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Your new movie The Beast Inside
- in a few words, what's it about?
The Beast Inside
is about a woman named Anne who’s possessed by something demonic—a
creature that’s haunted her family for generations now. Nobody believes
her, they think she’s mentally ill, or that she’s abusing drugs, or
both—she turns to the only person who will believe her: her old priest,
who’s since been defrocked. They make this unlikely team as they quest
to rid Anne and her family of this curse.
What were your sources of inspiration when writing The Beast Inside? Obviously,
there’s this whole sub-genre of horror when it comes to films about
exorcisms. So a lot of what I was trying to do with this film was to avoid
a lot of the usual clichés, while still leaning in to what makes this
sub-genre so popular. One thing was having her try two whole exorcisms
that fail, first—so you really get three exorcisms for the price of
admission. Since a large part of this film takes place in a single motel
room that Anne stays in while she’s going through this ordeal, something
else I was trying to accomplish was how to change a single set very
gradually from the way it looks at the beginning of the film to the way it
appears at the finale—without it being obvious. I worked with my DP Chad
Courtney and our gaffer Guido Orio, as well as our art director Greta
Falkenstein, to do these subtle changes in lighting and décor from scene
to scene as the film progresses so it’s almost subliminal.
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You dreamed up the story for The Beast Inside
together with your producer and leading lady Sadie
Katz [Sadie Katz interview - click here]
- so what can you tell us about the writing process, and who came up
with the initial idea for your collaboration?
Sadie and I had worked on a few films together, and she was wanting to
merge more into producing her films, and I wanted to help any way I could.
She’d had this idea of a woman who’s possessed and nobody believes
her, partly because she’s a woman and we all know how that goes—I see
it in the way doctors treat my wife as opposed to the way they treat me—so
she’d had this story of the character shacking up in this cheap motel
(which she’d sort of pre-scouted already). Meantime a few years earlier
I’d started writing something about a woman who’s possessed and has to
do the research to learn to exorcise herself. I’d gotten like 30 pages
into it and it had stalled. So we kinda combined all the good parts of our
ideas together like Voltron, and I wrote from there. Sadie had a lot of
input as far as the Anne character—what she’s dealing with as a
mother, and the parallels between how the character’s possession
manifests, and how people with bipolar disorder struggle in their daily
lives. You've worked with Sadie Katz before on several occasions - so what can you tell
us about your previous collaborations, and what makes you want to work
with one another time and again?
Sadie commits 1000% to the character, no matter how ugly or crazy the
story might get, and that’s the type of actor you want to direct. Back to
The Beast Inside - what can you tell us about your movie's approach to
horror? I guess the movies I make can mostly be called character-based horror. I
like to have the audience really live with the main characters and have
them feel real and relatable—to see aspects of themselves in them. So
when that character is hurting, or in jeopardy, the viewer is really there
with them: they care—and as long as your audience is rooting for your
characters, they’re going to be invested in the story, no matter how far-fetched it gets. For
The Beast Inside,
I think Sadie and I were able to make Anne a very relatable character for
a lot of viewers—not just eye candy, or fodder for a chainsaw. You can
understand her fear of losing contact with her son, her heartbreak at
being estranged from her husband, her terror that whatever evil is inside
of her will pass on to her child, like some awful hereditary disease. A few words about your overall directorial
approach to your story at hand?
Given that I also write most of the films I direct, a lot of my directing is
done on the page ahead of time. My scripts can be a little… precise, and
I know not every actor appreciates that (that said, I’m always open to
good ideas from the cast on the day). But I think the result of that is
that when most of my actors read a scene I wrote, it’s more-or-less
choreographed out, and the beats are all pretty much there—when someone
enters, when they pick up a prop or whatever—so there’s not a whole
huge range of ways to do it. That’s also a biproduct of the budgets I
work with. We don’t really have the luxury of ‘finding it’ on the
day of shooting, everyone pretty much has to be on the same page when they
show up, because there’s usually a bunch of other scenes that need shot
that same day, and there’s only so many hours to get it all.
Do talk about The Beast Inside's cast, and why exactly these people? We
had a great casting agent on the film, Kim Marie Swanson. She got us
Vernon Wells (Father Geoffrey), Laurene Landon (Jessica, Anne’s mother),
Anthony W. Preston (Daniel, the husband), Danelle Von Visger (Meredith,
the sister-in-law, and Denise Milfort (reiki healer). Sadie brought on
young Pressly James who played her son, who’s the son of another great actress
Carrie Jo Crosby. John Pasquale (Tom the motel manager) is actually one of
our executive producers. Sometimes casting a non-actor in a role like that
is a bit of a gamble but he was awesome, and has a great look. Likewise
Ron Russell is the husband of one of our producers, Jimmy Star, and it was
really cool working with someone who’s acted in films with people like
Sophia Loren. Everyone was a joy to get to direct. I needed a bartender
character so I cast my friend William Christopher Ford, because he’s a
great actor and has a cool look—and he just appeared in this season of
Cobra Kai fighting Daniel LaRusso, so that’s pretty cool. What
can you tell us about the shoot as such, and the on-set atmosphere?
The nature of shooting a film on a budget is that time becomes precious,
because the longer a film takes to shoot, the more expensive it becomes:
you’re paying people’s day rates, location fees, feeding crew, etc. So
you save money by shooting quickly, and to shoot quickly you have to plan
the film to be shot that way—so it’s all about limited (and
affordable) locations, and being smart about how you stack the scenes for
the day’s shooting, so you avoid time-consuming (and therefore expensive)
resets.
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The two things I refuse to compromise about are performance and
cinematography: I’ll work my ass off to get the schedule as tight as can
be, if it means I can take the time to make sure I get what I need out of
the actors, and make sure that I cover it well enough—this is the
pitfall I see with just SO many low-budget films, especially horror. Just
standing two actors against a wall in a single two-shot and making them
churn through a scene’s worth of dialogue. It’s boring, and
un-dramatic as all get out. If you’re fortunate enough to have good
actors like we did, please just give them the time to nail their
performance, light them nicely, and get your angles—it’s not rocket
science, it just requires you as the director to care enough to budget
that time to get it as good as it can be. That’s what’s worked for me. The
$64-question, where can The Beast Inside
be seen? The Beast Inside
is currently available to rent or buy digitally on Apple+, Prime
Video, Fandango at Home, and probably a lot of other places, thanks to our
distributor Uncork’d Entertainment. Pretty soon it’ll hit the
streaming platforms, and I’m very excited that we’ll have a physical
media release, which is NOT a guarantee with indie films (or even studio
films) these days. As a film buff and collector, I’m grateful I’ll be
able to add this film I’m very proud of to my library. Anything you can tell us
about audience and critical reception of The Beast Inside? So
far it’s been great—we did a few screenings around LA and they were
packed. Everyone had such nice things to say. It’s nice when that
happens. Any future projects you'd like to share?
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My action film Killer Ex is currently on Tubi. That was a fun film to do and
the first one I’ve shot myself, which has become my new norm. Speaking
of films I also shot, we’re just about done with post-production on my
most recent film Mandromeda—which
is a bit of a departure from genre filmmaking for me. It’s a black &
white film that follows three rideshare drivers on the last days of the
world. It’s an ensemble piece, so I got to work again with a ton of
actors from The Beast Inside, End
Times, House of Bad—all my past
films—plus a bunch of great talents I’ve wanted to work with for a while, so
it was a real treat. I’m about to start shooting an action film called The
Stickfighter next month, and I’ll be returning to horror this spring with a new very
intimate horror flick. More on that to be reveaeled.
Your/your movie's website, social media, whatever
else? You can follow The Beast Inside
on Instagram, and both Sadie and I are on Facebook and Instagram. I also write fiction,
and many of my short stories and excerpts from my books are on
jimtowns.com.
I’m working on making that site more of an all-around creator’s blog
in 2025, with updates on what all I’m working on. Thanks for the interview!
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