It may be new, but Tribeca Film's The Demon’s Rook looks like a lost flick from the midnight horror heyday of the 1980’s, when you could watch practical effects ooze from the tube late into the night. With The Demon's Rook now available on VOD platforms, we've been provided with exclusive artwork, along with behind-the-scenes photos from the old school-styled, practical effects-laden creature feature.

"I've been drawing and painting creatures all my life. Putting them down on paper is the easy part for me, but bringing them into our plane of existence takes a specialized kind of wizardry that took me a while to figure out," said co-writer/director/star James Sizemore

"We decided early on that we were going to go with the more is more approach to shooting the monsters," said producer Tim Reis. "James put an astounding amount of detail into the molds and we really wanted to make sure that it translated to the screen. We had a very minimal lighting setup-- a 5 head Arri kit and a bare bones set of expendables, but our Lighting Designer Mike Bremer really made it sing and was able to bring these great contrasty color shifts and moody backlighting scenarios to the creature scenes."

"The process of making the demon masks was especially tricky," explained Sizemore. "I wanted to go all the way, so I bought a 4-part Neill Gorton dvd set on how to make silicone character prosthetics and studied the hell out of them."

"For that first year and during the week days, I would work in my studio creating masks and makeup gags," Sizemore said. "On the weekends, Tim would bring a crew down and we would shoot a scene or two. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. None of us had ever made a feature-length movie before, so it was a learning experience for all of us."

"In fact, nearly all of our principal shooting budget went toward the prosthetic creature and special effects creation," said Reis. "It was always the bread and butter of the movie."

"Sculpting and painting has always come naturally to me, so I just needed to teach myself the process of mold making, casting, and all the little technical details in between," said Sizemore.

"We originally wanted someone else to create all the special makeup effects for the picture, but we had a hard time finding artists willing to work for nothing," said Sizemore. "In order to make the movie happen, I had to take on that role."

"Once I became pretty familiar with the process, it dawned on me how much money and assistance we would need to actually pull off all the scripted creatures and effects," Sizemore said. "I told Tim what I needed, and he found the money to do it. I then hired a few people from out of state to come in and basically live on my farm, working with me in my studio every day for two or three months, regularly pulling 16 hour days. We made over 90 molds during that time. It was intense, to say the least."

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“Chaos descends upon a quiet town when Roscoe, the pupil of a wizard monk from an ancient race of demons, unknowingly opens a portal that allows an unspeakable evil to travel freely into our world. When three grisly beasts cross into our dimension, the living are possessed and the dead rise to destroy everything in their path. Armed with demons’ magic, Roscoe is the only fighting chance to put an end to their eternal path of destruction. An ode to the DIY creature-feature classics of the 1980’s, THE DEMON’S ROOK is a “gut-flinging monster mash” (Dread Central) that you won’t soon forget.”

Directed by James Sizemore and written by Sizemore and Akom Tidwell, The Demon’s Rook stars James Sizemore, Ashleigh Jo Sizemore, Josh Gould, Melanie Richardson, John Chatham, Sadé Smith, and Dustin Dorough. The Demon’s Rook is now available on VOD platforms.

  • Derek Anderson
    About the Author - Derek Anderson

    Raised on a steady diet of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books and Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Derek has been fascinated with fear since he first saw ForeverWare being used on an episode of Eerie, Indiana.

    When he’s not writing about horror as the Senior News Reporter for Daily Dead, Derek can be found daydreaming about the Santa Carla Boardwalk from The Lost Boys or reading Stephen King and Brian Keene novels.