After writing the second season of the Japanese Netflix series, House of Ninjas, director Dave Boyle was ready for something new. “My producing partner Kento Kaku and I were just really eager to make a theatrical movie after being in the streaming world for so long. We just really wanted to make something for the big screen for theaters. And Kento just straight up asked me, ‘If you could just do anything, anything you want, what would it be?’ And I said, ‘I really want to make a ghost story. I want to make a horror film.’ And he said, ‘Let’s do it.’”
Without a finished script, Boyle began planning for the film Never After Dark. Japanese production begins even before scripts are written, with actors booked up to a year or two in advance. Crew and stage space are scarce, so the team locked them in early. Meanwhile, Boyle wrote his Japanese gothic mystery about a medium who uncovers real and supernatural dangers at a remote house in the forest.
Boyle asked cinematographer Patrick Ouziel to fly out to shoot the movie. When Ouziel arrived from Los Angeles, he was struck by the culture of preparation. “The amount of prep that every department wants to do to make sure that everything is going to be just so, even when it’s a low-budget movie, is kind of incredible,” he says. With a fully boarded film and 26 of 28 days at a single house location, he and Boyle could walk sets the night before and plan the next day’s blocking.
Though he doesn’t speak Japanese, Ouziel had a translator who also helped coordinate equipment logistics. Lighting director Hidenori Nagata brought some old-school and unfamiliar tools, such as ceiling-rigged inkies-small Fresnel spotlights- and custom mirrors that bounce light onto faces. “It was honestly kind of a dream workflow,” Ouziel says.
In Never After Dark, Airi, (Moeka Hoshi) the medium, uses a mirror with a spinning zoetrope around the edge for summoning spirits. The prop is a stunning visual that effectively shows her transition into the spirit world. “I wanted to get away from Ouija boards, like the usual sort of tools that you see in movies,” explains Boyle. “And so I wanted to come up with a convincing ceremony that she would do.” Production designer Yûji Hayashida designed the prop. “He has a knack for creating these interesting occult items that totally feel like you could find them in a back alley antique shop in Paris or somewhere in Eastern Europe or something,” says Boyle. “I wanted people to be able to watch the ceremony and understand what she’s doing without any explanation whatsoever. I wanted to do it all in camera, without any sort of CG component.”
The zoetrope was backlit with small LEDs. Ouziel tested it, and ended up using a shutter angle between 180° and 360° so the animation would read without a smeary look.
Mirrors were the film’s recurring theme. When one reflection shot wasn’t working, the fix was simple: flag the HMI, shade the sunlit ground outside the window and raise the camera to shoot against something darker. “You see it happen on the monitor. It’s kind of magic,” Ouziel says. For the shot of the mirror in Airi’s eye, he rigged the prop inches from her face behind a diopter.
Boyle says finding theatrical freedom after years in streaming was extremely rewarding. “I’ve spent so much of the last half decade or so in the streaming world where the downward pressure to not do anything that would make people turn it off and watch something else is so strong that you’re not always at liberty to make the best creative storytelling choices for that particular story,” he says. “In this case, we really only had ourselves to blame if anything went wrong. We had full creative authority to do it however we wanted.”
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