Infirmary director Nicholas Pineda started thinking a few years ago, as he watched countless real-life horror stories play out on police body-cams, that he should make a body-cam found-footage horror story.
He enlisted the help of fellow USC film school graduate Katy Krauland, who wrote the script and produced it with Pineda. At one point they wanted to set it in an office building, since so many were sitting vacant during Covid lockdowns.
But then they found an incredibly creepy location: an abandoned hospital. The discovery changed the whole direction of the film that became Infirmary, which premiered Friday night to an extremely positive reception at Dances With Films New York.
Krauland and Pineda prefer not to disclose the location of the Los Angeles-area facility, because it is a target of frequent break-ins and they don’t want to add to its notoriety.
“It’s like a 200,000-square-foot hospital. It took us forever to convince them to let us shoot there. We didn’t even have to dress it much. So it was really horrifying experience,” Pineda said Friday at a post-screening Q&A.
The film uses surveillance camera footage for long establishing shots of decaying halls, littered with detritus and medical mannequins and sometimes lit only by flickering fluorescents.
But the most horrifying sequences are recorded via the body cams of the two leads, Paul Syre and Mark Anthony Williams, both of whom are excellent, as is Danielle Kennedy as a hospital administrator.
Syre plays Edward, a young man starting his first night shift at an abandoned infirmary with a mysterious past. Williams plays his fellow guard and supervisor, Lester, who gets sadistic thrills from scaring the new guy. Both actors wore actual body cams to capture footage.
“We should have had like a DP credit,” Syre joked.
Shooting Infirmary in a Real Abandoned Hospital
Williams noted that though he’s been acting for 30 years, he’d never done a horror film before. His representatives sent him the script, he auditioned, and he and Syre gelled in a chemistry read.
“And then when we got to the location, we were like, holy s—,” Williams recalled at the Q&A. “They had medical records of people from like, 50 years ago, still in the building. It was really very creepy.”
The real abandoned hospital, like the one in the film, requires round-the-clock security because of people sneaking in at night. The filmmakers asked the real guards for their worst stories and incorporated them into the film.
The filmmakers self-financed Infirmary on a very tight budget, the majority of which went toward paying to use the hospital, Pineda said.
He said at the premiere that the film has gotten strong early interest from distributors. They would be wise not to rush it to streaming, because it benefits from being seen in a dark theater with an audience and no interruptions. Infirmary quickly becomes mesmerizing.
Cinematographer Donald Nam does an impressive job of keeping things compelling using only the found footage, luxuriating in the darkness and griminess of the location without sacrificing clarity.
The one place where the filmmakers allowed the film to stray from verisimilitude is in its sound. The hum and churn of lights, air conditioning and other mysterious building sounds eventually give way to an onslaught of noise.
“Sound design was very challenging, because that was kind of the one rule we broke in terms of the authenticity of the film,” Pineda explained. “We really wanted the sound design to be diegetic, derived from sound design elements that you would actually get from the scene. So we kind of cheated there and actually hired a composer to put together kind of a score, but it was a very atmospheric and almost diegetic in a way.”
Krauland and Pineda also have ideas for a sequel.
“There are a lot of layers to the movie,” Krauland hinted Friday.
You can read more of our Dances With Films New York coverage here.
Main image: Infirmary. Courtesy of Dances With Films New York.
