The Unholy follows Alice, a young hearing-impaired girl who, after a supposed visitation from the Virgin Mary, is inexplicably able to hear, speak and heal the sick. As word spreads and people from near and far flock to witness her miracles, a disgraced journalist (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Supernatural) hoping to revive his career visits the small New England town to investigate.
However, when terrifying events begin to happen all around, he starts to question if these phenomena are the works of the Virgin Mary or something much more sinister. Produced by Sam Raimi, it was written for the screen and directed by Evan Spiliotopoulos, and it's no playing in UK cinemas.
It's a fun ride, and when we caught up with the filmmaker, he offered an in-depth glimpse into bringing James Herbert's Shrine to the big screen. Starting by revealing what about the project made him want to step behind the camera to direct, Spiliotopoulos also talks in detail about crafting the perfect jump scare, why there's no post-credits scene, and the challenges of shooting in a pandemic.
Remember, you can check out what Evan told us about the greatest advice he received from Raimi by clicking here, and his thoughts on Disney+'s upcoming Beauty and the Beast spinoff here.
Watch the interview below or scroll down to read our full conversation with the writer and director.
Primarily, you’ve been a writer up until now, doing everything from Beauty and the Beast to Charlie’s Angels, so when it came to taking that step to becoming a director, what made you choose a horror film?
First of all, I did not want to take that step to become a director [Laughs]. I had seen everything directors go through in my career and I was like, ‘No! To hell with that!’ I read James Herbert’s great novel, Shrine, when I was thirteen, and I was a little film buff back then, and kind of saw it as a mix of The Exorcist and Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole with this morally corrupt journalist who screws over this small town with his lies and personal agenda. As my career in the film business advanced and I became a writer and studios seemed to like me, I would carry the book around and say, ‘Please, adopt this orphan child for me!’
Screen Gems finally stepped in in 2018, but they made me the offer to direct it. The reason they did that is that they’d just had a regime change where their new agenda was that they had had bad luck with music video directors and commercial directors who had never made a film before because they would shoot great stuff in ten-second increments but wouldn’t really assemble a narrative. So, they were like, ‘Let’s start giving some writers a chance.’ My team said ‘Yes’ for me! I figured, ‘Well, at some point, someone’s going to say ‘He’s nuts, let’s bring in an adult!’’ but they didn’t. Then, when they paired me up Sam Raimi, it was like, ‘This might actually work’ because Sam’s a movie God, he’s the nicest person imaginable so he kind of held my hand during the process. Long-winded way of saying I actually love horror movies, so despite all my Disney stuff, horror movies were my first love so I wanted to make one.
This is a very scary movie, and now that you’ve directed horror, what do you think the secret is to directing great jump scares that can take the audience by surprise without them knowing it’s coming?
It’s a couple of things. First of all, for me, my favourite jump scare in the movie is actually the first one where Finn is driving in the middle of the road and then, suddenly, there’s Alice standing in front of him. We actually got to that through a process. I had scripted it differently. There was a whole gag where the bottle of booze falls off the seat next to him and he’s searching and the camera goes under the seat, he looks up, and there she is. Everybody had read the script in our team and they were like, ‘Eh, it happens.’ We were like ‘Shit, the team has to be startled!’ So, without telling anybody, we cut the gag with the bottle. I mean, it falls, but it’s just this move and then he looks in front of him. When we scared the team, we knew we had a good jump scare because the audience truly wouldn’t be expecting it. I will say that the other big secret about scares is the sound. It’s actually silence. It’s playing with audience expectations of when the music is climbing or the sound completely drops away, you know something is going to happen there and it’s always second-guessing them. Are you expecting it when the sound goes away? Are you expecting it when the sound is climbing? It’s playing that a couple of times and doing it in different ways throughout the film.
We’ve seen a lot of horror antagonists over the years of different varieties, but Mary is unique, she isn’t like something we’ve seen before, so how challenging is it for you to come up with something that like without being inspired by this, that, or the other?
[Laughs] It was very easy because I based it on James Herbert’s book! Thank you for saying that because we're very proud of Mary. One of the reasons we’re proud of her because you know when you see a ghost story, the ghost’s agenda isn’t much more than ‘You entered my house. I will kill you’ or ‘You broke my curse. I will kill you.’ ‘You did something to me...I will kill you!’ They’re more forces of nature really. The ghosts in The Ring and The Grudge, their agenda doesn’t go beyond, ‘You offended this, I will now kill you.’ Mary is a thoroughly intelligent career. She actually has a broad, wide-ranging agenda of, ‘I will use this modern world’s social media to claim as many souls as possible. I’m not going to kill them necessarily, I’m going to corrupt them to the point where I’m going to damn them for all eternity. That’s a pretty complex plan for a supernatural entity. We were pretty happy with that. She’s like a Bond villain of supernatural entities.
We’re so used to these days seeing horror films become franchises quite quickly, but when you were approaching this one did you think about including a post-credits scene to set something up or did you approach it as a standalone story?
I absolutely approached it as a standalone story. In fact, I will tell you, since you’ve seen the movie, the little tag at the end was a post-production invention. My movie ended with them in the churchyard going, ‘It’s over!’ [Laughs] So no, for me, it’s a very self-contained movie. If a miracle happens, and the studio comes back and orders a sequel more power to them, but it is a self-contained story.
I’ve read online that you had to halt filming because of COVID last year, so how much of an effect did that have on what we end up seeing in the film because I certainly didn’t watch it thinking, ‘Oh, they look like they’re socially distancing,’ but I guess you had to take that into account?
[Laughs] It was a nightmare. So, what happened was, our original production schedule was a seven-week shoot. We shot four weeks, February through mid-March, and in mid-March, we had to shut down. We all came home, and we had that rare opportunity in a film production to actually take the footage we had shot in the first half of filming, assemble it, show it to the studio, figure out the pacing and all that, and the studio really liked it. They could take a write off because, frankly, our collective budget was probably the catering budget on Spider-Man! They could easily have gone, ‘Eh, it’s a tax write off.’ But no, they wanted to finish the movie and felt we had something.
The whole movie was shot in Massachusetts, so we waited until CDC in Massachusetts gave the go-ahead for movies to be shot again. That happened in September, so we basically March through September we were cutting and once we finished cutting, twiddling our thumbs. We went back in September and shot from mid-September to mid-October. The studio was kind enough to extend our shoot because part of the approval to get the CDC to let us shoot was fewer hours which immediately meant cumulatively, your fewer hours are costing you a day or second day. And, in between every scene, we had to hose down the set with an antiseptic spray which took about ten minutes, which doesn’t sound like much, except it’s happening after each scene is completed. That adds two hours, so again, that adds a day. They extended our shoot by a full week and in addition, they gave us a second unit crew. In the first half of production, I was shooting everything. In the second half, any extras were shot by the second unit crew, any specific visual effects shots were done by the second unit crew. Now, for the extras. We couldn’t have any extras, so remember when I said we shot the third act tent scene at the beginning? Thank goodness we did because there was no way. We either would have had to rewrite our ending so our characters are trapped in the church and she’s picking them off one by one or something. The rule was, you could have ten extras indoors, but they and to be socially distanced. Or, if each three could be family members, you could get three families of nine people plus one, and then those three families had to be socially distanced.
So, I will confess something. The funeral scene. If you pause when it comes out on Blu-ray, it’s the same ten people over and over. We would shoot them, change their clothes, move them around, shoot them, change their clothes, move them around. The second unit did that because if I had done that, it would have been another day.