When the Devil Is Pissed at Your Movie…

The following article by Nefarious writer/directors Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon is sponsored by SDG.

A friend of ours once offered us some advice: “If you doubt the existence of the devil, declare yourself against him and see what happens.”

As the writer/directors of Unplanned, the story of former Planned Parenthood clinic director turned pro-life advocate Abby Johnson, we were no strangers to spiritual warfare. But nothing could’ve prepared us for what happened on the set of Nefarious.

So, what sort of things might you expect to happen if you tried to make a movie the devil really didn’t like?

Well, your first attempt at shooting might end before you shot the first frame, with nine of your fifteen “department heads” coming down with COVID-19 — the first and most virulent strain — putting one of the co-directors in the hospital for eight days. That might force your production into a long and expensive hiatus, where you had rent an entire Oklahoma City basketball arena for an additional five months to keep from tearing down your very expensive movie sets.

And once you were ready to try again?

Days into your second attempt at shooting, the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE), the most powerful union in the motion picture business, might order a shutdown strike against your production without benefit of a strike vote and sans any stated grievances. Within hours, they might also try to get the United States government to issue a federal injunction to keep you shut down until you yielded to their demands (which fortunately never occurred).

And once you re-staffed, the exorcist-trained priest — who you kept on staff to deal with the supernatural issues you fully expected — might need an emergency appendectomy during shooting. His appendix might burst during removal; and his surgeon might mention that if he had he gotten to the hospital one hour later, he would be dead.

You might also endure a statistically-improbable string of car crashes — ranging from fender-benders to totaled vehicles — in the space of a month. And during the filming of scenes where the devil’s schemes were discussed, you might endure hours of the heaviest sustained winds in the history of Oklahoma — which is really saying something — to the point where the HVAC system and girders supporting the roof sixty feet overhead were twisting and turning, making tortured metal sounds that are clearly audible in the production sound recording.

Fast forward through a year of post-production obstacles, major and minor. And then, just weeks before your film was released, the entire roof might get blown off your office building in the midst of torrential rains. Your building might be the only one in your town (Burbank, California) to suffer this sort of damage. And naturally, this would happen in the middle of the night, over a weekend — when it would go unnoticed for eight or ten hours while the storm turned the entire facility into an indoor waterpark. This would necessitate a full move out, while damage restoration crews tore out 100 percent of the drywall — reducing the entire building interior “down to sticks.”

And on the night of your theatrical premier, demonic activity might manifest in the talent’s interview suite — necessitating an impromptu Latin rite exorcism by world-renowned exorcist Fr. Carlos Martins, host of The Exorcist Files podcast, who called your film the most realistic portrayal of demonic reality of all time.

On the way back to Los Angeles, all the data on a critical hard drive from days of celebrity interviews might disappear into the ether. And even your over-the-phone interview with Newsweek might need to be taken three times, due to mysterious malfunctions of the journalist’s recording device, which was three thousand miles away.

And the reason we know that all of these things might happen is because all of them happened to us.

So, what happens in Nefarious? And why is the devil so pissed? After all, the plot is pretty straightforward:

On the day of his scheduled execution, a convicted serial killer (Sean Patrick Flanery) gets a psychiatric evaluation to determine whether he’s sane enough to be put to death. During the interview, the killer — who he claims he is a demon — insists that before their time is over, psychiatrist Dr. James Martin (Jordan Belfi) will commit three murders of his own.

What makes things different is that the demon-possessed monster who calls himself “Nefarious” decides — for reasons that serve his own plans — to lay bare hell’s designs for the destruction of the human race, one soul at a time.

The resulting film has been described by the chairman emeritus of one of the “big three” theater chains as: “a dark, heavy masterpiece.”

The film’s audience slowly comes to realize what the fallen angels have known all along: that the problems we see and experience in the world around us aren’t the product of a cultural battle, but rather a spiritual one.

As Charles Baudelaire once wrote, and Kevin Spacey’s character Keyser Soze echoed in The Usual Suspects, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing people he doesn’t exist.”

This Friday, with the release of Nefarious, audiences in theaters all across America will get their chance to see through that illusion. And hell is pissed.

Chuck Konzelman & Cary Solomon
Writers & Directors of Nefarious