Blackheart Procession began with an interest in guilt—specifically the kind of guilt that survives even when there may be nothing left to fix.

I was interested in the idea of a father who cannot distinguish between remembering his son and punishing himself with the memory of him. The horror in the film isn’t necessarily that something supernatural is happening. It is that Isaac’s grief has become powerful enough to reshape the way he experiences reality.

At the same time, I didn’t want to make a film entirely about despair. The relationship between Isaac, Elizabeth, and Henry is the center of the story. The small things—sharing dinner, straightening a photograph, brushing sand from a child’s clothes, reaching for someone’s hand—became more important to me than the larger horror imagery.

Visually and emotionally, the goal has been to create something intimate and restrained: a family drama that gradually begins to behave like a nightmare without ever completely abandoning the humanity underneath it.