keep it found footage, or I could do something that’s slightly more traditional. And it felt like by approaching the photography from more of a traditional standpoint, it would create slightly more tension just in the way that the shots were more controlled and restrained. You know, the whole film is really just trying to be an exercise in a slow burn, and in simmering tension. And I just feel like the photography style we ended up with was the way to go about trying to do that.

Was there an evolution about what sort of tone you wanted to maintain, or did you know from the beginning that you wanted this to be a slow burn until the finale?

No, it was completely conscious from the extreme beginning. Because I was working on something that was at the time a self-financed horror film. That was the main reason that I wanted to do it, was that it was just totally different from the stuff I’d done before. And the whole point was to just have it sort of slowly chew away at the audience.

How did the volumetric capture idea come about? Was there any kind of lingering fear since it’s so new and so integral to the film?

Yeah, I mean it’s an incredibly bizarre process. It’s why I think you haven’t really seen it much in films yet, is because it’s so early and so glitchy that it needs to kind of get refined more. But one of the craziest things about it is it takes months to process all of that data. I think we were doing like, between 12 to 15 terabytes per day. And it’s 250 cameras at 4K, running all the time. So, first, you have to edit the sequence together in some semblance of a way, because it’s not filmed from any one POV. It’s obviously just a hemisphere of cameras. You have to kind of piece the cameras together to try to, you know, edit the scene. And then once you’ve edited the scene, you have your in and out points that then have to be crunched out of 250, different POVs down into three-dimensional geometry.

So that process, and also because of the amount of it in the film, I mean, I think there’s somewhere around 15 minutes of stuff in the movie, which is hilarious for low-budget horror. So yeah, it’s pretty funny. But that that honestly took, I think, a few months to complete. It’s like, maybe three weeks out or something, you get your first three-dimensional capture results. And then that gets handed to the VFX company who can then actually begin to implement [and] work on it, drop that capture of the actors into the environments that we were building, and begin to light them and set up real camera angles that would be what the audience would actually see.

So, I mean, it was insanely difficult, it was very difficult to film, because the actors are in a cage, a scaffold cage of cameras, they can’t really move properly, and it feels sterile and insane. And then it’s difficult when you’re waiting for this stuff to come back. And then once you get it into VFX, pretty much by the time it had gone into the effects it started feeling a little bit more normal, I would say. But you have absolutely no visibility as to what it is that you’ve got until far into the process. I knew that it would look glitchy and kind of lo-fi. It was written into the script to try to justify that. Obviously, it’s prototype technology for this medical research. And then that allows for the story. It’s like, okay, maybe the audience will accept it under those conditions. And then you just sit and wait and wait for it to come back. And then it comes back and you’re like, “Oh, yeah, it’s as glitchy as imagined.”

Is that something you can see using again in the future for any projects down the road?

Yeah, I would say yes. I love the results of it. I really disliked the process of gathering it, but the result is cool. It’s interesting because as the resolution increases, the amount of use cases for it will sort of skyrocket, I think. But for me right now, it’s not clear to me how I would use it in a sort of narrative sense again. It’s very easy to think of how to use it just visually, in something more like a music video. Aesthetically, I love the look of it.

What inspired the creature design in the film?

Actually, it was one of the easiest ones I’ve ever done. Yeah, I don’t know why. I was sort of into ravens and crows in general. And I was reading a lot about medieval plague masks with the long nose that they would put the lavender inside of, which actually Sam uses in the movie, she puts one of those on in the nightmare. And I think it may have been a case subconsciously, of kind of riffing on that idea. Maybe it turned into a beak somehow, I don’t actually know. But I wrote it in the script, the way that it looks in the film, and the concept artists that I work with who did the design for it pretty much nailed it. From the first illustration, it looked exactly like what’s in the movie. And I thought it was awesome. And then we just went off and built a seven-foot suit out of it. And yeah, its horrific beak face is sitting in storage somewhere right now.

Haunting somebody for sure. Speaking about creature design, I went back and re-watched all of the Oats Studios shorts, there’s some fascinating work there. What was the initial idea for the studio and what are your goals for the future with it?

Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to give away what the goal is, because I’m busy working on that right now. But one way to define the goal would be that it has nothing to do with Hollywood. Very separate. Everything to do with Oats Studios should never touch Hollywood in any way. But there’s a bunch of stuff in there that I love. I love Firebase. Actually, I like a lot of this stuff in there, the cooking show is way up on my list.

You’ve famously been involved in some major Hollywood IP projects; is that something that you’re still interested in doing going forward? Or do you prefer having as much creative control over projects as you can?

There’s no sort of firm rule that I have. I mean, I’m equally happy to work inside the Hollywood system. I just think that there’s a bunch of really interesting stuff that game companies do that could be applied, I think, to film, especially in the 21st century, and especially based on people’s amount of attention, and how they consume films. There is more interesting stuff that can be done than is being done. I would say that’s probably one of the main driving things. I’m working on a science fiction film, or a script right now, for a film that I want to do that’s like a substantially higher budget that something like Oats wouldn’t be able to sustain. And that’s cool, too. So, you know, I just want to be creative in general.

It seems like you latched on really early to the idea of narrative scope in gaming as well. How do you see that going forward? And what excites you about that medium?

I mean, personally, people always use the word narrative with games. And I think it’s the exact opposite. I think if you want narrative, it’s a passive audience experience, because the whole point of narrative is that you’re being told something, like sitting around a campfire. I think the description of where games will end up going is much more to do with increasing fidelity in simulated realities, that the person is doing the opposite of narrative. They have agency and can go through the world doing what they want to do. You know what I mean? It’s almost like the opposite. I think the future of it, to me, is a form of an open-world immersion.

What do you hope audiences take away from Demonic?

It’s meant to be a tense watch. That was my goal going in with it. So, that superseded everything else. You know, I hope audiences get that watching it. I’m not sure they will. But I hope they do.

Demonic is available on VOD and in select theatres now.