Fear No Evil

Fear No Evil is a horror story about a girl possessed by a demon that feeds on fear, and the friends and family who help her find the courage to fight back. As director of photography, my job was to take it from script to screen, finding images that make you feel what she feels.

We shot the entire feature in seven days, with a crew of about ten, a cast of six, and two locations: an actor's house for the first possession and exorcism, and a rented mansion for the rest of the week. A typical shoot covers five or six script pages a day. We averaged fifteen, with no shot list, working straight from the script scene by scene.

The script kept evolving as we filmed. What reads well on the page doesn't always play on camera, so we rewrote and reblocked as we went. At times I stepped in to work with the actors directly, so the performance and the frame landed together.

We shot on a RED Dragon alongside a Blackmagic, and built the film around two palettes. The real world is warm and bright: candlelight, oranges, soft light colors. The spirit realm, shot on green screen, is the opposite: deep blue or complete black, lit by a single spotlight or the dimmest light possible. Tying them together is the moon, which we built ourselves and heavily diffused so it read as natural, a cold blue light that slowly bleeds from her world into the dark one. Samuel and I kept coming back to Robert Eggers' Nosferatu, especially its single-source shots, as the reference for that darkness.

Going into the final days, we weren't sure we'd make it. The whole crew pulled together, and we wrapped on schedule.