Low budget horror films, particularly those of the found-footage variety, may have decreased in popularity over the past few years, but that isn’t stopping filmmakers from trying to put their stamp on the genre. The latest attempt is The Remaining, from writer/director Casey La Scala, which seeks to combine the usual thrills and chills with an unlikely bedfellow – the apocalypse, which in this case comes in the form of The Rapture.
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Casey via telephone about creating a horror film about a Biblical event, and what he hopes secular and non-secular audiences take away from the experience.
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The Remaining is labeled as a “faith-based” horror film. What prompted you to write a horror film from this perspective?
When my father was dying, one of the things I learned was that he wished he had more time, and I think that resonated with me. You learn that life can end very quickly, and you need to say the things to the people that you love while you’re here, and you need to think about the way you’re living your life while you’re here, because it can end in the blink of an eye.
I was writing The Amityville Horror, and my partner Jason Blum was shooting one of the [Paranormal Activity films], I got this idea: I wondered what a global Paranormal Activity would look like. It had never been done before. And when I was a kid, I was raised Lutheran, and I went to church camp, and a lot of the counselors would tell me about the Rapture, and about the Tribulation and the seven years of Hell, and all those pieces kind of came together.
When I started laying out the story, I [decided] I could use Revelations as the road I’m going to travel on, and then I started thinking about the faith-based aspect of it. Years ago, I had produced a film called A Walk to Remember, and we had brought in a faith-based marketing team to reach out to the faith-based community, and it was a really effective tool. So I thought, has there ever been a faith-based horror movie? Could they do the same outreach for this kind of film?
So I ended up writing it and sending it to Affirm Films, they’re kind of the faith-based label at Sony, and they looked at it and they weren’t sure. We had long discussions about “would the faith-based audience go to something like this?” My argument was, if you look at Passion of the Christ, that was technically a horror film. From that stage, the script was sent out to a few youth ministers across the country, and they got word back that they believed that everyone would support the film, so that kind of got the ball rolling.
But when I made it, I was always thinking that I also wanted to reach the mainstream audience, so I created those themes that are universal. Themes of loving the one you’re with, finding redemption, saying the things you need to say before you die. These are all things that I think all audiences can enjoy and connect with.
So you were working on Amityville before jumping onto this. Are you still attached to Amityville?
Yeah, I’m the producer. I’ve been involved every step of the way. The draft I wrote was very much like The Conjuring, and we had it ready to go before The Conjuring even started moving forward. Then there were some rights issues and we ended up stalling, and The Conjuring moved forward. And it was almost beat-for-beat the same movie, so at that point we started looking into a new approach.
We met with something like seventy writers, and ultimately Franck Khalfoun came up with a really, really smart approach to the material. So right when I finished post-production on my movie, we started shooting Amityville, and Franck did a great job. Bella Thorne is fantastic, Jennifer Jason Leigh is fantastic, and it’s coming out in January.
It’s going to be better than the Ryan Reynolds version, right?
It’s not even in the same ballpark. [laughs]
You worked on Donnie Darko, which also had a bit of a supernatural element, so working in that realm isn’t exactly new territory for you.
No, it isn’t. When I was growing up, I loved reading Stephen King books, and I’ve always been drawn to supernatural thrillers. I realized, after I had shot the movie, that there was a big influence from The Stand, which is really about good versus evil. This kind of darker genre is interesting to me. Donnie Darko had some of those science fiction themes and dealt with death and getting a chance to live your life over, and I’m drawn to that. From a very early age, I was influenced by those types of stories.
You cited Paranormal Activity as an influence. To me, the trailer evoked a little bit of Chronicle, or maybe even Cloverfield. All of those are found-footage films, but this seems to be more of a hybrid. How did you settle on the style for The Remaining?
I originally wrote it to be a single-shooter, to be found-footage, and that’s how I wanted to do it. But when writing it, there were certain scenes where I just couldn’t justify my protagonist shooting these moments that he would never be shooting. And a lot of times you’re like, well, maybe he puts the camera up on a table and it happens to be running, and I found myself doing a lot of that and trying to justify why we were shooting these moments.
So I decided to write it as a traditional narrative, and I said “I’m going to shoot this with a handheld style, I’ll have a steady rig and I’ll shoot so it will feel like it’s handheld, and then I’ll punch into those moments with my protagonist with those handheld cameras to get that visceral, real response.” And it was kind of challenging to get Sony onboard, but it really worked well. It freed me up to tell a real character story without worrying about “why is this person shooting this moment?”
The special effects in the trailer for The Remaining look pretty solid. What techniques did you utilize to get the most out of your budget?
A lot of it was planning. We wanted to do a lot of practical effects because we didn’t have a lot of money for digital effects, so that was the first thing, just trying to plan everything and be really smart about everything. We’re talking about a 20-day shoot, this was a really fast-paced film to work on.
So I found out visual effects supervisor, Chris Morley, who works at Tippett Studios in San Francisco, and we had a very similar vision. We wanted to do as much as we possibly could practically, because in-camera effects just work so much better. So Chris became really passionate about the material, he came out to set and he really worked hard to give us as much as he possibly could.
I think planning was number one, and then writing it to do effects that I could afford. There were marquee events that needed to happen, so I knew I had to hit those and I knew what those would cost, so in between all those I would just have to get smart and write and plan effects that would fit my budget. Sometimes, when you don’t have a lot of money, you have to make choices, and sometimes those choices are amazing.
For instance, go back to Jaws. The shark never worked, and that really made the movie work. Not seeing the shark actually worked out better. So a lot of the stuff that we thought we were going to do – there were much bigger visual effects – we ended up pulling some of them, and I don’t think we needed them. We spent that money elsewhere on more of the character stuff and establishing the world that these characters are populating.
There seems to be a real resurgence in faith-based entertainment right now, with Noah and Heaven is For Real opening earlier this year, and HBO exploring similar territory with The Leftovers. With some of these projects being so prominent, do you think that makes your film a bit more visible to potential audiences?
I think everything is cyclical. I think the faith-based audience has always been there, but Hollywood never really participated in doing films in that lane. I think now there’s a realization that this audience is looking for good stories, and I think that I benefited in that I was able to make this film. But I think the audience has always been there, they’ve just been chomping at the bit for anything that’s relevant to them that has faith-based themes and that’s well-executed, that stays super close to the things they’ve been taught.
I kind of feel like I’m at the tip of the spear. There’s a lot of interest in this world, and everyone has been really supportive of the film, and I think that’s what’s great. So that, coupled with what’s happening in the world, with the ebola virus and the unrest in the Middle East, and then nature acting completely off its rocker. Things are happening around the world that have never really happened to date in the Earth’s existence, and I think this is all drawing interest in these types of “end of the world” stories. And faith slides right in there, because obviously if you’re going to meet your end, you need to be thinking about what your faith is, and what your decisions are regarding your faith.
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The Remaining opens on September 5.