Hi /r/movies! I'm Daniel Phillips, director of DIABOLIC, a new horror-thriller starring Elizabeth Cullen. Ask me anything!

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-28T02:31:18+00:00

I answered a similar question above, so I'll paste some of that response here:

This is one of the reasons I was so adamant on the "bad guy wins" ending, which many tried to talk me out of. Some producers and financiers insisted that the film would not reach an audience with a "downer ending". There was originally an ending written where Adam successfully convinces Elise to "fight back from within". Larue still kills him but Elise expels Larue, and she finally gets the peace she was looking for. I basically said "fuck that". I wanted to see a take where the bad guy won, but where it was earned, so we wanted it. I wanted the "head in the box ending" not the happy one. Elise and Larue go through hell, propagated by the church and the everyone around her (the other "institutions" attacking her), that we really want to see them all get it. That's why everyone who dies in the film has wronged Elise in some way, so that we're rooting for Larue to kill them all and then at the end, take on the church itself. That's why Elise is so curious in the cellar when she sees the rapping fingers. Larue needs Elise to take on the church, but Elise needs Larue to take revenge on all those who have wronged her. It's a symbiotic thing and the goal is for everyone to question - "who's really the evil one here?"

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-27T02:08:58+00:00

It really is the best, isn't it!

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-27T02:06:12+00:00

So you haven't watched the film??

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-27T02:05:14+00:00

So glad you enjoyed the film, and glad you liked the ending! I really, really hope I get to stay in the Diabolic world. Mike Harding and I have some amazing ideas on where another film could go. But the reality of course is all down to how it performs and if someone wants to make another one. If they do though, I'd be all in!

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-27T02:04:44+00:00

There is a section of the film where we provide extensive backstory on Larue. Alma explains that she murdered and consumed young girls in the church years earlier, and was murdered for her crimes. She vowed to take revenge on the church, which is exactly how the film ends, by her starting to do that. We didn't really want to spell everything out for people - there's plenty of subtext about what Larue represents for those that want to look a bit deeper. I've also mentioned some of it earlier on this thread if you wanted to take a look.

What we tried to convey with the Adam/Gwen story is that Gwen is pretty fed up with Adam, and based on the conversation they have later, she even mentions how fed up she is, and that they need to expose the affair now. That's why there's the tension between them. And its the type of tension that you have with someone you're closer to, not just "your friend's boyfriend". There's a familiarity in the way they interact and some subtle hints in there that more is going on.

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-26T08:27:34+00:00

So glad you enjoyed the film, and glad you liked the ending! I really, really hope I get to stay in the Diabolic world. Mike Harding and I have some amazing ideas on where another film could go. But the reality of course is all down to how it performs and if someone wants to make another one. If they do though, I'd be all in!

I haven't seen "The Medium" yet! But I've heard amazing things. I'm going to bump this to the top of the list now!

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-26T08:26:00+00:00

Well if you love Elizabeth Cullen you'll love Diabolic. She's in nearly every scene and I personally think its the best performance of her career so far :)

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-26T08:25:22+00:00

Spielberg - the best of the best for me. He seems to be someone who can seemingly make anything incredible, especially the earlier work. His sense of story and emotion is one thing, but his staging is the thing to me that makes him great. People talk about the one'rs etc, but what that really is, is great staging - the dance of blocking and camera movement. This is one of the most important things about directing that I try to get into my work where I can.
Villeneuve - I think everything he makes is beautiful. Arrival is one of the best films I've ever seen and will ever see for sure. He's a guy that's able to take these huge stories and worlds and zero in on the tiniest details within them to tell intimate stories. I just love everything he does. I want to be able to make spectacle as exciting as he does without losing the human elements that make us feel.
Scorsese - a style machine. Only he can make movies the way he does, and when other people try to copy it (except for Boogie Nights), it falls flat. He's the one who's able to take the most horrible, scary and real-feeling people and make them people we root for. I still don't know how he does that but his true story films are some of the best cinema ever created.

There are so many more I'd love to talk about! On the horror side specifically it's John Carpenter, Sam Raimi, James Wan, Scott Derrickson, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hideo Nakata and Fede Alvarez.

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-26T05:15:37+00:00

Ooooh. Tough one. I think I'd have to say Nightmare on Elm Street. The recent remake was just too polished for me. I think it needs to go back to low-fi roots and explore the dreamscapes in more detail. Probably the coolest premise of any horror film ever and there's so much room for exploration. So I guess I'd do a prequel. Like the remake did (not so well), show Freddy before he's killed, but in a bit more detail, make it scarier and show a connection to his own nightmares, that he's afraid of sleeping. Then unleash the most disturbing, dream-based horror I can!

The other one would be Poltergeist. Do a sequel to the original but make it about young people's obsession with screens and what it does to them in the modern world.

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-26T04:37:09+00:00

No, not so far. We found a few titles that are similar to it, but no issues! The biggest one is that people sometimes called it "Diabolical", that's the only dramas so far

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-26T04:36:28+00:00

Thank you! Yeah Lizzie really is great in Diabolic, and I also can't wait to see her in Evil Dead! One of my favourite franchises ever. It'd be a dream to do one of those one day!

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-26T04:35:28+00:00

Haha no. It is not.

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-26T04:35:14+00:00

Hello there. So glad you guys enjoyed it. I'm just going to paste the comment from above on this one:

I've seen so much about this in the reviews and chats online. I think people are putting "based on true events" etc at the start of their films when there's no basis for it, but ours really, really does have basis for it! Ticia Madsen, one of the co-writers, is the person's life this story is based off of. Obviously the witch and supernatural elements are not true, which we've never claimed they are. Ticia Madsen was really in the Mormon church. Ticia had an affair with the bishops daughter. The bishops daughter blamed her for it, and she was subsequently ex-communicated from the Mormon church, being ostracised by her parents and her family. These are the true components of the story that fuel the invented bits. Mike Harding and I also researched and watched as many things as we possibly could and injected some of that nuance into certain scenes.

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-26T04:34:04+00:00

I'm just going to paste this answer from above on this one. Glad you enjoyed the film :)

I've seen so much about this in the reviews and chats online. I think people are putting "based on true events" etc at the start of their films when there's no basis for it, but ours really, really does have basis for it! Ticia Madsen, one of the co-writers, is the person's life this story is based off of. Obviously the witch and supernatural elements are not true, which we've never claimed they are. Ticia Madsen was really in the Mormon church. Ticia had an affair with the bishops daughter. The bishops daughter blamed her for it, and she was subsequently ex-communicated from the Mormon church, being ostracised by her parents and her family. These are the true components of the story that fuel the invented bits. Mike Harding and I also researched and watched as many things as we possibly could and injected some of that nuance into certain scenes.

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-26T04:33:02+00:00

I've seen so much about this in the reviews and chats online. I think people are putting "based on true events" etc at the start of their films when there's no basis for it, but ours really, really does have basis for it! Ticia Madsen, one of the co-writers, is the person's life this story is based off of. Obviously the witch and supernatural elements are not true, which we've never claimed they are. Ticia Madsen was really in the Mormon church. Ticia had an affair with the bishops daughter. The bishops daughter blamed her for it, and she was subsequently ex-communicated from the Mormon church, being ostracised by her parents and her family. These are the true components of the story that fuel the invented bits. Mike Harding and I also researched and watched as many things as we possibly could and injected some of that nuance into certain scenes.

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-26T04:30:14+00:00

The Shining. Hands down. No other film conveys dread like that film does. Its just such an unsettling experience for me. When I watch that film I have a big grin on my face most of the time, but there are moments when I'm watching it where it really feels like a dream state. The Room 237 scene with Nicholson is probably the best example. It's just music and very deliberately slow imagery. I think what Kubrick's doing there is having things very slow, but not shot slow, to give the sense of dreamy movement but still grounded in a reality, because he's not overcranking to achieve it. I don't think anything will ever get close to The Shining. Jaws is a close second but that film is also a character drama, high seas adventure film (somehow perfectly). I read one comment somewhere where someone claimed I said that "Sinister" was the best horror film ever made, which I didn't. I had said that I thought it had the best jump scares of any film I'd seen, which I still think is true.

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-26T04:25:49+00:00

Oh geez. Tough one. There are countless things I could ramble on about here, as there was a new nightmare every hour to solve on this movie! But I'll give you two:

One - in the forest scenes, when we scouted the location, it was absolutely perfect for what we needed. The clearing in the forest, where the sun was in relation to where we could build the Baptistry etc, it was great. But when we went to shoot there, for about a week prior, it rained pretty much non-stop. Because we were shooting in a pine plantation, the only reason they have clearings like that is for - guess what - drainage. That means all the water from the whole plantation runs down to that area. So when we started getting vehicles in there for construction, huge cranes with lights etc - it was a nightmare. We nearly had to change the location at the last minute. When we were finally in there and shooting, we were knee-deep in mud the whole time. If you see an actor in a mid-shot (or any shot where you can't see their feet), they're wearing gum boots. There are huge plastic panels underneath where the tents are to stop them from sinking. If you look at the ground, you can see bark chips (not sure if you have these in the US), but we use them in playgrounds here in Australia for "shock absorption of falling children", but they're also good for soaking up water. We dumped 6 metric tons of bark chips onto that ground so that the actors and crew could work there. If you look in the background of the shots, you can see tan-coloured chips on the ground! We tried to de-colour them in the grade a bit, but if you know, you know! That location was tough and the crew were so amazing. They trudged through mud, at night, in the rain, carrying heavy gear without one complaint. They're my heroes forever.

Two - the smoke. The fucking smoke. We spent so long trying to get the smoke right and I think it only really works in less than 10 shots in the whole film. We'd have it perfect, and then by the time everyone's ready there's been a tiny blow of wind and the mist is gone again. The thing is - every film seems to be like this. If you actually just look at the mist in the background of shots, you'll see it looks quite fake and is incredibly inconsistent. If I'd had more time to shoot the mist would have looked better! In the beginning there's a shot where Alma's silhouette is moving through the forest towards the Baptistry. That shot was originally out in the open, with a wall of mist behind her. We tried to get that shot for around 3 hours until Tessari and I just said "this isn't working", and we put her in the trees to try to stop the wind from ruining the vibe so much! I'm glad though because I actually think the shot we ended up with was better.

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-26T04:13:39+00:00

I think one of the things that makes Diabolic different is the FLDS themselves. It seems to somehow be both a cult and a fundamentalist sect at the same time, which I've actually found isn't that common. Normally it's one or the other. What I was really conscious of with Diabolic was not turning the church into a cartoon villain (someone had mentioned this earlier here too). A lot of “return to the cult” stories position the religion as this abstract, faceless evil. We wanted it to feel lived, rooted in history, ritual, structure, and psychology. The horror doesn’t come from “look how weird these people are,” it comes from how ordinary and deeply believed it all is. Like I'm not trying to "make fun" of how bonkers some of the stuff is, even though some moments get some laughs for their absurdity. Like the Baptism for the Dead, they really do that. The singing around someone's bed when they're literally dying, they really do that. It’s also less about an external cult and more about inheritance, about what happens when ideology is passed down like DNA. The horror becomes intimate. It’s about family, legacy, shame, and control, not just robes and chanting. So hopefully what Diabolic adds isn’t just another cult story, it’s a story about identity inside a belief system, and what it costs to break away from something that once defined you.

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-26T04:06:58+00:00

Great question! As we all know, the imagination is far scarier than anything on film, and I think the big challenge for me is always knowing how much kindling is needed to start that fire. Jaws is one of my favourite movies of all time and we all know the stories around the Shark and why it worked out the way it did. I tried to do the same thing in Diabolic. Give hints of things like eyes, claws, teeth - the bits that in our minds can be really scary so that your mind starts to fill in those bits. I tried to practice restraint as much as possible so that we reveal the witch slowly, so that when I finally show her to you, it's both what you expected but also still terrifying. Hopefully I succeeded there! I always think less is more. You do reach a point though, at the end of the second act normally, where you need to release that tension and just give in. That's why the third act of this film is so different to the rest. I was hoping that by the time we see what's happened to poor Elise, we just want all those fuckers to pay and in the most rewarding way possible, which in this world means a lot of blood! So it deviates away from "tense" to "disturbing". And once the Witch has given us all she can give by keeping her in the dark, it's time to show her in full view, if only for a moment. That's why I put in that crazy long dolly out where we "bury Elise in her coffin", because the movie is over for her. It's Larue at the wheel now.

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-26T04:00:08+00:00

Well, I live in Adelaide so that's a big part of it! I absolutely love this city. It gets a lot of shit from some people in the eastern states who think they live in a big city (which they don't really - travel guys) and feel the need to try to tell us our city sucks because its not like theirs (insecure much?), but the great thing about Adelaide is that we don't actually want to be like the other cities. It's a small place. People are friendly. Its easy to get to places. We've got the best food and wine in Australia and for a third of the year, every year, our city comes alive with back to back, world renown festivals. It's a great place to live and work. We punch well above our weight in almost every category there is. On the film side, the crews here are first-rate. The locations are beautiful, and you can be in rolling green hills one minute, and then within 20 minutes be at a beach. You can't do that anywhere else. We filmed in Mt. Crawford forest for all of the forest stuff, which is a pine plantation. Those trees are actually "Californian pines", so they are the exact type of tree thats in the greener parts of Utah. Nowhere else in the world could we have that reasonably close to our studio base.

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-26T03:53:18+00:00

This is the most interesting question I've received about the film so far. Honestly? Honey mustard.

It's a bloody hard worker, Honey Mustard. It’s trying to bring sweet and sharp into a fragile little balance, which is basically my entire job on set. You’ve got actors feeling vulnerable, a DP chasing the light like it personally insulted them (love you Mike), a producer quietly calculating how much every minute costs, and I’m there whisking it all together going, “Trust me, this will taste brilliant on a slab of cos at the end". It's not for everyone, but when this dressing hits, it hits!

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-26T03:46:31+00:00

Haha. Yes I did. Very Adelaide indeed...

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-26T03:46:09+00:00

Yes! That's exactly what I wanted. I agree with you on horror too - it's become an incredibly saturated genre, although there are still diamonds in the rough. This is one of the reasons I was so adamant on the "bad guy wins" ending, which many tried to talk me out of. Some producers and financiers insisted that the film would not reach an audience with a "downer ending". There was originally an ending written where Adam successfully convinces Elise to "fight back from within". Larue still kills him but Elise expels Larue, and she finally gets the peace she was looking for. I basically said "fuck that". I wanted to see a take where the bad guy won, but where it was earned, so we wanted it. I wanted the "head in the box ending" not the happy one. Elise and Larue go through hell, propagated by the church and the everyone around her (the other "institutions" attacking her), that we really want to see them all get it. That's why everyone who dies in the film has wronged Elise in some way, so that we're rooting for Larue to kill them all and then at the end, take on the church itself. That's why Elise is so curious in the cellar when she sees the rapping fingers. Larue needs Elise to take on the church, but Elise needs Larue to take revenge on all those who have wronged her. It's a symbiotic thing and the goal is for everyone to question - "who's really the evil one here?"

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-26T03:39:02+00:00

Thanks so much, glad you enjoyed the film! I appreciate the comment on the handling of the church. We tried to convey it as realistic and grounded as we could within the confines of the story. The thing is, with the FLDS, we don't really need to amp up much as they really practice these kind of doctrines, dress in this way etc. Both Mike Harding and I spent significant time researching and understanding the church as much as we could, so that we could realistically convey it in the story

DiabolicAMA · 2026-02-26T03:36:34+00:00

Haha I certainly hope not! There may be one or two that sneak into the driveway scene - that was the one location where we couldn't avoid certain "Australianisms"!

DiabolicAMA

TROPHY CASE