THE INFINITE HALLWAY
Lorraine faces her ultimate foe in this film - The Occultist. I wanted this to play partly as a serial killer story, but with a unique psychic twist. The big question is - what does it look like when Lorraine goes up against the Occultist?
I played with the idea based on the 1978 movie “The Eyes of Laura Mars” which has Faye Dunaway seeing through the eyes of a killer. We start to see flashes of this in the opening exorcism and then this connection develops throughout the movie. I wanted to pay it off with a one-of-a-kind sequence in the finale of the film.
I loved the idea that The Occultist as a “broadcaster” and Lorraine as a “receiver.” So when the two came into close proximity you’d have a “psychic feedback loop” - sort of like you do when you point a camera at a TV. I even had this visual idea planted in the exorcism.
This is a sequence that I really loved but, if you’ve seen the film, I ultimately chose to cut.
This was a lesson that sometimes an idea can look great on paper, and then also look good in reality, but sometimes it just doesn’t fit into the larger whole of the movie.