In the horror film Azrael, Samara Weaving’s titular character fights to survive in a world without speech. The post-apocalyptic story, which opened Sept. 27, follows the mute protagonist as she attempts to thwart a religious cult intent on sacrificing her to an ancient evil in the wilderness. Living isolated in the woods, Azrael and her partner Kenan (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) have cultivated a very camouflaged existence to keep the threat at bay: they move on foot, they don’t start fires where others can see them, and they don’t wander through wide open fields in broad daylight. Still, the devout community hunting the couple picks up their scent on the wind. When characters have to spend the majority of their plight running through the trees, it means that the cast and crew capturing their tears and recriminations must also devote an exorbitant amount of time hunkering down in nature. For filmmaker E.L. Katz, this meant committing to over a month’s passing in the foggy, cold trenches, roughing it in the freezing outskirts of the Republic of Estonia’s rugged mountain range. “It was a wild, grueling adventure,” director Katz tells me as we sit down to talk. “We’re in the Eastern European woods in late fall, and it was thirty nights outside. We worked our asses off.” E.L. Katz speaks during Film Independent’s screening of “Azrael” on Sept. 24, 2024 in Los Angeles. (Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images) Known for his impressive work on popular TV programs, such as Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Bly Manor, Nick Antosca’s Channel Zero, DC’s Swamp Thing and the Scream TV series, Katz found himself craving a new challenge — one that led him outside and away from any familiar soundstage. Like many of us during lockdown, the filmmaker binged an “unhealthy amount of movies,” wormholing into abstract art films indiscriminately, the highbrow and lowbrow mixture inadvertently feeding his desire to break new ground. “I think with this one, there’s something really interesting about almost marrying a little bit of some gonzo adventure horror movies, like The Beastmaster, and Mad Max rip-offs,” and Andrei Tarkovsky influenced Soviet cinema, like Hard to Be a God. Katz adds, “When I read Simon [Barrett]’s script, I was just like, this thing is unapologetically weird. You’re either going to go along for this ride or not, but it feels very singular and experimental.” Distilling that sort of unique mixture carried over into the casting process, which called for high caliber performers who were willing to engage with low down and dirty guerilla filmmaking tactics. “Getting to work with actors that I really liked, that are from movies that are maybe a little classier than usual — like, they usually wouldn’t act in a movie where night ghouls rip people’s heads off, you know? — that was really exciting to me,” smiles Katz. “Like, getting Vic Carmen Sonne from Holiday, or Eero Milonoff from Border, was really fun.” Most importantly, Katz and company needed a soldier in their leading lady, and they found one in Samara Weaving. Samara Weaving in E.L. Katz’s AZRAEL. Courtesy of Gabriela Urm. An IFC Films and Shudder Release. “I talked to some other actors on Zoom, and I would tell them, ‘This is not going to be that fun,’” relays Katz. “‘It’s not going to be that glamorous. You’re out in the woods. You’re going to be experiencing a panic attack the entire time,’ and some actors were like, ‘I don’t want to deal with that. That’s truly not what I want to do,’ which I get.” To that end, Katz immediately recognized the significance of an accomplished actor like the Ready or Not and Three Billboards star Weaving signing on to participate in such a physically demanding project. “Sam was like, ‘Oh that sounds cool. Let’s get weird. So, there was a feeling that she was game to jump into this stuff, and that’s really what you need for something like this, that’s gonna be adding the elements. It’s a lot of stuff that’s not easy. You can’t sleepwalk through the movie. She gave me the confidence that she was gonna jump in there, and really try, like the rest of us.” Raw, physical and highly emotive, Weaving’s gift as an actor resides in her ability to be present. Endlessly watchable, she creates a bridge between herself and the audience, casting an invisible line that hooks the viewer and reels them in to stand with her, shoulder to shoulder, against the demons and the forces of darkness. It’s a magic prowess emblematic of real cinematic titans, Katz feels, like juggernauts Bruce Campbell and Kurt Russell. “You can see it in some John Carpenter films, like Kurt Russell definitely has it,” Katz says. “Like, the first Evil Dead – even if the world is incredibly alienating and creepy, there’s something about these actors as lead characters where they can inhabit the stakes of the world. They’re clearly scared by the crazy shit that’s going on, but they can also function as the audience in an interesting way, without it feeling like a smirk that undermines the stakes. I think that Samara really can do both. She was able to play this role in a way that made her feel like Azrael has grown up in this world. She’s frightened by this stuff. She’s real and emotional, but she’s also able to be the audience, without it being a wink. I think that’s a really hard thing to capture tonally.” Set after the rapture, nearly two hundred years in the future, Azrael has the veneer of a film lost to time, which might explain why it feels like a deep-cut cult classic. “Just doing something that felt like you picked up some dusty ‘70s graphic novel from another country that wasn’t translated, like some fantasy horror thing, and you don’t completely understand what’s going on, but you’re still turning the pages, you’re still engaged in it – I was like, yeah, that feels like a fun challenge to create something like that,” says the director, “And I think the thing that I got really excited about was not having to do dialogue. That was really interesting.” Based on a recurring dream that haunted his longtime friend and fellow screenwriter Simon Barrett, the feature is so devoid of discourse that it almost plays like a silent film. Azrael, along with the members of the community desperate to chain her, bears a scar on her throat, rendering her speechless. “It’s supposed to be in the shape of a cross,” says Katz. “This is part of the religion in that cult where they believe, basically, that human language is unholy, and words are unholy. Speaking is what led to the end of the world.” E.L. Katz’s AZRAEL. Courtesy of Gabriela Urm. An IFC Films and Shudder Release. When asked about his own religious background, Katz jokingly refers to himself as a “bad Jew,” citing his screenwriter Barrett as the one who has been traumatized by his upbringing. The director has more of a philosophical take on it. “When I read the Bible, it feels like this movie,” he says. “It feels kind of blurry. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. It’s incredibly violent. People are out killing each other for some reason that’s mysterious and crazy. I think that’s the feeling that I wanted to capture. I didn’t want to do a ‘left behind’ movie. It was more about the feeling that maybe, partially because of religion — it could be any religion — that people just find reasons to keep killing each other.” After trying to team up for so many years, getting to work with his old friend Barrett was a real milestone for director Katz. “Simon was a great partner to have out there because he’s so well-versed in the genre. He’s a hard worker, he’s very cinematically minded, he’s a real filmmaker, he’s a real producer, and Dan Kagan, too. It was great having them in the foxhole, along with Samara, to make this crazy movie, because it was really, really tough.” Amid a reflective pause, the director continues, “Simon’s one of my best friends. It’s a pleasure to get to work with him.” Back in prairie times, the wind used to drive people crazy — mainly women who had to stay behind on the farm while the men went off to drive cattle, go to market, and manage their various businesses. The vortices in the night air mimicked voices, driving otherwise perfectly logical people mad with frenzy. They heard things that weren’t there, and it made wildfires rampant, fueling both blazes and hysteria alike. The wind also beckons in Azrael, where a crack in a church wall whistles in a language only the faithful can understand. “If people haven’t heard anybody speaking, and they grow up in this cult, and then you go into this church, and you hear something talking to you through the wall in this holy space, it’s just like the feeling in nature,” muses Katz. “When you hear the wind, it’s like nature’s talking to you. And what does it want? What is it looking for? You can project all sorts of things onto it.” For the members of this new religious movement, the wind tells them to recapture their prisoner and offer her up to the monsters hiding in the tall grass. “To me, listening to the wind is like listening to any crazy religion, or cult, or anything. We can shape it into whatever we want it to be. If people go, ‘There’s the wind, oh, I think we need to start killing people in our village that the wind tells us to kill.’ To me, there is something about it that felt like you could copy and paste almost any religious sort of thing — like listening, like practice or belief. I think when there’s not much left, the things that are going to be the loudest are going to be from nature.” Frightening as it may seem, the cult members chasing Azrael down aren’t even the greatest threat lurking in these woods. Dark, shadowy figures covered in charred and blackened skin, marked like they’ve been licked by the flames of Hell, stumble over raised tree roots and twist through fallen branches. Vacant vessels driven forward by an insatiable hunger for the hunt. E.L. Katz’s AZRAEL. Courtesy of Gabriela Urm. An IFC Films and Shudder Release. “Simon and I have not gone into too much detail about the mythology stuff, but fuck it,” Katz grins. “The creatures were from the time that the event happened, so they’re still walking around. We wanted to have this feeling that they’ve been in the woods for a long time. They collect weird leaves, they’re walking through the dirt. The feeling is that when you look at them, you should think about a lot of fire out there, and a lot of lost, unhappy souls.” Bringing these beauties to life in a way that made them stand out in a post Walking Dead world provided its own set of challenges, but in the face of adversity, Katz always finds the joy of rising to the occasion. To tackle this very specific creature design, the filmmaker turned to the special effects wizard behind such titles as Possessor, Infinity Pool and Colour Out of Space. “I’ve been a fan of Dan Martin since I saw his work in Brandon Cronenberg’s projects,” says Katz. “We were lucky. His stuff is always sneakily disturbing and feels very handcrafted. We didn’t want to just have some random person creating these things. We wanted somebody who was a weirdo artist. His approach was all about, how can you make these things uncomfortable to look at? Because we have such a familiarity with zombies, they’re like comfort food now. He talked about burn victims, and finding tortured humanity. That was really the goal with Dan, trying to make these things feel like you really wouldn’t even want them standing around, let alone chasing after you.” Faced with the option of creating his creatures in post and allowing himself some sense of reprieve in an already tough-as-nails shooting schedule, Katz stuck to his guns and opted for in-camera, tangible practical effects. “It’s always hard to create practical monsters, and that’s why a lot of people like the shortcut of just doing it in VFX, but I think the results are more fun when you have something that’s actually there on set,” he says. “It can be an uphill battle, but I think it’s worth it.” Boasting a weary smile, director Katz appears both grateful and excited to unleash his gnarly survival thriller on the world. “It’s definitely easier to shoot on the soundstage, but I think that I’m always drawn to something that feels a little bit different,” he concludes. “I don’t want to give that up, even though this was a challenge. It was a challenge to figure out how people communicate. It was a challenge to be out in nature like that. All of it is so hard, but I do feel a weird obligation to always try to take a big swing in our genre, because I love it so much.” The post Director E.L. Katz on Staging a Survival Thriller with Samara Weaving in ‘Azrael’ appeared first on LA Weekly.