Miles Doleac’s (American Horror Story) supernatural thriller Demons has now wrapped and is aiming at an October theatrical release. A brand image from the film has arrived and we have it to share with you.
Co-starring Wishmaster’s Andrew Divoff, and Smallville alum John Schneider, Demons tells of a celebrated fiction writer and former priest who, along with his wife, are tormented by the ghost of her late sister, as the details of her grisly death are slowly uncovered.
Written by Doleac, whose previous film, the small-town murder mystery The Hollow, was released in theaters late last year, Demons is described as a “psychological thriller that marries elements of The Exorcist, The Shining and The Big Chill.”
Initially, my decision to write a horror script was predicated on necessity: I had a synopsis for an “exorcism” script that Lindsay (my wife) and I had worked up together. Star-writer-director Doleac stated, “A major distributor had expressed interest. Said distributor wanted to see a script “ASAP.” I didn’t have one. So, I pounded out a pretty serviceable draft within a week and sent it on. The distributor in question had kind words for the script, but passed, saying it was “too dark” for their catalogue. I took that as something of a compliment. It’s an old saw in the film universe by now that horror films are the surest bets to make money, certainly on the independent side of things. I refined the script a bit a passed it along to Keith Leopard at Uncork’d, the company that distributed my last film THE HOLLOW. Keith and I discussed and decided it was worth making at a lower budget, with Uncork’d distributing.
I was off and running to pull together a budget that would allow us to make a quality film. I’m very glad indeed that I wound up making DEMONS on my own terms (as Keith and Uncork’d are extremely supportive of their directors’ creative freedom). For one, the script became more personal to me than I thought it would be at first. It explores a number of issues that I’ve looked at in my previous films (THE HISTORIAN and THE HOLLOW). I was able to plumb deeper into a question that’s always fascinated me: the impact of religion, especially when narrowly-focused, on families and relationships. Add to that the very question of faith, which means such different things to different people. For the Colin character, faith demands constant questioning, even if—maybe especially when—the answers don’t come. But what happens when you do get answers and they aren’t what you expect? What happens if they drive you away from the seeming core of your belief system? What happens then? Who do you become?
The film is also my most female-forward one to date I’m proud to say. I came to care a great deal, especially about the women in the script: Kayleigh, Lara, and Jewel. Two characters (Kayleigh and Jewel) have suffered profound physical and intellectual abuse, each dealing with the repercussions of that abuse in different ways, one (Lara) defies typical expectations of female power and sexuality; all three are swirling around one another exploding into the great forces of nature each is capable of becoming. Being able to cast exactly who I wanted in those roles was huge for me. Every one of those actresses delivered brilliantly. Then adding Steven Brand, Andrew Divoff, and John Schneider into the mix, each one playing a character that’s not quite what he seems on the surface … each so keenly able to peel away the layers of the onion and reveal the truth beneath those charismatic facades … After three features, I continue to be amazed and humbled by the caliber of performers I’ve had on my sets.
In the film, Father Colin Hampstead oversaw an aborted exorcism that resulted in the gruesome death of seventeen-year-old Jewel Grant, in rural Louisiana. The deceased girl’s older sister, Kayleigh, grew immediately attached to Hampstead and sought him out, at first for grief counseling and then, for much more.
Eight years later, Hampstead has left the priesthood and become a celebrated fiction writer, specializing in stories about the occult, and he and Kayleigh, now his wife, have a beautiful daughter and run a well-known bed and breakfast in Savannah, GA. When the couple agrees to host a wedding for one of Colin’s college friends, what begins as a Big Chill-type reunion turns into something much more macabre, as the seemingly omnipresent ghost of her dead sister Jewel compels Kayleigh to engage in bizarre, destructive behaviors that endanger the lives of both her friends and herself.
During our interview with Miles Doleac last year he had this to say about Demons:
It’s really a departure from what I’ve done in the past. A lot of people had been prodding me to write a horror film, but I didn’t want to write a standard slasher film. I wanted to write something that once again explored characters and their relationships. So the main narrative is structured around this idea of a young girl in southern Louisiana with very conservative christian parents. She appears to be possessed, at least that is what her deeply religious father, played by Divoff, believes. They call in a priest and a doctor to assess the situation and it may or may not be what it appears on the surface to be. The events that grow out of that potential possession deeply affect and in some cases wrecks the character’s lives. That includes the priest who is the character I play. So we have this heightened, crazy, dramatic event, the exorcism. Fast forward eight years and we find out that our characters are in a very different place, yet haven’t let go of this very traumatic event. That is all I will reveal at the moment, but I think it is a film that will appeal to a lot of different audiences.
Doleac, Lindsay Anne Williams, Steven Brand, Kristina Emerson, Gary Grubbs, with Andrew Divoff and John Schneider star in Demons, which will possess theaters in October via Uncork’d Entertainment. Check out the brand new image that has just arrived.
