"The film a terrifying supernatural shockumentary about a demonic presence in a young couple's home in London."

BLOODY DISGUSTING: Tell me a bit more about the story?

ANDREW CULL: David O’Reilly turns up at Alex and Kate’s apartment in the middle of the night. He tells them his girlfriend has been cheating on him, and Alex and Kate let him stay. But David’s not told them everything. For the past 2 weeks he’s been seeing and hearing things in his house, terrifying things and finally he fled to his friends place to escape them. It soon becomes clear he hasn’t left “them” behind - the haunting has followed him. The chilling story unfolds over the next 2 nights to a harrowing climax.

BD: What inspired the film?

AC: The story of a domestic incident a few years ago inspired the film. Police were called to a block of converted Victorian apartments, and what they found inside one of them was puzzling and disturbing. There were no signs of a break in, or reason to suspect drugs or other foul play and police attributed the events to a domestic dispute or love rivalry gone wrong. A diary was found full of strange ideas and drawings.

In most cases we settle for rational explanations, but our film portrays an explanation from beneath the surface, an explanation that defies logic.

BD: How do you respond to the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY comparisons?

AC: Ever since Blair Witch came along filmmakers have been trying to replicate the found footage or documentary approach of that film, with varying degrees of success. It’s a tremendous way of giving veracity and immediacy to a film. So anything that utilizes those techniques is going to be compared to Paranormal given its success. There are sure to be a lot of filmmakers out there making documentary, found footage films. Paranormal has broken out, because of the major marketing the film has enjoyed, but primarily because Paranormal is a good story well told, and word of mouth is very important.

The Possession of David O’Reilly was actually written about 5 years ago, and we were actively developing the script through last year and pre-producing it over the winter, and shot it early this year. Being in the UK, none of the production team has actually seen Paranormal Activity yet, but from what’s been written and the trailers, we share a documentary approach, and clearly there are supernatural elements. It’s also set in an ordinary London apartment with the characters being in their 20’s. In fact we made a web series like this back in 2007. A Youtube series about a young woman who moves to a London apartment and keeps a video blog for her friends back home. At first all is well, then strange things start to happen, she thinks she’s being stalked, and then some very supernatural things start happening. So perhaps Paranormal Activity was actually influenced by that?

Ultimately who cares – fact is Paranormal does the job well, wherever it got its influences, and whatever the techniques used. Our story is different, just shares some techniques.

BD: What makes this different?

AC: Our film is shot in a documentary style, hand held, with a lot of point-of-view shooting, really putting the audience into the characters heads. We build suspense with show not tell, and there’s a narrative flow. Key to understanding our story is that the haunting is not attached to a house, it follows David himself, is attached to a person.

BD: How do you create scares in your film?

AC: There are plenty of shocks, but suspense is built throughout the film, by showing the fear in the characters, with what they do to escape, and also importantly really showing the horrors they see, what David sees.

BD: What film would you say this is most similar to?

AC: There are elements that are like a mix of The Shining, The Thing and Rec, amongst others.

BD: How was the movie filmed? What camera was used?

AC: We shot the film on Red One, at 4k, since a lot of it was going to be in darkness with what’s in there, and we wanted resolution aplenty to get into that. We took a documentary approach and filmed long sequences. It was all hand held.

BD: What type of budget did you have to work with?

AC: We were very low budget, we shot in one location with a short shoot .

BD: What are some of your favorite horror films?

AC: All time greats like The Exorcist, The Shining, The Omen, The Thing, Alien, and more recent films like The Ring, Tale of Two Sisters, Rec, Hidden, Session 9

BD: What’s next?

AC: Lots of ideas in development we want to make. There’s one project, a supernatural story, literally stops your breath and makes your skin crawl….

BD: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

AC: We’re huge horror fans and we made this film as something as fans we’d like to see – supernatural, terrifying, and intense.