In Jason Miller’s film Ghosts of the Void, Jen (Tedra Millan) and Tyler (Michael Reagan) are spending the night in their car. They’re in their car because they’ve been kicked out of their house and have nowhere else to go. So they stop at what appears to be a quiet park to get their rest for the night. Dealing with their first night of homelessness is difficult enough, but when strange noises and escalating pranks are added to the mix, they’re in for a very long night.

Ghosts of the Void takes time unraveling its story, and it’s very character-centered. The tension slowly ramps up to a gruesome climax that’s firmly rooted in horror traditions.

The tension slowly ramps up to a gruesome climax that’s firmly rooted in horror traditions.

The movie impressed the hell out of me, which is why I was happy to get to talk with director Jason Miller about it. 

So tell me a little bit of your background before Ghosts of the Void. This is your first feature, right?

It is, yeah. There’s not much of a background. I live here in Arkansas. Born and raised here. Went to the University of Central Arkansas. They have a little film program. But, yeah, since film school I’ve made a couple short films and stuff like that, but mostly just trying to get to that first feature. Eventually had the opportunity with Ghosts.

I was able to get Ghosts off the ground because a buddy of mine I met at UCA, we ended up hitting it off and becoming friends. He ended up moving to Chicago, and kind of getting into the film scene there. And it was through that connection that we started getting to some bigger opportunities that weren’t available here in Arkansas. We wrote a film together called Echo Boomers, which is kind of a crime thriller. And he was able to get that off the ground for himself as a director. And he got Michael Shannon and Patrick Schwarzenegger. That was a big opportunity for him, and it was a big opportunity for me because I was a co-writer on the project, and I did a lot for him to help develop that concept and that idea. Because of everything I did there, he was like, “Hey man, if you’ve got something you want to get off the ground, say the word and I’ll pull my strings, and we’ll see what we can make happen.” So I took him the script for Ghosts of the Void. It was called The Lot at the time.

I didn’t want to make a movie as big as what he’d done for Echo Boomers. That was a couple million and it took us five years to get that off the ground. That was a hard five years. And I didn’t want to go through all that for this. I said, “Look, man, let’s do something smaller. Let’s do something under a million. Preferably way under a million. And let’s just make it as simple as we can. He’s like, “Yeah, man, that’s fine with me. We’ll do it that way if that’s what you want.” So that’s how it eventually got made.

From what I’ve read Echo Boomers also has to do with economic struggles. What keeps you going back to that subject?

Well, I think my own economic struggles for one thing. You know, it’s interesting because on one hand I feel like it’s a little coincidental. Echo Boomers was kind of Seth [Savoy]’s idea. I just helped him write it. But I do think that the struggles that I was going through at the time — you know, once I graduated film school, between that and making Echo Boomers, it was a lot. This is not an easy industry to get ahead in, at all. And when you have that as your main focus, it’s hard to get ahead and there’s going to be those years when, if you don’t have something as a backup — which I didn’t. I do video work here in Arkansas, which is not the most profitable thing to work in. So, yeah, there was a lot of a struggles there, and I think that informed a lot of what I brought to the table in Echo, but it also informed what I wanted to do with this movie.

I wrote the script from a place of almost desperation. I need to write a script that I think can get made on a super low budget, that’s a very simple idea. Because I think that’s the only way I’m going to get ahead. Or get my first shot, anyway. So it was kind of those two things: the desperation to get ahead, to get my first shot, with the desperation of the financial struggles merged together with this idea that, “Well, this is what I need to write about.” I need to write about that struggle. And so it was kind of born out of that.

Have you ever written any fiction? Because you perfectly captured the vulnerability of the fiction writer. Do you have any similar experiences to Tyler in trying to find your voice? 

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s harder, the more pressure you put on yourself when you put yourself in that kind of situation where you’re just trying to find that first opportunity. You start putting more and more pressure on yourself, like Tyler does in the film. Yeah, it can lead to a lot of mental struggles, it can lead to a lot of instability, mentally, and that can be horrifying. You could start thinking, “I’m never going to make anything of myself.” It can be horrific, and I wanted to capture that horror.

Was [Ghosts of the Void] always intended to be a horror movie? Because you have this interesting sort of slide. It starts out as what could be a straight drama and then sort of merges into a straight horror movie by the end.

I mean, I’ve always loved horror. Horror’s the genre that I always love to go to. But I also really like exploring characters. It started with this idea of “What’s a good story that I can tell in a very simple kind of thing?” So I thought, single location, few characters. I was actually sitting in my car after work one day thinking, “Wait a minute, I could make a whole movie right here in this situation. Then I started thinking about what that situation might be. Why would these two people be in their car? So it kind of evolved, it bloomed. I found the story as I went along, but I always knew I was going to take it into a horror direction. Now, what that would be took a lot of time to find. Because it could be anything. The fact that they’re living in their car could be irrelevant to some kind of monster that’s chasing them.

But once I started writing these two characters, I knew everything had to come back down to that theme. And so that naturally lent itself to being focused on the drama between these two characters. So, yeah, I did always know it was going to be a horror — I just didn’t know what kind of horror it would be until it was out there and finished.

I’ve read more than one critic call the film a “slow burn.” Would you describe it that way?

Oh yeah, for sure. I’ve always liked slow burn. I like when a story can unfurl in a very meticulous way. And I also felt like it was necessary for this movie. If I’m going to keep it in one location and if that location is going to be so limiting as a car, then I felt like there’s only so many things that can happen before I lose control of that story. So it insisted that every piece of the puzzle be unfurled one piece at a time. Focusing on these characters, focusing on revealing what their backstory is gradually over the course of the movie. If I had just rushed through all that and gotten to an immediate threat, the movie would have been over in thirty minutes. So it kind of necessitated a slow burn. But I like slow burn anyway. It’s more exciting to me to take something and gradually ramp it up.

Did you go back and watch some arthouse films in preparation?

Sure. A big one I paid attention to, for some reason I honed in on, was House of the Devil by Ti West. Anything by Ti West, actually, because he’s such a master of the slow burn. But that one in particular was one I kept going back to because not a lot happens for much of the runtime, but he holds your attention and keeps elevating what’s happening. So that was one I watched quite a bit.

So coming from someone who’s experienced anxiety disorders, I was really impressed with the sensitivity and the realism of your approach to it in this film. And depression as well. Did you do a lot of research into anxiety disorders and depression?

A little bit. Mostly I just drew from my own experience. I would just try to think about those times when we were struggling financially really hard. I’ve never been homeless, I’ve never had to live out of my car. But there were times when it felt like it could get that bad, and I would just imagine what that would be like. Laying in bed at night, not being able to sleep, thinking about the worst case scenarios. And it was really just a matter of putting that worst case scenario on the page and following through with it.

You know, I tried to do as much research as I can into how these disorders manifest themselves in people, but mostly it was just personal experience.

What was it like shooting in mostly one location? Were there any challenges that came with that?

It was a very difficult film to shoot, that’s for sure. I mean, it was kind of ironic because the traditional wisdom of the best way to make an indie film like this is to keep it in one location. And, yeah, that’s true. But if that one location is a pitch black parking lot in the middle of the night, then that becomes a huge challenge.

There were a couple challenges. For one, we were shooting ten hour days, which was a blessing and a curse. I liked it and I would definitely do it again. However, there needs to be a lot more preparation. I learned a lot, is what I would say. I learned a lot about how to shoot a film with ten hour days. Even if we hadn’t had ten hour days, though, I think we would have been severely limited. This parking lot was at a school, and we could not be on the campus while children were on the campus. And so there were some kids that were there until six o’clock. It was a private school. And so because of that we didn’t get to set every day until after dark. There was just no way around it. So my crew had to set up the entire lighting scheme for this thing, which was substantial. It’s pitch black. There’s no lights in the area. They had to set it up from the ground up every single day. In the dark, in the freezing cold, in the woods. It was muddy. It was a mess. Very small crew. Very indie film, so very small crew. And doing that every single night, night after night, meant that we had significantly less shoot time than you would want to have on any movie.

So, yeah, it did present a lot of challenges. We pretty much had to cut our shot list every single  night that we were shooting. Which meant I had to re-work a lot of the blocking to figure out, “Okay, I only have time for two shots. Because if we tried do more from this angle, then we’d have to move the lighting around, and we don’t have time for that.” So, being on the spot and trying to figure out how I can do this as a oner. And I love oners. Oners are great, but it’s a little different when you’re not doing it because you wanted to but because you have to. But it still presented with a lot of opportunities to do some interesting things that I don’t think I would have necessarily planned on doing. So a lot of blessings in disguise where we ended up with a lot of oners that I think makes it a little more immersive than it otherwise might have been if we had stuck to the plan.

What was it like working with your two leads, Michael Reagan and Tedra Millan? They were excellent and sort of had the majority of the acting all to themselves. 

We knew from the beginning that casting was going to be hugely important. We knew that we weren’t going to go the route of big stars. We didn’t have that option. But we did have the option of going SAG. And so we did. But we knew that the whole movie was going to hinge on these two actors, whoever they would be. And so we took it very seriously. We shot the movie in Chicago, where our producer Seth was. And we used a casting agency there in Chicago, but they cast a pretty wide net. So we had a nice response to that in terms of auditions, and were able to choose from a really good selection. Tedra and Michael were just the best ones for the role.

But I was really nervous. This was my first time working with SAG actors. I’ve worked with a lot of good actors on short films I’ve done, but never at this professional caliber. Again, they weren’t big stars, but they are professional SAG actors. They’d been in a few things. Small roles. Never leads. But nonetheless I was still really nervous about wanting to make sure I know what I’m doing. I’m pulling up all my acting books that I had collected from film school and re-reading them. I started having almost a panic attack. Oh no, I don’t know how to direct an actor! So that amount of preparation and that panic spurred me to almost over-prepare, so that by the time that I was able to talk to them, and sit down to talk about their characters, it was so easy. It was so great. They responded well to everything, and I realized that I enjoy working with actors. I think before this movie, I definitely wouldn’t have called myself an actor’s director. And I still wouldn’t just because that sounds so pretentious. But I do feel confident. More confident than I did. And I think that’s in large part to how graceful Tedra and Michael were. They made it a very pleasant experience. I would say that of all the troubles we had on that set, the least challenging one was working with them. They just made it easy. They came prepared every day, and delivered.

So every good horror movie’s got to have some bad guys. I guess you kind of already explained this, but what made you want to go the less-is-more route with the villains?

Again, a lot of it was necessity. If I trot ‘em out in the first act, what do they do from there? A lot of it was thinking about the sort of ambiguous enigmatic kind of villain. Like in the Strangers, that’s a great movie where the villains have no motive. But there’s a big house. There’s a lot of different areas that they can explore and different things that can happen there. When I’m limited to a car it’s like, “Okay, there’s not a lot of places they can go, and not many things they can do.” So I have to keep the action focused on simple things that can add up to something bigger.

It was mainly keeping the focus on the characters and letting that drive the movie.