Taglines: It’s Not a Dream, It’s Not Reality.
Demonic Movie Storyline. After a creepy dream involving her mother Angela (Nathalie Boltt) foreshadows the film, Carly (Carly Pope) is contacted by an old ally named Martin (Chris William Martin). He knows that Angela and Carly have been estranged for years, the daughter having left her mother behind after a series of violent, murderous actions that can’t really be forgiven.
Martin claims to have seen Angela at a hospital, where she lays in a coma. Angela goes to investigate, and discovers that two men (Michael J. Rogers, Terry Chen) have a vested interest in Angela and Carly. They have devised a way for people to enter the dreamscape of coma patients, and they want Carly to go in and “talk” to her mother. She will, of course, learn that she’s not alone in there.
Demonic is a 2021 supernatural horror film written, co-produced and directed by Neill Blomkamp. The film stars Carly Pope, Chris William Martin, Michael J. Rogers, Nathalie Boltt, Terry Chen and Kandyse McClure. Filmed amid the COVID-19 pandemic, it was released on August 20, 2021, receiving generally negative reviews from critics.
Demonic premiered at Berlinale in March 2021. IFC Midnight bought rights to the film in the United States, where it will be released in theaters on August 20, 2021, and on video on demand a week later on August 27, 2021.
“The main character is a girl whose been estranged from her mother,” the District 9 and Elysium filmmaker tells EW. “During the course of the film she gets sort of reunited with her mother and we learn about some crazy back story that she wasn’t aware of. I would say it has a crossover between science fiction and horror.”
Blomkamp shot the film after the start of the pandemic. “The whole planet was shutting down and the plans that I had for other bigger films were put on hold,” says the British Columbia-based director. “Living out here in this slightly more rural area I was thinking we should self-finance something so that we could make something cool.
For a long time, I’ve been really interested in films like Paranormal Activity, and lower budget stuff that is pretty terrifying, and so we just started working on this concept. It grew and it got bigger than films like Paranormal Activity but it was cut from the same cloth really. So that’s what it is. We made use out of a lot of the locations out here and just shot it through the summer.”
The cast of Demonic includes Carly Pope, Chris William Martin, and Michael Rogers. “The cast was a group of people who I really like, everything coming from this feeling of wanting to get people to together and shoot something that we were in control of,” says Blomkamp. “It made me look through the catalog of actors that I had worked with [on] our experimental Oats Studios YouTube stuff. I worked with Carly Pope on a few Oats pieces so I immediately thought she would be great for female lead. It was a pretty cool close-knit group of friends working on something.”
Blomkamp is not the only director who made a horror film during lockdown. Last year saw the release of Rob Savage’s Zoom-set chiller Host while Kill List auteur Ben Wheatley put out his own shot-during-the-pandemic terror tale in April.
“With Ben Wheatley it’s pretty fascinating because a mutual friend of ours is Sharlto Copley [the star of District 9], who starred in one of Ben’s films,” says Blomkamp. “I was saying to Sharl that I was shooting this smaller horror film out here and he was like, ‘Ben’s doing the exact same thing in England.’ I emailed Ben and I was like, ‘Are you also shooting a COVID horror film right now?’ and he was like, ‘Yes, yes, I am.’ So that was pretty awesome. It’s a genre where you can be really creative and fairly experimental at a low-budget level. I think it was a perfect time, when people were on pause, to play around a bit in the genre.”
Demonic (2021)
Directed by: Neill Blomkamp
Starring: Carly Pope, Chris William Martin, Michael J. Rogers, Nathalie Boltt, Terry Chen, Andrea Agur
Screenplay by: Neill Blomkamp
Production Design by: Steven St. Arnaud
Cinematography by: Byron Kopman
Film Editing by: Austyn Daines
Art Department: Gideon Hogan
Music by: Ola Strandh
MPAA Rating: R for language, some violence and bloody images.
Distributed by: IFC Films
Release Date: August 20, 2021
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