According to E.L. Katz, the demented horror-thriller filmmaker behind films like Cheap Thrills and Small Crimes, “words really don’t mean anything. It’s what you see.” This is what he told me when we spoke about his latest film, Azrael, a film whose unique storytelling challenges are almost impossible to unsee from its opening moments. The film, which recently held its World Premiere at the SXSW Film & TV Festival, follows its titular heroine, Azrael (Samara Weaving), a woman being pursued by a mysterious cult in the aftermath of the Rapture. The tribe, who forbid speaking for reasons initially unknown, capture her and attempt to sacrifice her to one of the many horrific, shadowed creatures that infest their world with a hunger for human flesh. For the sake of the remaining story, Azrael manages to escape, but not for long.
It would be one thing to tell a horror story with minimal dialogue. It would be another to explore an explicitly religious world post-Rapture, something that has never quite been tackled even within the wide canon of post-apocalyptic movies. It would be another thing to feature creatures simultaneously shadowed by the night yet so visceral up close and proceed to feature them feeding on human flesh with almost no jump cuts, inserts, or sped-up footage. And that’s just what’s visible to the naked eye; what isn’t visible is Katz and his production team shooting practically in the thicketed forests of Estonia, where their intricately designed prosthetics must endure deceptively choreographed stunt work.
There are few filmmakers who would tackle such challenges head-on, but Katz is certainly one of them. The visionary has lent his voice to many worlds, from his early collaborations with filmmaker Adam Wingard to his own features to even television shows like Channel Zero, Swamp Thing, and The Haunting of Bly Manor. Amidst all of these projects, as well as Azrael, Katz creates playgrounds for flagrant, brutal stories and characters to run wild while never losing sight of character or plot progression. It also helps to have a star like Weaving, who earns another notch in her belt as a badass horror icon willing to take a beating. The two of them, along with a slew of talented designers and crew members, craft a uniquely thrilling and visceral story that will surely satisfy horror fans of all stripes.
GVN spoke to Katz about all of his film’s unique challenges, what it’s like to work with an actress as eager as Samara Weaving, and how they came to design the film’s zombie-like creatures. Here is our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
While watching this film, the motif I kept going back to was “unique challenges.”
[laughing] Yes.
I want to break down the unique elements of this film that brought on those unique challenges. The first thing is, of course, the film takes place in a world where people do not speak. Though this aspect originated in the writing stage, which you weren’t involved in, why were you, as a director, interested in tackling that specific challenge?
The thing that I’d done prior [The Haunting of Bly Manor] had a lot of dialogue. I sometimes feel so restricted by television storytelling because it is so much more dialogue-driven, whereas I do think the joys of the genre are visual and should be immersive. With [Azrael], there was a certain amount of communication within the culture. There was a lot of talk of how the hell this society functions. Things can be expressed with a certain shorthand, touch. Then, you see it in the face. The more we went down a rabbit hole of trying to create too much of a detailed [world], the more it started to pull it away from very base, primary emotions and interactions. Words are sort of meaningless when it comes to explaining a character. In my first movie, Cheap Thrills, everybody’s talking about their narrative about why they’re doing the thing that they’re doing, but how they hurt other people, that’s the thing you should be watching. It’s like Small Crimes. The guy’s constantly monologuing about who he is and his sob story, but it doesn’t mean anything. Words really don’t mean anything. It’s what you see.
Another rare thing about this film is that it’s post-Rapture. A lot of films lead up to that point, but we’re looking at its aftermath. What to you were some of the formative details of this world, specifically in that context?
To me, there was a philosophical thing. The Rapture has happened but people still have to stick around and live their life. There was something kind of funny about that. [The film’s antagonists are] stuck in this cycle where the apocalypse keeps on happening over and over again and it’s sort of their own fault, based on their actions. It’s people still treating people within their society as others, causing this cycle of violence. They’re enabling the apocalypse to keep on happening based on their own crazy human shit. They’re not living great. There’s even a structure that they could live in, the church, but because of their crazy beliefs, they’re not even allowing themselves that. They have to live in these crummy tents outside of it. It’s some of the worst aspects of religion, how people make their lives terrible because of some nebulous greater good. That was kind of dictating how this society was living. There’s other cultures outside of these guys. There’s probably all sorts of roving packs of people that ended up in all sorts of different places. These guys ended up outside of a church, so that means something. But then when you get a glimpse of some other culture, you’re like, “Oh, some people might be living a different way.”
That brings us to the harrowing creatures of the film. They have this unique, almost amorphous quality. They’re so shadowed at times that you’re not even sure you’re looking at a human body. How did you come to specifically this very dark and coated makeup job on them?
It was Dan Martin who did Possessor and other Brandon Cronenberg films. He goes really hard. You have all these zombie shows now and the audience is very comfortable with a lot of zombie-like designs. We were really trying to find something with a different expression visually and also speak to some[thing] apocalyptic. Looking at images of people that had burn wounds, there’s a revulsion there. It was like, “Well, maybe there’s a way to make something that feels uneasy and sickly to look at but is still human.” It doesn’t go full monster mode, but it still has that unsettling threat to it. Me and Simon [Bartlett, writer] and Dan Kagan [producer], we’re such horror fans that the idea of having a generic zombie walking around would have killed us. We needed these things to have their own personality. It took a lot of time and a lot of revisions. You do a camera test and you look at them under the light and you’re like, “Oh my god, the latex is reflective.” There’s a lot of challenges behind a man in a rubber suit. It’s the most exciting thing if you can land it but a lot of times there’s a reason why people do the VFX creature. It moves faster, it’s fluid, it’s anything you want. You don’t have to deal with a performer getting hot. But there was something interesting about going to Estonia and working in a mode that felt old-fashioned. It made our lives very difficult, but it felt like we were out there in the 80s or the late 70s, making this crazy thing. Also, [when you have a guy in a suit,] the actors can see something.
Are there any other separate prosthetics involved or is it just a suit?
Some of them had a fake jaw. There’s a little bit of VFX augmentation because sometimes somebody ate too many sandwiches during craft and pieces come off. These guys are also running around in the woods, so there’s a little bit of stitching together. There are burnt texture layers and sometimes it’s too much because you look at it and it looks flappy and then sometimes it looks creepy. You’re constantly eyeballing it. It’s a delicate thing.
Another thing about them is that they get really physical. There are usually tricks that a lot of filmmakers use to get away with intense gore, like cutaways or sped-up footage. In this film, it’s a lot harder to catch anything because you watch the creatures literally go for people’s throats and tear flesh in real-time. Was that a writing choice or did that come in the direction?
Simon’s writing has always been incredibly visceral and violent. I’m a horror fan and I almost went to school for makeup effects because of Tom Savini. I’ve always been drawn to that stuff, as has Simon. For me, there’s so much gore on TV in a way that always feels like if you blink, you’ll miss it. [It’s] very digital in a way that makes you grow numb to it. It was interesting to be like, “Well, what can we actually do in a more old-fashioned way?” It was about stretching those things as much as we could. There are other projects that you work on and there’s a range of how far you can go before people are like, “It’s too much.” With this, it’s a crazy survival horror film in some strange wasteland. These movies were made to be meaty. The ones that you grow up watching, you remember them for those scenes. That was a big part of the design.
We have to talk about Samara, obviously. Does she genuinely enjoy getting a beating in these movies?
Yeah, she totally does.
Is there a joy to work with someone who’s interested in really getting down and dirty in the process?
There’s an incredible joy. She’s a total gamer. You work with some people and it feels like you’re twisting their arm to get into this kind of stuff, but if you speak to her, she’ll say the thing that got her interested in doing [the movie] was the challenge, the extremity, the crazy, the weird. I talked to some actors on Zoom and they were very nervous about the idea of going to Estonia and shooting in the woods and doing all this action. Samara was just like, “Let’s get weird. I want to do it. I’m just going to start training now.” We had an incredible stunt choreographer, Stanimir Stamatov. He did Texas Chainsaw [2022], the one that was on Netflix … Listen, the violence in that movie was pretty dope. He’s an artist, so working with him, working with Sam, and then trying to get as many stunt-trained performers as we could––it’s hard because there’s a limited amount out there, but we were able to put together an action movie situation in a way that was really exciting.
Hearing you say all of that, it seems like there is a deceptively large amount of stunt work in this movie.
Yeah.
It’s so on the ground that you wouldn’t consider it. Talk to me a little bit about finding that stunt team. Being in Estonia must have been an extra layer of difficulty.
Stani was recommended to me by the producers of Texas Chainsaw. He’d also worked on Extraction II. I met him, and he was a filmmaker! He’s truly a gifted artist, like all good stunt coordinators. A big part of it was there’s no dialogue in this movie, so even the action scenes need to be story scenes in their own way. In some action movies, all story stops as soon as the action scene starts. It always feels very objective and you’re not connected to anything. With this, it’s like you are on the ground. You’re with this lead character. You’re going through her arc of her getting more extreme and more desperate and going darker. Capturing that with these stunt scenes, that was one of the biggest parts of the construction of the movie. A lot of our prep was in “How does this stuff work? How does this stuff escalate? What is the experience?” She was game for it and Stani was awesome, so we were lucky, or else it wouldn’t have worked.
Azrael held its World Premiere as part of the Midnighter section of the 2024 SXSW Film & TV Festival. It will be released in North America at a time to be determined, courtesy of Republic Pictures.

Larry Fried is a filmmaker, writer, and podcaster based in New Jersey. He is the host and creator of the podcast “My Favorite Movie is…,” a podcast dedicated to helping filmmakers make somebody’s next favorite movie. He is also the Visual Content Manager for Special Olympics New Jersey, an organization dedicated to competition and training opportunities for athletes with intellectual disabilities across the Garden State.