interview & copy written for RED Digital Camera
Often referred to as the ‘Devil Made Me Do It’ case, a haunting 1981 murder trial was the first and only time that 'demonic possession' had been officially used as a defense in a U.S. court. Now, a new feature-length docudrama, The Devil on Trial exhumes the troubling events leading up to the brutal crime, the trial, and its aftermath, using firsthand accounts of the people closest to the case, including the man at its epicenter, Arne Johnson.
article here
“This is a
ripped-from-the-headlines true-crime tale of satanic possession, exorcism and
murder but with different interpretations of the truth,” says cinematographer
Brendan McGinty. “We’ve got disparate voices, documentary, b-roll of the actual
location, dramatic reconstruction and archive, so the danger was we’d end up
with a cacophony of visual styles. The combination of a large format RED sensor
with a vintage LF lens choice gave us a strong look for this whole world.”
Disturbing
the past
The story may be
based on real-life events but is told through the medium of the protagonists'
memories, interpretations and beliefs. A key note from director and long-time
collaborator, Chris Holt to McGinty during prep was that this is about dreams
and nightmares.
“These are the
memories of individuals in the distant past and they have a non-literal
nightmarish quality to them,” he says. “You can hardly sit and listen to an
interview describing someone else speaking in tongues, of lights flashing in
the house, and vapor in the air and feel like you are in the world of realism.
That’s not to belittle the trauma they felt but it feels blurred memory when
people look back through the eyes of childhood where everything is tainted by
the fictive nature of our memories.”
The filmmakers took
a deep dive into the horror archive and rewatched The Exorcist, The
Shining, Rosemary’s Baby and Hereditary to retell the
lived experience of their film’s subjects in the language of horror. Akira
Kurosawa’s Japanese classic Rashomon, a film with multiple versions
of the truth, was another key reference.
“Our collective
memories have so much to do with visual language and the films we have seen.
So, we leaned into that by playing on horror tropes. Our film does have jump
scares. We are delivering the horror genre and also deconstructing it.”
They went to
Connecticut to the scene of the actual events and shot around the original
family home (now owned by another family) and in and around the church where
the exorcism took place.
“The whole history
of the area and the 17th Century witch trials, made for quite spooky
surroundings. We shot in some woods that felt pretty David Lynchian in style.
It was snowing when we were there which leant the landscape even more of an off
kilter mysterious vibe.”
Stylistic
contrast
They employed a
distinct stylistic contrast between these two narrative modes of drama and doc.
In the long interviews (many of which ran for two days), the frames are locked
off, with symmetrical wides and asymmetrical, short-sighted B camera angles.
“We used a mirror
box on the A camera to allow the subjects to tell us their truth and
recollections of the distant but traumatic events direct to camera.”
This down-the-lens
point of view runs in counterpoint to the off-kilter B camera perspective. “It
asks the audience, subconsciously, whether what the person is saying direct to
camera is true.”
The lighting was
single source throughout these interviews, with as much shadow ('negative
fill') as they could manage. The rooms beyond were also chosen to 'speak' as
much as the subjects themselves, with a host of small practical sources and a
self-conscious sprinkling of curious, defocused details.
By contrast, the
scripted portions of the narrative took place in Canada and were shot like a
traditional drama. It was all shot handheld in classic horror style.
“We wanted to
immerse the audience in the horrific situation but also destabilize the unmoving
'certainty' of the interviews. There’s an unsettled quality to the photography,
as if there’s a real satanic presence and our camera in the midst of it all.
Hopefully it’s quite terrifying.”
Much of the
extraordinary archive footage that peppers the narrative was also handheld, so
the drama scenes were able to integrate into this material more fully.
Some of the drama
scenes were run in sync with startling tape recordings from the time, with the
actors skillfully mouthing the exact words of the family and the exorcists who
come to help.
Both the drama
shoot and the interviews were set at night, a world of darkness and shadows, of
nightmares and hallucinations.
"For lighting
these dramatic scenes, my approach was more extractive than additive,” McGinty
says. “Our aim was to remove as much light as possible, constantly leaning into
dark corners whilst embracing small fragile pools of visibility.”
A
richer canvas
Holt and McGinty
have shot countless docudramas together, including Elizabeth I; Witch
Hunt: A Century of Murder and Mind of a Monster (an
episode about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer), and all have been filmed on RED
cameras. McGinty also shot Disney series Welcome to Earth with
the MONSTRO VV, which was the model of choice here.
“I’ve been shooting
RED since its earliest days, and it remains ahead of the curve, especially with
color space. The fact that you can shoot raw with a smaller data package is a
big deal. Other cameras can shoot raw, but they require bolt on recorders and
eyewatering amounts of data.
“Shooting R3D is
the way I always like to work because it’s like shooting negative. You always
get a safety net of exposure, detail in the shadow, highlight retention and
16-bit color. You couldn’t hope for a richer canvas as a director of
photography.”
For The
Devil on Trial, McGinty shot 8K, which enabled Holt to perform some
reframing in post; extracting a mid-shot from a wide or closeup from a mid.
McGinty also loves onset grading and will often take high resolution frame
grabs to serve as references for the whole team through the grade and art dept
to publicity for stills.
Large
format and vintage lenses
They chose large
format to take full advantage of a set of vintage lenses and all the vignetted
distortions it would bring. “Everyone talks about the shallower focus of LF but
also with the width of the LF lens, I can be much closer to people on wider
focal lengths. If you were shooting on Super 35, you wouldn’t even see all the
organic accidents at the edge of the frame. Large format definitely gave us a
very different look and feel.”
With business
partner Michael Lindsay, he hunted down a set of rare 1960s-designed Canon
Dream primes and rehoused them to be mounted on an LPL mount, which is not only
bigger for large format but places the glass closer to the sensor. There are
only a handful of such sets in the world.
“What the lenses
deliver is tremendous softness on the edges but the center is quite sharp,”
McGinty describes. “The veiling glare and flare is exceptional. There’s a sniff
of light and soft glowing streaks across the lens. These are hand ground
objects, not precision-molded modern lenses so when you do get flare you don’t
get sharp lens patterns in the image. There is more glow to it than that. It’s
also very warm so you get amber flares.”
Unusually for
docudrama, McGinty shot both the drama and the documentary sections of the film
using this glass.
“Docudrama is a
fascinating space that has grown in public appetite and in budget. While drama
frequently emulates docs, and doc makers are echoing a lot of practices from
drama.
In this case, we
needed something to tie the fabric of the story across archive and b-roll and
drama and past and present together. I am really glad we did. When I look at
the photography, there is possibly an unconscious stream of optical magic going
through it.”
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