Horror Favourites – Evan Spiliotopoulos

Evan Spiliotopoulos the man behind The Unholy, talks us through some of his favourite but less known horror films all of which helped him make his monstrous movie.

The Unholy follows Alice, a young hearing-impaired girl who, after a supposed visitation from the Virgin Mary, is inexplicably able to hear, speak and heal the sick. As word spreads and people from near and far flock to witness her miracles, a disgraced journalist (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) hoping to revive his career visits the small New England town to investigate. When terrifying events begin to happen all around, he starts to question if these phenomena are the works of the Virgin Mary or something more sinister.

Staring Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Katie Aselton, William Sadler, Cricket Brown, with Diogo Morgado and Cary Elwes.The Unholy is produced by Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert and Evan Spiliotopoulos, written for the screen and directed by Evan Spiliotopoulos, and is based upon James Herbert’s best-selling book Shrine.

The Herbert family said: “Our father was a huge movie fan and would have been delighted to see Shrine on the big screen scaring new audiences around the world. The film captures the creeping feeling of classic Herbert horror that his fans knew and loved, bringing his English voice to a modern American setting. We’re thrilled that The Unholy will once again gather people together in cinemas to be terrified out of their wits – Dad would have loved that! How better to end a year of horrors than in a cinema with a story by Britain’s Grand Master?”

Shrine was originally published in 1983, the 9th of James Herbert’s 23 books which have sold over 54 million copies worldwide and are celebrated as classics of the horror genre. James Herbert was one of the UK’s greatest popular novelists. He was awarded the OBE for services to literature in the 2010 Birthday Honours list, the same year he was made the Grand Master of Horror by the World Horror Convention.

Enjoy Evan’s extensive and informative journey into horror below:

“My favourite horror movie is The Exorcist, but seeing as libraries worth of material have already been written about that film I wanted to talk about five possibly lesser known pictures that influenced The Unholy.

Lady in White (Frank LaLoggia, 1988), starts so innocently you might mistake it for an Amblin movie, or Amblin’s predecessor The Wonderful World of Disney. But soon LaLoggia strips away the veneer of 1960’s small town USA to expose racism, pedophilia and insanity. Realizing the supernatural doesn’t hold a candle to these real life horrors, LaLoggia makes his specters benevolent and harbingers of justice. With a star turn from post-Witness Lukas Haas.

The Whip and the Body (Mario Bava, 1963). Christopher Lee as a Byronic romantic lead with an S&M fetish, this film was a strong visual influence on The Unholy. Bava’s Gothic style is at play with remarkably vivid splashes of random color — a green glow in a dark castle hallway, a slash of deep red across Daliah Lavi’s bedroom in the middle of a storm — unreal lighting to herald the appearance of ghosts or signify the protagonist’s descent into madness.

The City of the Dead (John L. Moxey, 1960). Christopher Lee again, this time in a tale of witchcraft. I screened this for my production team so we could study the amazing lingering fog banks. Moxey built an entire village on a sound stage — the only way to control the level, density and movement of mist and smoke… as opposed to our out-doors shoot, where steering the rolling fog was like herding cats. Fun fact: we only used fog in the first, pre-COVID half of our production. When we returned to complete our film, fog and indoor smoke atmosphere could no longer be used as COVID could actually hitch a ride on the fog particles and travel faster. Moral of the story: avoid filming during a global pandemic if you can.

Night of the Eagle (Sidney Hayers, 1962). You thought your work environment was rife with politics and back-stabbing? Ha! Check out this quiet rural English school where the faculty members begin flinging hexes at each other. The beauty of this film is its internal logic and mythology. It never sits down to explain its rituals or spells, it never tells you why a lock of hair twined around a lamp or a person’s voice played backwards on a tape recorder and mixed with Satanic chanting can be lethal. It just accepts these things within the film’s reality. It believes in itself and, as a result, convinces the audience to believe in it too.

Finally, as the above movies are all pretty old, I wanted to introduce you to a relative newcomer and probably the least-known of the lot. Banshee Chapter (Blair Erickson, 2013), is saddled with a bumpy title and the rough edges of a very tight budget but is loaded with goosebumps. Katia Winter plays a journalist who gets involved with the insanely creepy real-life phenomenon of numbers stations (imagine a little girl’s voice reading random numbers in German over a crackling, static-ridden radio). Theoretically used for Cold War espionage, numbers stations have never been adequately explained and director Blair Erickson’s supernatural sci-fi theory is as good as any. With a great turn by veteran character actor Ted Levine (Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs) as a drugged-up-to-his-eyeballs gonzo reporter modelled after Hunter S. Thompson. This one has a criminally low IMDb rating, but horror is pretty subjective and one person’s bucket of guts may not impress another.”

THE UNHOLY IS AVAILABLE TO DOWNLOAD AND KEEP, TO RENT ON DIGITAL, ON BLU-RAY AND DVD NOW. Read our review HERE.