This week I had the pleasure of interviewing the writing-directing team of the upcoming supernatural horror, The Djinn. Set in present-day, The Djinn follows a non-verbal boy trapped in his apartment with a sinister demon after making an innocent wish. Childhood friends David Charbonier and Justin Powell wrote the emotional tale after a previous film was postponed during last year’s COVID-19 pandemic.  

“We wanted to make our first feature that year, so we scraped together our resources. We had an apartment where the lease was expiring in a month and we had Erza Dewey [Dylan in the film]”, Powell says.

It was those motivations and time limitations that sparked The DJINN — and it would be budget limitations that contributed to a lengthy rewrite during shooting, resulting in the film’s biggest plot point.

Charbonier explains, “We didn’t have the budget necessary to achieve the concept art we had for the original demon. We had this amazing special effects make-up artist [Christopher Osorio] and we just couldn’t allocate enough money to his department to execute what we wanted. So, we came up with the idea that the Djinn would take different forms.”

It was a gamble that paid off. Much of the horror resonating through the screen during my viewing was rooted in the anxiety of not knowing what form the Djinn would take next. Grounding the horror in The Djinn is also a very emotional subplot about Dylan blaming himself for his relationship with his absent mother.

“It’s really important for us to try and be as grounded as possible. Horror is more impactful when it has an emotional core, so that was something really important for us to explore and we love the theme of grief. It was always our intention to have these pieces of Dylan’s back story”, says Powell.

It was also the original intention for Dylan to be non-verbal from the start. The team decided in order to save money, they would have as few lines as possible in the script.

“We wrote traditional dialogue and specifically that it would be in sign language”, says Charbonier.

David adds, “Ezra did not know how to sign when we started, but he's incredibly talented and so we had a conversation with his mom and he was up for it. We had someone on set who knew how to sign to give him a refresher if he needed it, but he learned everything on his own.”

When asked what advice they would give their younger writer selves, Powell offered this, to which Charbonier agreed: “You’re going to deal with a lot of rejection in this town. That’s just how it works. Even if you have a great product, there are so many factors that come into play. Just keep going and don’t stop.”

The Djinn releases in theatres and streaming platforms on May 14th, 2021.