Heart Eyes is a winning romance and a killer slice of slasher movie fun. Not an easy balance to pull off. The team behind the hit—which made even more money in its second weekend at the box office—succeeded with sincerity. Not for a second do genres clash in the hands of director Josh Ruben and cinematographer Stephen Murphy.
Murphy is a seasoned pro behind the camera, having shot excellent episodes of Atlanta and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Romantic comedies aren't usually in his wheelhouse, so Heart Eyes gave him the opportunity to stretch his talents and explore a new aesthetic.
Recently, Murphy spoke with Daily Dead about shooting a rom-com, crafting some lovely kills, and recalled his first gig on set—working with horror legend Stuart Gordon.
[Editor's Note: This interview covers major Heart Eyes plot points and spoilers.]
I assume you wanted to make every shot of Heart Eyes as dynamic as possible. How did you want the killer to truly pop?
Stephen Murphy: When we first got the test mask, it wasn't the final mask, but it was the test mask maybe two weeks or so before we shot. I was really keen to get the mask on camera as soon as possible. We could put it under the lights, using the blue moonlight and such, to see how the colors and textures of the mask would respond. Then, we could feed that back to [special effects artist] Tony Gardner and his team, and they might adjust the paint scheme, textures, or reflective quality. It's all a process, a team effort. Okay, this is how we think we're going to shoot him—do we want to change anything? Are we seeing enough of this quality?
When the mask first arrived and we started lighting it, it was a chance for me to figure out how to best define its shape—just as you would do test shots with an actress or actor. You need to get to know their face, because the same lighting that looks brilliant for one person might not work so great for another person. You need to get to know the mask, and as you get to know the mask, you begin to see what looks interesting and iconic.
You start channeling in on, oh, you know what looks great, when we keep him mostly backlit. We had moving light on the front of his face. Maybe it's the shafts of rotating light in the winery, the machinery lights, or the car headlights. That's when you begin to learn what works and the kinds of scenarios and frames that will make him iconic.
What did you know wouldn’t work for shooting Heart Eyes?
Stephen Murphy: All that didn’t work was turning on all the lights, which we were never going to do anyway. If you put Heart Eyes in a brightly lit supermarket, he'd have a very different effect than if you placed him in a moodily lit supermarket. It’s a fine balance: lighting him enough that you get a sense of him, but not over-lighting him to the point where it’s just a guy in a mask. Even though it is just a guy in a mask, you still want to create this suggestion that he's maybe more than just a guy in the mask.
The design of the mask worked really well because it had so much texture, and the heart-shaped eyes had a silver rim rather than just plain glass pieces in there. That meant, from a lighting perspective, I could put lights behind or around them—backlighting, edge lighting, cross lighting—which would catch the edges of the silver eyes. That let me suggest the eyes without needing a light right in front of his face, which would have shown too much and taken you out of the mood.
The police station set-piece screams early 2000s—you’ve got Jordana Brewster, Devon Sawa, a blue tint, and heat rising off the coffee. Did you and Josh talk a lot about early 21st-century slashers?
Stephen Murphy: We did. When I first started speaking with Josh, he was super adamant that he wanted to make a very earnest love letter to both rom-coms and slasher movies, particularly from the ’90s and 2000s. He didn’t want to shortchange either genre, because he loves them both.
The two images he mentioned were Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives—his favorite Jason movie—and a frame from Big, where Tom Hanks is at the party in the white suit with pink curtains behind him. That was his goal post: from rom-com color palette to slasher color palette.
As we spent time together in pre-production—scouting locations, looking at Heart Eyes concept art, seeing costumes come together—that’s when you start evolving your conversation and adding to it. We talked about Monster Squad, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Last Boy Scout, and Sam Raimi movies. He loves Darkman.
That was when we made movies that looked beautiful. They were still scary and moody, but not gloomy. They were polished or shiny. Everyone looked great, you could still see everything going on there, but there was still an underlying threat.
It was a time when everyone looked beautiful in movies.
Stephen Murphy: Which helps. That's the throughput between the romcom side of it and the horror side of it, where everyone stays looking beautiful, more or less. They don't suddenly become super sweaty and gritty halfway through the movie.
You have a Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style shot during the drive-in movie sequence, where the camera zooms out through a hole in a throat. How was that pulled off?
Stephen Murphy: Josh came up with that sequence early in prep. He asked, Is it possible for us to do this? Can we get the camera to do that? So, I sat down with him, our makeup effects supervisor Stefan [Knight], and our VFX supervisor, Matt [Holmes], and we figured it out.
It’s a fairly straightforward shot, but a bit complex. We used a motion-control camera slider to repeat the same pullback five or six times. Each time you do it, it’s some takes for the background actors and some for the actress in the foreground.
Then you’re putting in the prosthetic throat that has the wound in it, just lining it up perfectly. We used a snorkel lens on the camera, so it can fit all the way through to the other side. The snorkel lenses need a lot of light. They really should only be used during the daytime. So it means you're lighting the whole space to a very high level and then just making it look darker with the iris. You're marrying all those elements together and you get that trailer shot.
Some cinematographers love shooting blood and others hate it. What about you?
Stephen Murphy: I love it. I have a brief background in special makeup effects, so I’m all for blood and guts—it just depends on the intention and tone for how they’re used. I don’t necessarily take pleasure in hyper-realistic gore, but the way we used blood in Heart Eyes made me laugh—probably more than I should.
As a DP, you fall in love with liquids, reflective surfaces, and anything that catches the light and spec your highlights. Blood is beautiful on camera. In prep, we tested different colors and types of blood to ensure that, even in dark lighting, it still had the right color and texture. I thought it worked fantastically.
For the big finale, when you see the neck slowly breaking apart, how did your makeup background help you there?
Stephen Murphy: That was what Josh and I were calling The Thing sequence because there's a moment in The Thing where you can see Rob Bottin’s team’s work—you see the thing stretching, the sinew popping, and it's just great. So again, that was a conversation we had fairly early in prep between myself, Josh, Stefan, and everyone involved.
My background in makeup effects helped in talking with Stefan about how we were going to shoot it. We talked about which side of the action line we’d be on and where the lighting would come from. I could tell them, Okay, the light’s going to be coming from here, so if we’re doing wounds or prosthetics, let’s make sure they’re applied on the lit side of the face, not the shadow side. That way, we could properly see and describe them.
From working with prosthetics for years, I’m pretty handy at how to light them to make them look their best. The quality of prosthetics on this film was amazing. We didn’t have to fudge anything or hide anything. I could just shoot them as if they were real, which was fantastic.
The fact that you get the camera so close speaks to the quality of that effect.
Stephen Murphy: A hundred percent. Those big neck shots at the very end of the movie are all practical. There’s a little CGI enhancement in the wide shot to remove the stunt performer’s head, obviously, but all that great, chunky close-up stuff, it looked fantastic on set. Everyone was squealing. Whatever version or length of the shot ended up in the movie, we actually filmed it for a lot longer. It just keeps going.
For the chapel, how did you want the aesthetic to bridge the gap between horror and rom-com?
Stephen Murphy: It was about keeping something moody and interesting, but still making sure you could still see. We knew the action would take up most of the floor space in the church, so we needed a lighting plan that gave us the flexibility to shoot in every corner as well as the middle of the church.
The first thought was using the color contrast of the warm candlelight against the cool blue moonlight. That worked pretty well. We shot the church sequence last. Since we were also filming other things on the stage while the church was being built, I had time to walk through it between setups with my gaffer. I could say, I think we need the option to get more moonlight here—let’s knock a hole in the ceiling or add a few more candles here.
It was a collaborative process with [production designer] Rob [Bavin] and his team. As they built the set, we identified all the places where we could cheat light in and make sure the blocking worked.
Josh told Daily Dead he really didn’t want to make a rom-com that looks too clean, like a Tide commercial. How did you approach making a good-looking movie without making it overly polished?
Stephen Murphy: It’s a fine line. My natural sensibilities don’t run toward rom-coms. It’s easy for me to do the dark stuff, but quite hard to do the rom-com stuff. I think that’s partly why Josh asked me to shoot the movie, because I would naturally steer away from the rom-com world. It was a challenge. It was definitely harder work to make everyone look like they belong in a rom-com and then transition them into a slasher movie.
We wanted to shoot anamorphic. Josh and I are both huge fans of that format. I went out of my way to use older lenses so that they weren't perfectly clean and weren't the sort of squeaky clean you'd see on Netflix. I wanted the images to have a bit of character, even in the rom-com world.
I also pushed the sensor of the camera. We were shooting on Alexa 35, and that has a texture feature in it, which is a bit like a grain emulation, but it's burnt into the image. Once you commit to it, you can't undo it in post. I made sure that I was stressing the sensor in terms of how I was exposing the image and in terms of the texture that we were using. I kept that consistent from the rom-com side to the horror side as well. The rom-com side, it could have been cleaner, it could have been more diffused, it could have been “prettier,” but it was never perfect.
Your first gig was with a horror legend, Stuart Gordon, on Space Truckers. Being a Gordon fan and writing for a horror site, I have to ask: How was that experience?
Stephen Murphy: That was my first experience. I was still in college studying to be a makeup artist, and I got work on a sci-fi movie called Space Truckers, which was being made in Ireland. They had finished the main shoot and had set up a miniature effects house and studio—kind of an ILM-style setup—to shoot all the model work.
A friend of mine had a connection there and got invited to visit. He asked if I wanted to tag along, knowing I was interested in model-making. When we got there, the model-making supervisor was really nice and told us, Oh, come back anytime you want. I showed up the next weekend and just said, I’m here to help. He said, Okay, go make some deep, deep background models.
My friend and I just kept showing up, working for the last few weeks of their schedule. We just kept making models. By that point, they were running low on money. They had a vending machine where the crew drank Cokes all day to keep going, because they had crazy hours. And so, they would give us the Coke cans and we would make deep, deep background models out of the Coke cans and some fast-cast pieces.
I loved it. I grew up reading about ILM and Star Wars, so I thought this was the greatest thing ever. We had no idea what the movie was—we were just happy to be working on it. Then, on maybe our last week or day, Stuart Gordon showed up. There were about 25 of us in the room, and he came around to personally thank every single person for helping on the movie. He shook everyone’s hand, looked them in the eye, and said, Thank you for helping me on my movie. That blew my mind.
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Catch up on our earlier Heart Eyes features:
A film journalist with over a decade of experience writing for Slash Film, The Credits, and High Times Magazine.
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