Seth Grossman’s newest horror movie, Inner Demons, follows the production crew of an Intervention-style reality program and their subject, Carson, a troubled teenaged girl addicted to drugs. Oh, and she’s also possessed by the devil. Forgot about that part.
A veteran of reality television, I talked to Seth Grossman (The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations, $50K & a Call Girl) about the verite style, the production of Inner Demons, his time working on Intervention, and just how involved documentary filmmakers should be.
Your experience in reality TV obviously provided the background for the film. But what inspired you to take the reality show format and use it to tell a horror story?
Seth: I’ve worked in reality television between feature film jobs for the last eight years. I made my first movie The Elephant King in Thailand in 2006, and since then I’ve made three other films and between movies I’ve done reality to make a living. And I feel like the aesthetic of reality programming create a visceral response in the audience and make you feel that things are really happening in front of you in a way that can be really emotionally effective.
I totally agree, it’s not unlike documentaries.
Seth: There’s something about movies that are shown from a handheld point-of-view. The sort of editorial style of reality, the kind of coverage you get in reality shows, it lends a level of reality to the picture. And I wanted people to respond to Inner Demons as thought it were happening right before their eyes. I’ve made movies with the more formal, traditional approach using dolly shots, cranes, and things like that. But I felt like this kind of story, because this was about the relationship between this reality production crew and the addict and who family that they’re filming, and how that relationship evolves and leads to ultimately tragedy, because it was about that relationship I ultimately wanted to show it from the point of view from the reality crew that was capturing it on the ground.
I always say that found footage is fertile ground and the genre has yet to take full advantage of its limits. In your opinion, what is it about verite horror that works? What doesn’t work?
Seth: Verite horror works when it immerses people in the perspective of the camera’s point of view, through the eyes we’re watching the events unfold. But the crucial thing about found footage that really makes or breaks a movie and really determines whether it gets released at all is performances. I think that when you’ve got performances that are believable and feel real, that lends credibility to the documentary-style format. When the performances read false, I think it immediately makes the whole thing feel contrived.
Apparently Jason Blum, who does every horror movie on the planet, has tens of thousands of found footage movies lining the walls of his office that are never gonna see the light of day. And the thing I’m most proud of when with Inner Demons is that I was working with non-union actors, some of whom were working on their first feature film, and I feel like I got performances out of them and it’s a real testament to the casting director Ricki Maslar, and the dedication of the performances. I feel like I got performances out of them that feel the equivalent of any big budget horror movie out there. I mean, I feel like they really brought it in terms of the tears, the dramatic moments, the fears, the demonic transformation that Carson undergoes, the humor of the crew, it all felt very real. And that’s what I’m really happy about.
I had no idea you had non-union actors. You did a good job with them.
Seth: Thank you! We put a lot of work into it, it’s a huge challenge to work with relatively green actors and give those kinds of performances. We rehearsed for a long time. I worked with an acting coach that I worked with a lot on the demonic transformation when she really turns into the demon, and we watched a lot of videos together, and we just formed a real circle of trust around one another. I took full advantage of every tool in the director’s toolchest to bring out the reality of the performances.
Jason gets a lot of abuse! I was a film student, I’ve done PA work before.
Seth: Me too!
What led you to decide that he should be the center of the film?
Seth: I think he was the one who wasn’t jaded. He was the only one in the crew who hadn’t been on a lot of these Intervention shoots already. I think there is a certain gallows humor that the other producers share that he doesn’t really participate in. He’s sensitive. He feels the pain that Carson and her family are going through. He empathizes. He’s emotionally intelligent. He gets it. He really identifies with her in a way. He’s also an outsider. He feels like nobody understands what he’s going through. I think that his identification with Carson is almost tragic. Because he’s not being professional. As much as I like him and I think he’s the most empathic person on the crew, when he shoots her up with heroin because he believes that’s the only way he can help her and protect the people she’s surrounded by, that sort of sets off the movie’s descent into the third-act chaos.
He also displays some stalker-ish behavior.
Seth: He’s got the hots for her!
The characters working on the show — the producers, the directors — they were kind of awful people. Considering your background, did you write them as people you’ve hated working with? Or did you have them be antagonistic just for the film’s sake?
Seth: That’s a really good question, and I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. Because I was recently talking to the executive producer of the show Intervention . I was the field producer and he was my boss. And I was telling him about some of the tension I felt on the show, manipulating people to get “the goods,” to draw out a performance. And he said, “I don’t think you’re manipulative. You’re helping them. You worked really hard and these people went to rehab because of the show you helped to make.” So, I think those characters — Suzanne, the lead producer, and Tim, the cameraman — I think they’re jaded, they’re tired from being on the field for a long time, they’re tired of being away from their families, they’re insensitive as a defense mechanism. They want to keep the trauma of what they’re documenting at a distance. Keep it at arm’s length so they don’t have to feel it too much.
And you have to have antagonists in a horror movie. That’s the way they were written. They were actually written as being more exploitive than what they wound up being in the final version. But, they’re definitely part of the problem and not the solution.
And I just want to say for the record, it’s not a reflection of the production staff were on Intervention. In fact the people who worked on Intervention really cared about the subject of the show, and most of the time when I was filming an actual intervention, when their families are breaking down and crying, and telling their loved one to get help, I would be watching my handheld monitor with tears in my eyes. Because what they were going through affected me so much. This is the horror movie of those kinds of characters, and they need to be that way to push the story it goes in.
As a documentary filmmaker who has done verite-style shoots, how important is it for filmmakers to intervene? How do you feel about crossing that line?
Seth: That was a question we asked ourselves a lot when I worked on Intervention. Because you would get in situations sometimes when someone was gonna potentially hurt themselves or someone else. And you have to ask yourself, when do I put down the camera and step in and stop this from happening? Or call the police and stop this from happening? If someone was in danger of hurting a child, we would always call the police and Child Protective Services to make sure that didn’t happen.
There was one situation where I was shooting an episode with a young woman named Christina in Riverside, California. She was a meth addict who thought she had bugs crawling under the skin in her face. She had meth-induced psychosis. And she asked her mother to bring her a sterilized knitting needle so she could dig the bugs out of her face.
Oh my God.
Seth: This was a beautiful young girl with great skin and it’s something that would have happened and has happened when the Intervention crew was not there. And we knew it would happen if we were to stop her, it would just happen as soon as we left. Because she was freaking out about these bugs. So we documented it, and part of the reason we documented it and justified it was that we’re not making this show to help Christina. We’re making this show to help the millions of people who watch it, who may be wondering the effects of meth and what it can do to people.
In terms of creating a memorable image that will probably stop someone from ever experimenting with meth, a meth addict digging her face with a needle looking for bugs is definitely a powerful image to prevent people from trying. So it’s not easy to answer that question and everyone who produced that show answers it differently in terms of when to put the camera down and help somebody, but it’s a question we asked ourselves a lot. And it’s interesting in Inner Demons , the climax of the film is when Jason is seeing Carson struggle with her possession, and he does put down the camera and he goes to her, hugs her, tells her he loves her and that he wants to help her. That’s when everything changes.
You kind of bring in another question about adolescence and bullying. Carson’s demonic origins start with this. What do you think of young people today in the face of rapidly changing technology redefining their daily life? Are they more empathetic or more cruel?
Seth: I think they’re pretty much the way they’ve always been. They understand bullying more as a cultural phenomenon, so they know more resources to deal with it when it happens instead of just this unique thing that is only happening to me. They can take a step back and go, “This is something, there’s resources online, there’s a lot of people in the world who are aware of this, this is something that happens to people, and here is more ways to deal with it.” But with the resources to address bullying, there is a lot more ways to bully somebody.
So, bad kids will be bad kids and will use all the tools to ridicule someone. I think adolescence is a period where people are unsure of their social identity. So the best way to form an identity is to ridicule somebody else and kind of define who you’re not. It also helps groups to cohere and to have a common enemy. So I think when people see someone bully someone it gives them a satisfying feeling of being a part of something. “We all hate this one person! So that makes us feel like we’re a team!” Unfortunately that’s just a relative human evolution, and it’s something we always have to deal with. But it’s good there’s an anti-bullying movement because it gives somebody an option when they face an attack.
Inner Demons is out now from IFC Midnight.