By Eric Ortiz (@EricOrtizG)
A satanic ritual goes terribly wrong for the worshipers in Abby Falvo’s short film *666 (2022), which shows two women (Karlee Liljegren and Angie St. Mars) as they perform a ritual that involves candles, blood, a spell book, and the traditional inverted pentagram. What they don’t expect is that this will result in the appearance of an actual telephone that allows you to hear the voice of none other than the Devil.
*666 has a distinctive look, having been shot on Super 8 film, and with the intention of recreating the aesthetics of silent cinema. Another singularity is the use of practical effects, which primarily stand out during a melting face sequence.
Falvo’s short originated in 2022 as part of the One Take Super 8 event, hosted by the Winnipeg-based WNDX Festival of Moving Image. *666 was shown last year at notorious genre festivals Fantasia and Fantastic Fest. Its most recent stop on the festival circuit was Slamdance, and this allowed me to interview Falvo.
Eric Ortiz (EO): Why did you decide to explore the satanic horror subgenre?
Abby Falvo (AF): There was an interest in the occult and wanting to do horror. But the film itself really stem from the idea of wanting to do practical effects and melt a head.
Then I just had this old phone that used to be at my grandmother’s. It just had so much character that I felt I had to use it. From that it developed into having the phone, and I was just thinking of things like how when you talk to angels in the Bible, or the voice of God will melt you because people can’t hear it. Then translating that to demons.
I thought it was kind of charming the whole idea of these people trying to call the other side and then it to be this actual physical phone.
EO: The short is very stylish. It was shot on Super 8 and, of course, it has the style of a silent film.
AF: When it was filmed, it was all done on Super 8 camera. It was a good excuse to learn how to use it. Shooting on film is wonderful because even the most expensive After Effects plugins still don’t have that feeling and that warmth that traditional film can give.
This was also a fun challenge, because we were limited when we filmed it to only three minutes, that’s how long is on a Super 8 cartridge. And all the editing had to be done in-camera and filmed chronologically, so you didn’t get any takes.
I feel for myself sometimes the biggest hurdle in creating anything is feeling like I’m not done or that I need to do something again. So having the limitations of not being able to edit and fix things in post, or not being able to make it this long, drawn-out thing, and being forced to make sure it fits into that three minutes, made it a little more special and forced me to think more about my choices.
There wasn’t any audio track that you could record. The event (One Take Super 8) that it was made part of meant that you could give audio to them to play at the same time, but it couldn’t be synched, so it had to be something where there was no dialog.
I’m a big fan of old silent films like Häxan (1922) and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920), so it just seemed like a really easy way to have some small dialog but really focus on what was being shown.
EO: What about the score?
AF: I had a roommate, they’re a conductor, they work in choir and do a lot with music. So I asked them to work with me on making the score, which was all done on this old organ that I found on Facebook Marketplace and got for free. All I had to do was just pick it up out of this woman’s basement. So we just played around on it and found it could do these fun rhythms, like the rhythm used in the actual film is western. It was just fun to play on that and give it that old feel.
EO: I really enjoyed the practical effects and that melting face.
AF: Melting the head was kind of the main reason I even wanted to make this film, so I’m glad that’s what people have taken to.
I had to look up a lot of different ways that they’ve done it in other movies, the most prominent example being Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), which involved the creation of a wax head, heating it up and speeding up the film. But I didn’t have the budget, the time or a place where I could do that safely.
So I just kept looking it up and I think it might have been a Popular Mechanics for Kids article where I found that styrofoam actually was very easy to melt. Fortunately I had a couple of styrofoam heads at home and I just needed to use nail polish remover, which is acetone, to create that melting effect. We added a couple extra details like carved out holes for the eyes and mouth, and we stuck in two rubber balls for the eyes, press-on nails as the teeth, and then used a sharpie just to draw the details. So when it melted, it really gave it definition and you could see it coming through in that black-and-white film. And then things that weren’t styrofoam sort of fell out. It turned out to be a much better effect than we ever could’ve expected.
EO: Is there a reason why all the characters, including Satan (Lar Violet), are female?
AF: Everyone on the cast is a friend of mine. The two occultists are comedians in Winnipeg. My background is in stand-up comedy. The person who plays Satan is my partner.
The entire cast is either female and non-binary. That’s who I would want to see in more movies. There are a lot of cis white heteronormative people in the horror genre. I want to take every opportunity I can to showcase women, non-binary, gender diverse people, wherever I can. My only regret is that we’re all caucasian. If I could change anything, that would be something that I would want to do.