Deep Dives

Behind the scenes

1. Kreed Kafer: the medium and the made-up ghostControversy

   In the series 6 opener at Bodmin Gaol (2005), Derek Acorah appeared to be possessed by an aggressive South African jailer named Kreed Kafer. The name was an invention by the show's resident sceptic and parapsychologist Ciarán O'Keeffe, an anagram of "Derek Faker". O'Keeffe had also had Acorah fed a fake ghost called Rik Eedles ("Derek Lies"), who Acorah then channelled as well. The exposure ended Acorah's time on the show after six series. Fielding later said they had told people everything was real, and then it turned out he was a fake, so he had to go.

2. Ofcom: it's entertainment, not an investigationControversy

   After viewers complained that Most Haunted and Most Haunted Live contrived paranormal events and deceived viewers, Ofcom cleared Living TV in December 2005. It cited 11 complaints. It ruled that the show should be seen as entertainment, using techniques where the audience is not necessarily in full possession of the facts. Reports also said a newspaper article raised questions about unedited footage that appeared to show crew faking bumps and knocks, which Fielding denied.

3. The rope on the stairsControversy

   During the Most Haunted Live! Halloween special on 31 October 2015, Karl Beattie appeared to be dragged up a staircase by an invisible force. Viewers and sceptics noticed what looked like a rope or cable around his waist, and a knife that vanished and reappeared was also called staged. Beattie and Fielding said the cable was just a camera lead, and Beattie later made a YouTube video answering sceptics.

• Acorah joined the programme in July 2001 when it was still called Haunting Truths. It was sold to Living and renamed Most Haunted.

• Series 1 episodes were only 30 minutes long (later series were 45 minutes), and the first series was later re-edited to a full hour as 'Most Haunted Unseen'.

• Series 1 ended with Michelham Priory, which was the first episode actually produced, even though it aired last.

• The first Most Haunted Live! aired from Dudley Castle on Halloween 2002, in front of a 500-strong live audience in the castle grounds. It ran for one night. Later events stretched to as many as eight nights.

• The Halloween Most Haunted Live special that aired in the same week ITV3 launched drew about 704,000 viewers over three hours, according to Broadcast. That beat everything else on multichannel TV that night.

• Series 1–3 relied heavily on Steadicam for gliding shots, and series 8 added a camera crane (jib) for aerial shots. The show was shot on Sony DVCAM and miniDV cameras, plus a thermal imaging camera to pick out hot and cold spots. Its look became less grungy and more mainstream after series five.

• Series 6 was originally planned at 18 episodes, with the last eleven forming series 7. Acorah's departure meant the series was extended. His fellow medium David Wells fronted the finale at Sinai House.

• Cameraman and rigger Stuart Torevell, one of the regular on-screen crew, is presenter Yvette Fielding's cousin. Fielding's husband Karl Beattie produces and directs.

• Sky Living axed the show in August 2011 and handed the rights back to Fielding and Beattie. It returned on Really in 2014 after four years off-air, and ran there until 2019.

• Drama:Ofcom once ruled that a pre-watershed (6pm) repeat on Pick TV could have unsettled children. The episode was the Chatham Dockyard investigation, in which Acorah appeared to be 'possessed' by a soldier and later by a 9-year-old boy.

Behind the scenes

1. Years of 'no' from broadcastersProduction

   Brotherhood pitched the idea to Mitchell around 2019, before COVID. Mitchell had told Big Talk's Kenton Allen he wanted a classic detective role, and Allen put the word out. The project then went through a long development of synopses and scripts. Mitchell says most broadcasters turned it down, in some cases more than once, before the BBC commissioned it. It went on to become the BBC's biggest scripted show of 2024.

• The theme tune is based on the third movement (Allegretto) of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 17, the 'Tempest'.

• The score by Finn Keane and Nathan Klein is built on melodic fragments of Beethoven, including the 'Tempest' and 'Moonlight' sonatas, the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 9th symphonies, and Für Elise. That gives classical fans their own hidden puzzle to solve.

• The Guardian's crossword editor, Alan Connor, helped design the crosswords used in the opening titles.

• The soundtrack was issued on transparent red vinyl for Record Store Day 2025 (Silva Screen). Each copy was numbered and came with a crossword puzzle insert.

• Mitchell read history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and met his comedy partner Robert Webb there through the Footlights. Cambridge was therefore a personal setting for him, and he said filming there had an 'unbearable poignancy'.

• Mitchell says he fell for the genre at age 10, watching the Joan Hickson Miss Marple adaptations with his parents. He has said he long wanted to star in an Inspector Morse-style detective show.

• Writer Mark Brotherhood has credits on Father Brown, Cold Feet, Shameless, Mount Pleasant and Death in Paradise. He worked in a call centre before becoming a screenwriter.

• The show became the BBC's biggest new scripted show since 2022. Its second episode drew 9.5 million views, and the series passed 9.5 million viewers in its first month.

• Series 1 shot in January 2024 at Cambridge locations including St John's College, Queens' College with the Mathematical Bridge, Silver Street Bridge and the River Cam. The police station exteriors were at Stockley Park in London.

• Series 2 added Mark Bonnar, Sian Clifford, Ben Ashenden and Rumi Sutton to the cast. A third series has been commissioned, and a Christmas special featuring David Suchet has been announced.

Behind the scenes

1. Ten years in development hellProduction

   Goldman spent years trying to get his book made. Richard Lester, François Truffaut, Robert Redford and Norman Jewison were all attached to or interested in it at various points, but studio troubles and funding problems stopped each attempt. Part of the problem was that nobody could pin down the film's genre. Goldman bought back the rights when they went to auction, and the film finally happened under Rob Reiner, with 20th Century Fox distributing.

2. Cary Elwes and André's ATVAccident

   About six weeks into the shoot, André the Giant nagged Elwes to try his all-terrain vehicle and teased him that he wasn't "worthy" of it. Elwes had never ridden one. He caught his left big toe between the gear pedal and a rock and broke it. He kept working, went to hospital only after the day's shooting, and says you can see him hopping to keep weight off the toe as Westley and Buttercup run into the Fire Swamp. Reiner told him he couldn't be fired because he was the only guy who could play Westley.

3. Knocked out for realAccident

   According to Elwes, the props team had forgotten the foam swords, so the scene where Count Rugen knocks Westley out was shot with a real steel sword. Christopher Guest kept being too careful, so Elwes suggested he hit him properly. Elwes was knocked out and woke in the emergency room with stitches in his skull. Reiner used that take because it looked so real, so the fall in the film is a real blackout. Elwes tells the story in his 2014 book As You Wish.

4. Billy Crystal broke up the setLegend

   Billy Crystal's improvised 13th-century jokes as Miracle Max were so funny that the cast and crew struggled to keep filming. Reiner reportedly had to leave the set to avoid ruining takes with his laughter. Mandy Patinkin says his only on-set injury was a bruised rib from holding in his laughter during three days of shooting.

5. André the Giant's back and the casting of FezzikCasting

   Goldman first wanted André as Fezzik in the 1970s, but he couldn't commit. Arnold Schwarzenegger was then considered, but by the time the film was made he was too big a star to afford. André was available for the shoot, but he'd had back surgery shortly before and was in a lot of pain. Robin Wright was suspended on wires in the final scene so he didn't have to carry her weight. Patinkin, Reiner and Crystal have said André drank to numb the pain.

• The only Oscar nomination was for Best Original Song, for "Storybook Love". Willy DeVille wrote and performed it, and Mark Knopfler, who also scored the film, arranged and produced it.

• Rob Reiner sent the script to Dire Straits' Mark Knopfler, whom he admired but didn't know, hoping he'd agree to score it. Reiner said on the DVD commentary that only Knopfler could capture the film's quirky-yet-romantic tone.

• Wallace Shawn was afraid of heights. A double was on hand for the Cliffs of Insanity climb, but at the last minute Shawn decided to do it himself. The climb was faked on rubber cliffs, with the actors on bicycle seats and André the Giant standing on a forklift behind a slit in the set.

• The exterior top-of-the-cliffs duel was not shot at the real Cliffs of Moher. It was filmed on a set, and the real cliffs stand in for the Cliffs of Insanity. Most of the rest was shot in England, including Haddon Hall in Derbyshire as Florin's castle, plus sets at Shepperton Studios. Principal photography ran from August 18, 1986 to December 1986.

• Miracle Max and his wife Valerie are named after William Goldman's parents. This detail comes from the original book.

• On the DVD commentary, Rob Reiner says he supplied the growls of the Rodents of Unusual Size (R.O.U.S.) himself.

• Many actresses were reportedly up for Buttercup, including Uma Thurman, Meg Ryan, Courteney Cox and Whoopi Goldberg. Robin Wright's agent pushed her to audition. She was shy at the first meeting, but Goldman said she was exactly what he'd written. She also had to bargain with the producers of her soap, Santa Barbara, to get time off.

• Cary Elwes's audition for Westley reportedly lasted only about a minute. The production saw several other actors before offering him the part.

• Most of the people involved thought John Alvin's original poster, a grandfather reading to his grandson with a distant castle, failed to sell the film's mix of swashbuckling, romance and satire.

• The film was added to the US National Film Registry in 2016. Criterion released it on Blu-ray, DVD and 4K in 2018.

Behind the scenes

• The series was preceded by an independent documentary-style film with the same title. It was shot in 2004, produced by 4Reel Productions in 2006, and premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel on July 25, 2007.

• That original film centred on the trio's investigation of Virginia City, Nevada, and the Goldfield Hotel in Goldfield, Nevada. The crew went back to the Goldfield Hotel in the series' fourth, fifth and seventh seasons, and again for a discovery+ special.

• The series premiered on October 17, 2008. It ran on the Travel Channel for about 12 seasons before moving to discovery+ in early 2021.

• Nick Groff was part of the original trio and appears in seasons 1–10. Aaron Goodwin stayed with the show, and Billy Tolley and Jay Wasley later joined the on-screen crew. Groff went on to front his own series, Paranormal Lockdown.

• As of June 2024, 278 episodes had aired, 53 of them specials. Since the episode 'House of Brujeria', episodes have premiered exclusively on discovery+.

• The show's credits list Bagans as a creator, executive producer, writer, producer and editor, and as one of its camera operators. That makes him a hands-on filmmaker as well as its on-screen host.

• According to the museum's own site, the first-ever episode of the series was set at Bobby Mackey's Music World, a haunted honky-tonk in Wilder, Kentucky.

• The show spawned several Travel Channel spinoffs with Bagans, including Ghost Adventures: Aftershocks (2014–2016, 3 seasons) and Deadly Possessions (2016, 6 episodes).

• Bagans opened Zak Bagans' The Haunted Museum in Las Vegas to show off his haunted-object collection. It includes the staircase from the Indiana 'Demon House', which he made a 2018 documentary about, and the house was later demolished.

• Drama:Ghost Adventures and ghost-hunting shows in general have been accused of fakery by critics and skeptics. Bagans has also been the target of skeptical criticism of his Haunted Museum.

Behind the scenes

1. The $1 iPhone app that finished the filmProduction

   Bendjelloul shot the stylised footage on Super 8 film, but the film stock was so expensive that he ran out of money with a few needed shots still to go. He tried an iPhone app called 8mm Vintage Camera, which cost about a dollar or two, and found it looked basically the same as the real thing. He also used it to re-film some already-shot footage off a computer screen. It became a much-repeated detail of the film's Oscar win.

2. The star who slept through his OscarLegend

   Bendjelloul begged Rodriguez to come to the Oscars, but Rodriguez refused. He felt attending would take attention away from the filmmakers, and he said he was tired after returning from South Africa. He was asleep in Detroit when the film won, and Bendjelloul thanked him from the stage.

3. Did the film exaggerate the mystery?Controversy

   After the film's success, some critics said it left out that Rodriguez's career hadn't vanished as the film implies. He was also known in Australia and had toured there. They said the film also overstated his role in South African anti-apartheid politics, and that the mystery was played up for a more emotional story. Reviewers still said the core of his story is remarkable.

• Director Malik Bendjelloul said the shoot was about one month of filming at the start, followed by roughly a thousand days of editing. He structured the film like Citizen Kane: people piece together what happened to a man, then his history, then a present-day answer.

• Bendjelloul traced illustrations onto oven paper as mock-ups for 3D animations he could never afford. The oven-paper drawings ended up in the final cut.

• Bendjelloul first heard of Rodriguez while travelling through Africa. He originally planned only a short film for Swedish television, and it grew into a feature. He reportedly spent four years and all his own money on it.

• Rodriguez was reportedly reluctant to take part at first. When the film won the Oscar, he was asleep at home in Detroit, and his daughter Sandra phoned to tell him. He has said he doesn't have TV service anyway.

• Rodriguez had a following in Australia before South Africa. A few copies of Cold Fact reached Sydney, where DJ Holger Brockman played 'Sugar Man' on 2SM radio. Copies sold for upwards of $300 before the album was released locally.

• The film opened the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. It got a long standing ovation after Rodriguez was introduced at the end, and Sony Pictures Classics bought it at the festival.

• On Oscar night, producer Simon Chinn explained Rodriguez's absence by saying he didn't want to take credit for the film. In his brief speech, Bendjelloul thanked Rodriguez as 'one of the greatest singers ever'.

• The film's soundtrack album, made up of songs from Cold Fact and Coming From Reality plus a couple of outtakes, charted worldwide.

• One estimate is that Rodriguez sold around 500,000 records in South Africa. Some of his songs were reportedly banned by the apartheid government.

• Searching for Sugar Man was Bendjelloul's only feature. He was found dead in Stockholm in May 2014, aged 36. His brother said he took his own life after struggling with depression.

Behind the scenes

• Beck and Woods wrote the script while they were also writing A Quiet Place, and per IMDb trivia they didn't expect either film to get made.

• The haunted house was originally going to be built in Atlanta. The production ended up in the Cincinnati region instead, which Beck says is supposedly the home of the haunted house. Wikipedia says principal photography began in October 2017 in Covington, Kentucky, and wrapped in November 2017.

• According to IMDb trivia, the haunted attraction's interiors were all sets built inside a dairy factory.

• Production designer Austin Gorg built haunted houses as a teenager, which Beck says the directors didn't know when they hired him. He loved drawing overhead schematics of how the maze fit together.

• Each set was designed so the rooms could physically connect into one working haunted house, even though the stunts were shot in separate pieces. The Collector's Edition Blu-ray includes a map of the layout, as the directors described to ComingSoon.

• Eli Roth's gory films often take over half an hour to reach any gore, according to Beck and Woods. Early cuts of Haunt reportedly ran more than 40 minutes before the first kill, because they wanted the audience to get to know protagonist Harper first.

• Roth pushed the directors to work out backstories for the killers even though the film doesn't show them. Beck and Woods said they wanted the audience to sense that the filmmakers knew them.

• The directors have cited Tobe Hooper's The Funhouse and John Carpenter as inspirations. They aimed for an 80s-style grindhouse slasher, in contrast with the quiet family drama of A Quiet Place.

• Damian Maffei, who plays the Devil, also voiced Harper's dad in the flashback scene. According to IMDb trivia, the crew dressed up in costumes on one of the shoot days, which fell on Halloween.

• A phone lock screen in the film shows the I-74 Bridge linking Bettendorf, Iowa, and Moline, Illinois. This is the directors' home area, the Quad Cities.

Behind the scenes

1. Spielberg's new endingProduction

   After the film reached DreamWorks executives, Steven Spielberg reportedly found Peli's original ending underwhelming. In that ending, police arrive and Katie, knife in hand, is shot. Paramount gave Peli a small sum (reported as about $4,000) to shoot a replacement. It is the one audiences know, with Katie lunging at the camera and a smile after killing Micah off-screen. Peli said on a 2017 podcast that he wishes he'd kept his original ending. Other accounts say several alternates were shot, and one online summary claims the new ending cost $200,000.

2. Spielberg's 'haunted' DVDLegend

   The legend goes that Spielberg took a DVD of the film home and his bedroom door locked itself from the inside. He then reportedly carried the disc to work in a trash bag because he thought it was haunted. Peli said he believes the story and that marketing didn't invent it. Spielberg still liked the film.

3. Nearly remade, until the walkoutsProduction

   DreamWorks first planned to remake the film with a bigger budget and Peli directing, with the original included only as a DVD extra. Executive Adam Goodman then screened it for an audience. People walked out, and he first thought it was bombing, but they were leaving because they were too scared. He decided a remake was unwise, and Paramount released the original, mostly as it was.

4. From Screamfest to a CAA dealProduction

   At the 2007 Screamfest, the film impressed a CAA assistant, Kirill Baru, and CAA signed Peli. The agency sent DVDs around town, and Jason Blum saw it and thought it had potential. The DVD then reached DreamWorks executives including Spielberg.

• Oren Peli came from software and video game design and had no film background. He bought his own equipment, and Paranormal Activity was the first thing he did in film.

• Peli spent about a year preparing his San Diego house (Rancho Peñasquitos) as the set. He ripped up carpet, installed hardwood floors, painted and added new banisters. That cost him money up front but meant no location fees and unlimited access.

• The casting call said no script would be provided at any stage and that all dialogue would be ad-libbed. Auditions were improvised interviews in which the actors invented backstory on the spot, and some of it reportedly ended up in the final film. Peli later posted the audition tapes on YouTube.

• The audition breakdown described the film as 'not a cheesy teen slasher movie (although some bad stuff may happen)'.

• Peli has said he told Micah Sloat to close the camera's viewfinder and simply point it roughly at Katie, so the footage would look less polished and more like an amateur's.

• Featherston and Sloat played versions of themselves under their real first names. Featherston had just graduated from SMU and Sloat was attending music school when they moved to L.A. and landed the roles. They were reportedly paid about $500 each. The two had been dating for three years, which they said made the improvised chemistry feel natural.

• The film premiered at the Screamfest Horror Film Festival on October 14, 2007. It then played Slamdance in January 2008 and Telluride in September 2009 before its limited US release on September 25, 2009. Jason Blum reportedly submitted a re-edited cut to Sundance, and it was rejected.

• Paramount/DreamWorks reportedly acquired the US rights for $350,000. Shooting time is quoted differently by different sources: seven days at Peli's house in several accounts, and 10 days on IMDb. It was reportedly filmed out of order.

• The theatrical release was built on a 'Demand It' web campaign, where fans requested screenings in their city. It began with midnight-only shows in 13 college towns, and the requests eventually passed one million before a nationwide release on October 16, 2009. Paramount also put footage of audiences reacting in green-tinted night vision into its trailers and TV spots.

• The film displaced The Blair Witch Project (about $22,000 budget, about $240 million gross) as one of the highest return-on-investment films ever. The figures are hard to verify and likely exclude marketing costs.

Behind the scenes

1. Cancelled on a cliffhangerControversy

   Netflix cancelled The OA in 2019 after two seasons, with the second ending on a cliffhanger. Marling and Batmanglij had planned five seasons. Netflix cited no specific reason. An unnamed person told TheWrap that the platform weighs viewing against cost. Fans trended #SaveTheOA, performed the movements outside Netflix's offices, and one woman went on hunger strike there. A GoFundMe raised about $5,500 for a Times Square billboard. The show was not revived.

2. The drowning scenes were realAccident

   Batmanglij says the scenes where Hap drowns his captives used a real apparatus the crew built, not digital effects. The actors actually held their breath. It was hard on the whole crew, and Batmanglij says Marling lasted the longest.

3. Jason Isaacs parachuted in mid-shootCasting

   Isaacs says he got a call in the middle of the night, after shooting had already started, asking him to read eight scripts. His agent told him he would Skype the director and, if he liked it, had to get on a plane.

4. Faking Cuba was more expensive than going to CubaProduction

   Cuba was always in the script. Production designer Alex DiGerlando says the team looked at faking it in America. They concluded it would be cheaper and more convincing to shoot in Havana with a stripped-down crew. Cuban art department staff worked with very few resources.

• Marling and Batmanglij spent about a year developing the show. Once they were happy with the first episode's script, they pitched it to five different networks over two days. Netflix was the best fit.

• About a month after Netflix greenlit The OA, it also approved a show by Batmanglij's friends Matt and Ross Duffer, who had worked with him on Wayward Pines. That show was Stranger Things. The three sometimes met for dinner to commiserate about making what Batmanglij called an eight-hour movie.

• Netflix released the first trailer only four days before the December 2016 premiere. The show had been announced about a year and a half earlier and produced quietly.

• The cast reportedly spent about five months of shooting training on the movements. Choreographer Ryan Heffington devised them, and Wes Veldink helped train the actors in New York. Heffington also created the symbolic pictograms used to notate the choreography, similar to musical notation.

• Episode six ("Forking Paths"), which follows Hap, is shorter than the others by design. Marling says it was written short and had no deleted scenes.

• The braille on the wall of the FBI office in season one reads "Rachel". That is the name of the one captive who has no near-death experience. Marling later said season two would unravel it.

• In the season two octopus scene, real dancers played the creature's limbs against Marling's body. A digital octopus from Method Studio was added in post-production.

• Jason Isaacs says the creators cast him partly because they had seen him play an incredibly nice, innocent character in the Sundance film Nine Lives. None of his earlier villain roles was the reason.

• Isaacs says a season two scene was cut in which Hap tried to learn a British accent by looping BBC radio. It would have explained Isaacs's accent in the alternate dimension.

• The near-death-experience research behind the show drew on Raymond Moody's book Life After Life and Sam Parnia's research. Marling and Batmanglij also researched Midwestern high schools for the teen characters.

Behind the scenes

1. The film A24 passed onProduction

   After releasing I Saw the TV Glow, A24 reportedly passed on Camp Miasma. In a Vulture profile, Schoenbrun said they even considered making a much smaller independent version before Mubi stepped in to finance it. The budget ended up at about $10 million, the same as TV Glow. Schoenbrun said they sometimes feel like the only trans person in America getting money from film financiers.

2. The sex scenes Schoenbrun hadn't plannedProduction

   Schoenbrun usually shot-lists their films exhaustively. For Camp Miasma they told The Hollywood Reporter they had no real plan for the sex scenes. They realized during production that they had been avoiding, or even dissociating from, directing them. They said that directing those scenes felt as scary as directing for the first time. That fits the film's own theme of learning to stop dissociating.

• Schoenbrun reportedly started writing it after running a Twitter (now X) poll that offered three ideas for their next project, according to IMDb's trivia section.

• The title had been rattling around in Schoenbrun's head for years before the film existed, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

• The film was shot in summer 2025 on Vancouver Island, mainly at two working summer camps. One was dressed as the modern-day camp and the other as the 1980s camp from the fictional original movies. It was also shot on film rather than digital.

• Special effects supervisor Kyle Moore handled both the blood and the snow. Schoenbrun called him the "snow guru of British Columbia". He helped the crew shoot summer-for-winter.

• The production designers had to make all the in-film franchise merchandise from scratch, including bobbleheads and VHS sleeves. They also had to invent decades of artwork by Billy, the franchise's traumatized survivor, who keeps repeating a concentric-square motif.

• Little Death's mask was written in the script as having an air-vent-like quality. The art department designed it with a specialist effects house, and its maze-like square pattern echoes through the cabin's artwork.

• The film's music choices are deliberately anachronistic. The fictional original film's climactic bloodbath plays out to Counting Crows' "A Long December", and an anti-melodic synth cover of R.E.M.'s "Nightswimming" plays over the opening. Alex G composed the score.

• Zach Cherry (Severance), who is 38, plays one of the franchise's supposedly teenage victims. The film sends up the way slashers cast grown adults as teens.

• Its own success was modest at first. It opened on five US screens on August 7, 2026 and made $249,606 that weekend, then expanded to 54 theaters and about $907,000 in its second weekend. It went wide on August 21.

• I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun's previous film, reportedly grossed only about $5 million worldwide against a $10 million budget. Camp Miasma got the same $10 million despite having a bigger cast and scope.

Behind the scenes

1. Ten years waiting to adapt the novelProduction

   Kon wanted to adapt Tsutsui's novel soon after Perfect Blue. Plans stalled when Rex Entertainment, Perfect Blue's distributor, went bankrupt. He has said he spent about ten years seeking financial backing without success. Development finally began at Madhouse while Paranoia Agent was still in production, and Kon has said he met Tsutsui at a magazine-organised discussion where the author himself suggested Kon do the adaptation.

2. Did Inception borrow from Paprika?Controversy

   When Inception came out in July 2010, a month before Kon died, viewers noticed shared ideas: technology for entering dreams, a hotel corridor that warps physics with zero gravity, and an elevator used to explore traumatic memory. Nolan has reportedly said his inspiration came from elsewhere. Some outlets say he cited Kon's film for Ariadne, but that is unconfirmed. Coverage generally says Nolan has never officially confirmed a link, and commentators disagree over whether it was copying, homage or coincidence.

• Kon and the novel's author, Yasutaka Tsutsui, voice the tall and short bartenders in the virtual bar where Paprika meets Konakawa. According to fan-wiki accounts, even the other voice actors didn't know until they saw the names in the premiere programme.

• The movie theatre in the final scene shows films by Kon himself. Apart from the fictional Dreaming Kids, they are Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers.

• Kon said the budget was about the same as Tokyo Godfathers's. He said the film looked much better because of improved ways of blending 2D and 3D animation. The budget is given as ¥300 million (about US$2.6 million).

• The film premiered in competition at the 63rd Venice Film Festival on 2 September 2006, where it reportedly got a five-minute standing ovation.

• Kon's adaptation drops many of the novel's technical details in favour of a more visual approach. Tsutsui approved of the film and admitted it is 'simpler' than his book. A Strange Horizons review notes that the novel takes 117 pages, about a third of its length, to reach the point the film reaches in its first ten minutes.

• In the novel, Chiba and Paprika are not split into separate selves. Kon changed this, and also made Konakawa's old friend a different character. The changes fit the doubled-self themes of Kon's earlier work.

• In a dream sequence, Paprika escapes into a room of paintings on the Oedipus and the Sphinx theme, and enters a Gustave Moreau work whose original hangs in the Met in New York (an IMDb user-submitted trivia item).

• When Paprika rides a cloud in a warrior outfit with a crown and staff, it is seen as an homage to Journey to the West's Sun Wukong (the Monkey King).

• Its opening in Japan was in only three theatres. It stayed in cinemas for eight weeks, growing by word of mouth, and was pitched to fans of experimental cinema more than to anime fans.

• In the US it was a small arthouse release. IMDb lists about $882,000 in US and Canada box office, from an opening weekend of about $35,600. Sources differ on the worldwide total: Wikipedia gives about $2.5 million, while IMDb lists about $1.2 million.

Behind the scenes

1. Shooting in the actual room where Saw was filmedProduction

   For a season 2 episode in which the killer and a fellow captive must solve a set of puzzles, Brice was scouting locations and found the room where Saw was shot. Duplass confirms they filmed in that very room. Brice says it looks quite different from the movie but still feels like being in the film.

2. David Dastmalchian gets cast at a screeningCasting

   Duplass and Brice were showing season 1 at Vidiots in Los Angeles. They had never met David Dastmalchian, who sat next to Brice and told him during an oddball moment on screen that the pair were very weird and that he loved them. They asked him on the spot to do an episode the next season, and Duplass built the season 2 opener around him, shot at a wooded cabin.

• Duplass has said the aim was originally a third Creep feature. The ideas they had felt hard to sustain for 90 minutes, until he pictured the closet of tapes from the first film and phoned Brice with 'what about the tapes?'

• Duplass has described the shoot as improvised, like a jazz standard: they write, rehearse, trim and pace the episodes as they go. That is why they hire filmmakers with a good sense of pacing and performance, such as Desiree Akhavan on Creep 2 and Josh Ruben on this series.

• Josh Ruben, a filmmaker himself, plays the filmmaker Brad in season 1's fourth episode.

• Duplass says the crew often wrote inspiration from the night's cable TV into the next episode, with movies like Forrest Gump or Dumb and Dumber on the TV. The season 1 finale has the killer rhapsodizing about Forrest Gump as he drives.

• Duplass announced the show on June 4, 2024 with a TikTok teaser of himself in the Peachfuzz wolf mask. It came over six years after Creep 2, and fans had assumed the news was Creep 3.

• Patrick Brice, who directs every episode, also shoots them as cinematographer. He co-wrote the first two Creep films and played the doomed videographer Aaron in the original. The series' opening credits pay tribute to Aaron.

• Brice has said he keeps pitching the return of his character Aaron's ghost as a hallucination, about 3 or 4 times so far. Duplass says he regrets killing Aaron off, but that the 'doomed bromance' is what makes it live so large.

• Duplass met Brice when Brice's wife was nanny to Duplass's kids. That friendship, plus a Craigslist experience of Duplass's, led to the first Creep film.

• Season 1 has six episodes of about 21–27 minutes each and premiered on Shudder and AMC+ on November 15, 2024, with a two-episode premiere. Renewals for seasons 2 and 3 followed.

• Season 2 changes the formula in its first two episodes. Peachfuzz is no longer simply the one inviting a camera operator over under false pretences. Season 2 also includes a Christmas Eve therapy-session episode.

Behind the scenes

1. Ellen Page out, Alison Lohman inCasting

   Ellen Page was originally cast as Christine Brown. She left the project days before the shoot, citing scheduling conflicts after the start date slipped from March 17. Alison Lohman stepped in as an 11th-hour replacement, and filming began March 31, 2008, only about two weeks later than planned.

2. The car fight was a real fightLegend

   Raimi wasn't into fake acting, so Alison Lohman and Lorna Raver were encouraged to really fight in the car attack scene. They compared bruises afterward. The crew built a car that could come apart piece by piece so the chaos could escalate safely.

3. Hives, spa mud and the graveyard graveProduction

   The graveyard scene was saved for the end of the shoot. Early mud mixtures made Lohman break out in hives, so the team sourced mud from a spa in Calistoga, California. They built a steel trapezoid around the coffin so mud could pour in safely. Rain rigs completed the look, and the sequence took roughly two weeks to shoot.

• The Raimis wrote the script in the early 1990s, after Army of Darkness, but Sam went on to other projects before coming back to it. The film went into production under the title The Curse.

• Elements of the story are drawn from the 1957 British horror film Night of the Demon. Both have similar-shaped demons, a three-day curse, and a cursed object that has to be passed on to someone else.

• When Mrs. Ganush attacks Christine in the car, she curses in Hungarian. The phrase translates roughly as "Shall the devil fly into you!"

• Dileep Rao, who plays the seer Rham Jas, won about $34,000 on Jeopardy! in 2002. He also came up with the titles of the books his character has supposedly written.

• Ted Raimi, Sam's brother, makes an off-screen cameo as a doctor. Their brother Ivan, the co-writer, is a practicing doctor of osteopathic medicine. Sam Raimi himself appears as a spirit in the exorcism scene.

• Composer Christopher Young can be glimpsed eating a cupcake outside the bakery Christine looks into on her way to work at the start of the film.

• Mrs. Ganush's car has the licence plate 99951. Turned upside down, it reads "IS666". This is a fan-submitted observation from a movie-mistakes site.

• The nosebleed scene was originally even more extreme, with blood spraying nearly 20 feet across the office. Greg Nicotero got the rig working exactly as Raimi wanted, and then Raimi decided it was too much and scaled it back.

• Raimi partnered with his own Ghost House Pictures to make the film independently, without major-studio constraints. Universal distributed it in North America and some other territories, and Mandate International handled the rest of the world.

• Alison Lohman reportedly did almost all of her own stunts.