ComingSoon Senior Editor for Horror Neil Bolt spoke to director John McPhail (Anna & the Apocalypse) about his new film Dear David, which is based on the real-life tale told by Buzzfeed artist Adam Ellis. McPhail discussed the parallels between internet trolls and hauntings, working with two cats, technological horror, and why time has made a follow-up to Anna and the Apocalypse more likely.
It stars Augustus Prew as comic artist Adam, who after responding to Internet trolls, begins experiencing sleep paralysis. As he chronicles increasingly malevolent occurrences in a series of tweets, Adam begins to believe he is being haunted by the ghost of a dead child named David.
The movie also stars Justin Long (Barbarian), Andrea Bang (Fresh), Rachel Wilson (Saw 3D), and René Escobar Jr. (Neon Lights).
Neil Bolt: How much of Adam Ellis’ story were you aware of before you came to this project?
John McPhail: I came across it in 2017 when it was happening, not on Twitter, it was probably a Buzzfeed article you know, like ‘’The Scariest Thing on The Internet Right Now!’’ and I suffer from sleep psychosis myself, so I was hooked and I was ‘’stalking’’ Adam Ellis for a while. Then I forgot about it when it petered until the script landed on my desk, and I was like, ‘’I know this!’’
With the sleep paralysis thing, I’m quite a visual person, and that all came flooding back, and I was excited about filming those scenes.
The sleep paralysis scenes have this off-kilter, skewed version of reality that I think really worked well. How did you settle on that particular look for them? Was that from your own personal experience?
I just wanted to let the audience know when it was happening, and I love color in film so I filled the film with color to begin with and then pulled it out for those scenes. And by the end it all fits together so you don’t know if it’s real or not anymore.
The skewed windows were about doing something fun, and a little different. We built them into a set and put them in place of the normal set when we were shooting those sequences.
Were there any significant challenges for you filming a very American story after the very British Anna and the Apocalypse?
You know, I think it’s always the same because when I was shooting Anna, I was always trying to think of an American audience. For Anna, we filmed in Port Glasgow, and when some American people talk to me about that film, they’re like, ‘’Oh my God, that town is so quaint,’’ and I’m like, ‘’Port Glasgow? Wow, it’s like Chernobyl when you drive into it!” But because it’s on this hillside, it can look good.
So I was like that with this film, I always try to think of the audience regardless of where they might be from. I knew there were fans of this particular story, and we’d be telling a different version to the one they have in their head. I mean, you just go on Google and see all the different opinions people have about this and variations on this, so I’m never going to get that right for everybody, but what I can do is give them certain things like the two cats. Because it would have been so much easier to use one cat, but we had to have two. And I reached out to Adam Ellis, as Buzzfeed had connected us, and got him to give me photos of his apartment for creating the set. We took some license with it so we could shoot certain things, but there’s a lot of the furniture, photos, and colors on the walls that are from that.
You mentioned the cats in the movie. They were fantastic, and they’re great little actors. Were they as easy to work with as they seemed?
Oh no, Puffin and Penguin! One would always run away, and one would always stay. But we did love them, and they were lovely cats as well.
Over the years, we’ve seen the technological evolution of the curse movie. Dear David uses the internet and its culture as the backdrop, but did you use those previous iterations as touchstones for making this film?
Oh yeah. I really liked The Ring. I’d never seen something like that. As a teenager, I was getting into Japanese horror and that blew my mind. So there’s little nods and winks in Dear David. And the computer game sequence in the film was inspired by A Nightmare on Elm Street 3. You know the scene where the guy’s puppeteered off the ledge?
With a lot of the technological stuff. I’d always seen the parallels between a haunting and online trolling because it’s outside forces invading your personal space. Your home is supposed to be your sanctuary, and having a ghost in it or having your phone constantly buzzing or stuff pinging on your screen can be like that. You know when you read a comment and let it burrow into your head and you’re still thinking about it later? That’s terrorizing you, and you’re like, ‘’I’m gonna go straight on the internet and reply to that!’’
I could see the parallels to that and because the thing played out on Twitter, I thought that should play a part in that.
Yeah, I like the parallels between the ability to have your identity online taken from you and manipulated with what David does. Was that something you had in mind when filming Dear David?
Yes, the internet plays such a big part in it, and I wanted the audience to feel like, ‘’is he having a mental breakdown, or is this actually happening? That was the thing in that Twitter thread, there were lots of replies asking those questions. The scene in the office where he goes nuts because the thing disappears is like that. Is it him, or is it David?
The film also brings up the perils of using our personal trauma as content. It can help build an online persona that can be relatable, but at the cost of leaving yourself very open and vulnerable like Adam does. You don’t appear to be all that online yourself in social spaces, but was that something you empathized with as a filmmaker who puts themselves into their work to some degree?
100% Like with Adam himself. The thing that attracted me to the script was the character of Adam Ellis. I think he’s a funny, in-your-face, sarcastic, satirical guy in real life, and seeing that kind of protagonist going through this story, I wanted you to feel sorry for him, sad for him even because of the fact his internet notoriety is rising, but his relationship’s all around him are falling apart, but that notoriety is keeping him going because it’s like a dopamine hit.
Having that rise of a character can become everything to them, and I found that quite sad. There’s this scene where he sort of tries to have a crywank and by the end, we wanted to have a scene where he’s in the middle of the room with his trousers around his ankles, excited about the million followers he’s got. There’s something really sad about that.
Do you know how much of the social media interaction is accurate to real things Adam was sent and replied to?
Oh, we used dramatic license with that kind of thing. There’s a few recurring characters in the replies. We used Adam’s tweets about the story, but the things he was sending out to folk, and the back and forth, that’s just us taking dramatic license.
I love Anna and the Apocalypse, which ends on an ambiguous note. I love that because it reminds me of Romero’s zombie movies, but is there ever a chance of you returning to that world for another film?
100% We’ve chatted about it; we’re all like best of friends still. When we finished it we were like, ‘’done, no sequel!’’ As we became the adults we were pointing the finger at in that film and got families and grown up, and feel like we’ve got something to say in that world. So yeah, definitely not right this second, but yeah.
DearDavid is in select theaters and on digital VOD platforms on October 13, 2023.
