Interior

All filmmaking is about manipulation, but no other genre has more of a visceral and extreme effect than the horror genre. Horror films play with the manipulation of sound and image to create fear and dread in an audience, forcing us to confront death and pain. Using the cinematic form to instill fear in an audience requires the filmmaker, and, in a sense, the film itself to disappear. The audience cannot be made aware of the illusion, and as much as one can, should lose themselves in the experience. Most of the terror one feels during a horror film is fear for the characters within and what will happen to them. With my feature film INTERIOR, I hope to explore a different kind of fear: the fear of film itself. It is the fear of the form, the fear of what is in the frame and outside of it, of the subject and who is filming it, of dead moments séanced back into the present. In any work of cinematic horror, there is only one true villain, and it is not the ghost or the slasher or the evil force in the woods; it is the filmmaker.

INTERIOR is a micro-budget horror film about a filmmaker, Sam, who is hired to spend the night alone in a haunted house to record evidence of the supernatural. He is the type of person who would rather look at the world through the lens of a camera than actually participate in it. Isolated with something that may or may not be stalking him, the cameras, his lifeline to the world, start capturing images that cannot be explained rationally. This thoroughly modern man is suddenly confronted with his own mortality in the form of a spirit that lives beyond comprehension through the very tools that shelter him from the world not immediately present. If he cannot trust the camera, what can he trust?

Unlike a “found footage” film, where the viewer is asked to look at events that have already happened in an academic way after the fact, we are creating a world with immediacy that is unfolding in front of the viewer. This is not a "found footage" film, but a classic narrative with a protagonist who acts as the audience’s avatar. When he finds footage in the film, the audience finds it as well, and participates in the horror of the discovery, which is an important part of the fear of found footage that no film is able to explore anymore.