The Malicious

“The Malicious” is an interesting one. The base idea for the Short had been circulating around my head since 2015 and over the years, there had been multiple drafts of at least three different incarnations of the script. Each one explored contrasting story angles and different characters but remained true to the foundational sleight-of-hand which was it’s embryonic impetus. Thus, no draft had ever worked.

Fast forward to November 2017 and “I’m Sorry Mommy”, my collaboration with Director Sonja Steyn, had taken home the Audience Choice Award for Best Australian Short at the A Night of Horror International Film Festival. If you were to ask one of us, we’d tell you that our victory is solely credited to the hands of the talented Art Director for that film, Tanith du Plessis. She brought our demon to life and I wore the makeup. Needless to say, the unexpected win had fueled a fire in us and Tanith had enthusiastically mentioned that we should use her house for a future project. This began my wheels turning. I knew her place to be perfect location interior with it’s spacious and traditional structures of family, home and hearth, and that became the aim of my next corruption.

I riffed ideas with her for about ten minutes when I suddenly began to see a connection to “The Malicious”, which at that point had rested in a pile of drafted embarrassments to be rediscovered at a later time. But as I nurtured the idea within the following days, the concepts of a battered wife and a supernaturally-tinged home invasion began to take hold… and the story had finally found the foundation that was always missing. That coupled with Tanith’s eagerness to relinquish her home and take her Art Direction to the next level created the momentum we needed to begin making things happen.

I can’t chalk it up to kismet completely, but the whole project came together naturally from there. I found an Executive Producer in Felix Von Gellhorn who also consented to shaving off all of his body hair, non-begrudgingly, and sat through four hours of makeup applications to play one of our more menacing characters. I got Sam White to come on board as Co-Producer with Tanith and I, and he was able to reach out and secure Timothy Carr as our Cinematographer. This upped the Production level to much more than we had even conceived for ourselves, and because of that, we were able to put a wonderful team behind us, from our talented Cast to our driven Crew, who were subjected to breathing in copious amounts of haze-with-extra-haze during all hours of the Shoot.

And throughout all of this, I cannot be prouder and more thankful for the teamwork lent to the fledgeling hands of this first time Director. You never know what you’re capable of doing until you do it. One thing I found was that I had a special knack to remain completely motivated while accidentally, and continually, damaging my partner’s automobile at several stages throughout the production-- an element that only Tim and I know vehicularly-firsthand as ‘the malicious curse.’

Well curses back, and get behind us Satan, because at the end of the day, we all know that we fucked some serious shit up when we finally got to press record on May 1, 2018. That’s when every little bit came together!