Interview With E.L. Katz, Director Of ‘Azrael’

If you’re familiar with filmmaker E.L. Katz’s phenomenal film Cheap Thrills, then you know his latest directorial project, the Samara Weaving-led, Simon Barrett-penned Azrael is vastly different. Told entirely without dialogue and relying on body language and visuals, Azrael – the Islamic angel of death – is a gore and blood-soaked violent horror film with religious undertones and a fearlessly strong female lead.

In a world where no one speaks, a devout female-led community hunts down a young woman who has escaped imprisonment. Recaptured, Azrael is due to be sacrificed to an ancient evil in the wilderness but fights for her own survival.

To celebrate the release of the film, I chatted with E.L. about how he got involved and making a film with no talking, horror movies, and more!

PopHorror: I really enjoyed Azrael so I’m super excited to speak with you today. What intrigued you about the script and made you want to be a part of the project?

E.L. Katz: I am a masochist. No, I had never done anything in any way quite like it. There’s always something appealing in our genre to try something that feels a little adventurous. I had been a fan of his before, I’ve known Simon for 20 years, but when Dan, the producer Dan Kagan, brought up the idea of doing it, I’d been locked in my house for two and half years during the pandemic. There was a creative restlessness in me that felt like… Okay, after staying inside and just watching insane movies for two and a half years, whatever I do next, it really does need to feel like something crazy. It does need to feel like a big swing because I wanted an adventure. I wanted to get out of my town, I wanted to do something that felt very different, something that felt hard and experiential, and I wanted it to be this almost international… Like a film that could belong to any country in the same way I was watching all these films from all these different countries. That was my passport to get the hell out of my house. I wanted to participate in that if people watched it, it took them somewhere.

PopHorror: What better movie to want anybody in any country to be able to watch, than one with no dialogue, subtitles or people understanding the language? Everybody has body language.

E.L. Katz: One hundred percent. It’s funny, because everyone will be equally confused. But no, I think there was something really fun about doing that, where you could literally put this in any theater and not change a thing. Let it rip.

PopHorror: With this film having no dialogue, you really have to rely on facial expressions and body language of the actors, your sets and set designs, props, creature design, among a lot of other things. How did you convey your vision to your cast and crew?

E.L. Katz: We had a production designer, Carlos Laszlo, he’s really good. From the beginning, it was about constructing a production book, and the production book had all sorts of illustrations. We tried to build any sort of thing that we could. As soon as we cracked something, it was like, “Okay, this is what part of their village looks like. We’re going to put it down.” Really trying to create a consistent visual language to the movie. Our actors had a certain amount of rehearsal, and some of the rehearsal – a good amount of the rehearsal – was about stunts. And then some of the rehearsal was about stunts but along with how the characters are going to communicate to each other while this is going on. How do people prey? How do people alert each other? It was like long, long explorations into like, looking into how other cultures have done this before, how do we do it in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s offensive. You don’t want it to be an offensive movie where you’re like, “No, that’s like sign language, man. Don’t do that.” So it’s like you’re constantly trying to find a way to achieve all these things in a specific way with a limited amount of time. It’s not Lord of the Rings. We don’t have years to create this fake language. There has to be an efficiency to it and it’s just about every single day, are we ironing this out? Have we figured this out? Does this make sense? Recording it, listening to it, watching it. It’s an exhaustive process but it all comes together in the nick of time.

PopHorror: Was there anything that you were adamant about keeping in the film, no matter what?

E.L. Katz: I was lucky to have collaborators that didn’t disagree with me. But I felt like the ending needed to be dark because that’s the journey that she’s on, and I think the violence had to be hardcore. I definitely felt like part of the language of this movie was the gore and it needed to have a voice. There was no way we were going to back down from that. Simon, all of his writing is really violent. Dan Kagan is a producer that loves crazy stuff. C2, the financiers, they did Longlegs. We were all on the same page. Everybody set out to make this crazy movie together. It doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes people have different ideas on what they’re doing.

PopHorror: Gore is my love language.

E.L. Katz: Good!

PopHorror: I don’t want to get into any spoilers, but that first kill? You got my attention with that.

E.L. Katz: That’s one of my favorites! When an actor’s really good at dying, and he looks really unhappy. I love that shit. That’s the fucking joy. Our genre, I think that there’s room for the very restrained, quiet, slow burn stuff, but it’s like, you’ve got to know what movie you’re making. This movie, it’s called Azrael for God’s sake. It’s gotta rip so it’s like, the gore stuff needs to happen. I hate and love filming that stuff because it’s incredibly challenging. A lot of times it falls apart and you’re like, “Oh my god, we have to fix this with VFX or whatever.” But when it does come together, oh my god you do feel like you’ve captured lightning. Everybody feels it on set.

PopHorror: I bet when you see the final piece of it and you’re watching it, you can be like, “Okay, that came together really awesome! Despite everything that happened and it falling apart on me, that looks amazing!”

E.L. Katz: Oh, yeah. I would definitely hoot and holler in a way that people would be laughing. It feels like such a victory. If you grow up a horror fan, every time you get to actually shoot something that does work in that kind of way, it’s like ah! That teenager inside of me that still exists somewhere under these layers of age is like really, really pumped right now.

PopHorror: I love that so much! I have just one last question for you today. What is your favorite scary movie?

E.L. Katz: Oh, my god. It’s so challenging because for a long time, I felt like I had to reject saying that it was one of the classics because I felt like I was being too basic. My interests were all about, I know about this obscure thing. I know about this kind of thing. I’m cool, I’m hip, I’m edgy. I think at the end of the day, I do have to go back to The Shining. It’s The fricking Shining. And there’s no shame in that. Everybody loves The Shining but for good damn reason. It’s just that the atmosphere is unparalleled. It’s the most beautiful looking movie. It’s truly sinister. It’s what I love about Stephen King but with this amplification of it because of Kubrick being totally insane and not giving a shit about King, even though it’s still King, and this truly gonzo almost like Nicolas Cage-like Jack Nicholson performance. It’s my favorite. It’s the vibiest. Yeah, it’s The Shining.

PopHorror: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying one of the classics. I think really, when it comes to the classics, and I hear The Shining a lot, The Exorcist, The Thing, I like a lot of it is nostalgia too. You remember how it made you feel the first time you watched it, and you remember how it makes you feel every time you watch it. You probably remember the first time you saw it and who you were with, and how old you were. 

E.L. Katz: I do, I do. 

PopHorror: It’s the whole feeling it gives you.

E.L. Katz: It is. I have a guilty pleasure favorite that I’ll tell you. It’s guilty in a different way. It’s a different kind of shame. Hellraiser II is my favorite horror movie. I remember watching it, just as you said, as a kid and it was like watching The Neverending Story or something like that. Like the horror version of a fantasy adventure.

Thank you so much to E.L. for taking the time to speak with us. Azrael is currently in theaters.