Does the title The Evil Within ring a bell? No, not the game. After 15 years of production, The Evil Within has finally been released. No, that’s not a typo. The film took 15 years to make. What’s even stranger than the long production time is the story behind the film.
Andrew Getty, heir to the Getty oil fortune and grandson of J. Paul Getty, wrote, directed and invested $6 million of his own money into the movie. Principal photography, which began in 2002, would start and stop, taking 5 years to complete. Getty insisted on making his own camera rigs, animatronics and sets. He worked on tweaking the film all the way up to his death on March 31, 2015 in an attempt to reach perfection.
Sean Patrick Flannery, Michael Berryman, Fred Kochler, Brianna Brown and Dina Meyer star in the film, inspired by Getty’s own nightmares, which centers on a mentally challenged boy whose dreams are invaded by a demonic entity who orders him to begin a murderous rampage.
Co-producer Michael Luceri finished the film and had this to say:
After Andrew died, I made it my mission to see that his film was completed. I have been on this project from the beginning. Andrew was such a perfectionist, each and every shot had to be perfect before he would move on. When he was young, Andrew told me that he would have these really powerful, twisted dreams, so scary that he didn’t want to believe they came from inside him, so he had this idea that it was this ’storyteller’ who created the dreams, and that became the genesis of the film’s story.’
The Evil Within is on Amazon for both rent and purchase, and was released on Blu-ray and DVD on March 3, 2017 from Vision Films.
