Gabriel Black on ‘It Hunts’ and Building a Supernatural Nightmare After Dark

The writer and director of the neon soaked supernatural thriller sat down with us for an honest, funny hour about poor Casey, a color palette borrowed from police lights, and why he wants you arguing about the twist the next morning.

I opened this interview by telling Gabriel Black I spent most of his movie saying “poor Casey” out loud. “That’s one hell of an intro you just gave me,” he said. Fair. Then I made my case against him: Casey wants one normal night, one decent conversation about his relationship, and maybe eight uninterrupted hours of sleep, and It Hunts refuses to give him any of it. The film starts unstable and stays that way, with shifting colors, a restless camera, and flashes of imagery you understand and then very much don’t five minutes later. I told him I kept thinking I had it figured out.

He smiled and warned me he’d drop breadcrumbs but, “I can’t give away all my secrets.” The best never tell all, I said. They tell some. So here’s the recap of what he told, spoiler light, for a movie that’s streaming now on Prime Video, Google Play, and YouTube Movies.

Why Are You So Mean to Casey?

That was literally my first real question, and I asked it with the energy of a woman who had just gotten up from her couch to yell at a screener. (I had.) Gabe took it like a pro. No matter how many rewrites the script went through, he said, it was always about a man experiencing supernatural phenomena, and that leads somewhere very logical: if nobody else sees what you’re seeing, you start to wonder if something is wrong with you, so you go see a doctor. That’s why therapy and treatment are baked into Casey’s story, and why the movie never lets the poor man get comfortable. Turns out the meanness is structural.

I confessed I felt weirdly protective of Casey, because I relate more than I’d like to admit. Even when I think things are going fine, something as simple as fixing a computer turns into a whole situation. (That’s all I’ll say. It matters to the movie, and I promised no spoilers.)

Then I asked what I’d been chewing on since the credits: did he want us to love Casey, pity him, or just stay close enough to follow along? Gabe said pity was never the goal. “In order to pity somebody, you have to understand why they’re behaving the way they’re behaving,” he told me, and at the start of the film, we don’t. That’s the design. “The whole beginning of the film is all about raising questions,” he said, and every question is a brick in the suspense. Take the computers. Most of us gravitate toward whatever we’re naturally good at, because it comes easier. Casey has a natural gift for fixing computers and wants nothing to do with them. There’s a subconscious reason, and neither Casey nor the audience knows it yet. (I could feel something was off. I just didn’t know what, and apparently that was the point.)

I told him job well done, because I’ve been telling everybody about this movie. It kicks off spooky season perfectly, and it’s already on my Halloween list. (I said that to his face.)

Which brings us to Izzy Martinez, who plays Casey and happens to be one of Gabe’s good friends. I told Gabe that sounds like an exhausting role. Casey has to be tired, paranoid, angry, and confused, sometimes inside the same scene, and somehow it never turns into one long panic attack. The breaks in intensity are what keep him human. So what did Izzy understand that made the character click?

Gabe said he’d worked with Izzy before and knew he had great range. Izzy’s background is mostly theater, so Gabe trusted him with the big, intense moments, the “high notes,” without a second thought. The script is also packed with dialogue, which is nothing for someone who’s used to memorizing pages for the stage. Then Gabe started talking about how Izzy gets the lines out, and he blanked on the word. I jumped in with “the delivery of knowledge.” Delivery, I said. That’s what I’m here for. He laughed and said that’s exactly why he belongs behind the camera and not in front of it. (Izzy lives out here in LA, so consider this my public invitation to the show.)

Casey the Night Crawler

Casey works nights, and that whole part of the movie comes from a place Gabe actually knows. He used to work overnight himself, so he understands that very specific kind of loneliness that hits around 3 a.m., when everybody else is asleep and you start feeling like you’ve somehow been kicked off the planet. He described it perfectly: “you feel like you might as well be on the moon.”

And honestly, that explains Casey before the supernatural stuff even kicks in.

Gabe also had a friend working at Taco Bell back when they were staying open until three or four in the morning, so he got a front-row seat to the people moving through the world at those hours. The exhausted people, the drunk people, the people barely awake, the people who probably should have gone home two hours ago. Gabe called them “the zombies,” and if you’ve ever been out that late, you know exactly who he means.

That weird overnight world is all over It Hunts. Casey is technically surrounded by people, but he still feels completely disconnected from everybody. His job sucks, his relationship is going nowhere, he’s tired, and before anything starts hunting him, life has already kind of beaten the hell out of him.

Which is why I kept thinking, poor Casey.

There’s a scene where Casey has to work himself up just to get behind the wheel, and I told Gabe it genuinely gave me anxiety. Nothing huge is happening in that moment, but the movie lets you sit there with him long enough to understand how much energy it takes for Casey to do something everybody else would consider normal. You can practically feel his brain turning a basic task into this giant mountain he has to climb.

And apparently Casey has been stressing Gabe out for a long time too.

The first version of It Hunts was written before Gabe made his 2017 film Kitty Kills, and the script basically refused to die after that. Gabe estimates he went through 34 or 35 drafts over somewhere between 15 and 20 years. He would rewrite it, put it away, let it collect dust, pull it back out and start messing with it again.

Thirty-five drafts is insane, by the way.

At some point I feel like the script becomes a family member.

But you can actually feel all that time in the finished movie. It Hunts doesn’t feel like Gabe came up with a monster and then built a story around it. Casey’s exhaustion, paranoia, dead-end routine and general “what the hell am I doing with my life?” energy feel way too specific for that. The supernatural threat just walks into a life that was already uncomfortable.

After finishing his last movie, Gabe finally decided this was the one he wanted to make next. He loves supernatural thrillers, so coming back to the script made sense, but there is something kind of funny about a filmmaker spending nearly two decades trying to put a story away only for it to keep coming back.

Basically, Gabe spent years writing a movie about a man who can’t escape the thing following him.

Meanwhile, It Hunts was sitting on the shelf doing the exact same thing to Gabe.

Reds, Blues, and an Argento Nod

I told him I spend a lot of time around horror and I know a color palette is never just decoration, so did he have a rulebook? Gabe went with reds and blues because that’s the flash of a police car, which stirs strong emotion almost subconsciously, and where the two blend you get purples and pinks. “I’m kind of a sucker for that,” he said. I held up my neon nails as proof I’m on his team. He pointed to Nicolas Winding Refn’s saturated look in Drive, and I was reaching for the name of that old school horror style when he got there first: Dario Argento, whose blood was red to an almost unrealistic degree. “Just a little homage,” he said. Kitty Kills was poppier, so its palette was softer, and Izzy gets a thank you here too, since he happened to own a brand new set of lighting at exactly the right time.

Then I asked how much the camera’s wobble was tied to what Casey believes is real. This was my favorite answer of the whole interview. Partly, he said, but “in reality, it was a combination of things”: locations, a modest budget, lighting, the actors, how long a take they could pull off. He shot listed the entire film before he touched a camera, and he’s not going to pretend every angle is a grand symbol. I told him I like to call that a happy mistake, and that next interview he’s allowed to say it was all intentional. He did not promise.

He also edited the film and mixed the sound himself, with one or two video tracks and 10 or 15 audio tracks, clean location sound from lavalier and shotgun mics, and background texture so the silence never feels empty. Because the movie is so dialogue heavy, music and effects dip under the talking, then rise for action and transitions, like a scene of Casey dragging himself through his apartment that I’m still not over. That’s a lot of hats, I told him. Labor of love, you could tell.

Will He Tell Me What Pale Eyes Is? (No.)

I told Gabe I wasn’t asking for an ending explained, just how much he wanted to reveal. He likes to write endings first and work backward, and he even watches mystery shows that way, from the finale down to episode one. The original ending had the same events but “a little sloppier,” early drafts didn’t include Pale Eyes at all, and sequences with Lisa’s mother and father ran longer, with more explanation of Casey’s past, until he trimmed them. “I like when there’s a little bit held back,” he said.

So naturally I asked if Pale Eyes is a monster or a mirror. “Oh man, that’s going to be giving a lot away.” I tried again. He held the line: some things are better left unexplained, and if someone wants to make an ending explained video, be his guest, it just can’t come from him. (Respect, Gabe. Also, rude.)

He did give me breadcrumbs. One of the biggest twists lands halfway through, along with a couple more mysteries. The medication, the diary, the entity, and an Alexa scene he’d never seen in another film are the things he expects people to wrestle with, and a character tells Casey you’d have to be Sigmund Frederick Freud to figure it all out, which tells you how Gabe feels about interpretation. Some of it is open to interpretation, he said, and some of it is right there in your face. I asked which horror tropes he leaned into, and he said, “You’re going to hate me for this answer.” I said I never hate anybody. His answer: he doesn’t really pay attention to tropes, and “I’m not meta.” They show up naturally while he’s writing. He just wanted creepy, with brief peaks of violence and moments where you wonder, did I see what I think I saw?

He knows it’s divisive. People will either hate it or love it, and he’s fine with that. His comparisons are The Empty Man, Resolution, and The Endless. I asked for a full list of head scratchers. I’m serious, Gabe.

Night Shift Rapid Fire

I made him play a game, because I’m a Southern girl who will talk all day (how’s your mama, how’s your cat) and I wanted a fast one before the end.

What does Casey need most: sleep, therapy, an ex, an exorcism, a new job, or all of the above? All of the above, but “Casey will probably say sleep.”

Worst place after midnight? Your own apartment.

Better scare: show me the monster, or make me spend 20 minutes wondering if I saw one? Twenty minutes. I agreed immediately. (When I first moved into my new studio, I swore I saw something at the end of the long hallway. I’d rather think I saw it than have it show up.)

A trope you’ll never get tired of? Thinking you saw someone, turning around, and they’re gone. I added my favorite, the person across the street who vanishes after a bus passes.

A trope you’d retire? Jump scares, when they’re overdone. I asked about a pump fake jump scare, like the medicine cabinet that closes on nothing, and he had no idea what I meant until I explained the basketball move. Then he liked it: that’s good suspense, that’s subverting expectations. He also had thoughts about found footage, which we agreed to share telepathically.

Twist rule: guessed in five minutes, or still arguing about it the next morning? “Arguing about it the next morning.” If they figure out your twist ahead of the game, you lost them.

Make It Look Good Enough to Get Lost In

That last answer comes from how Gabe thinks about indie filmmaking. On a budget under $100,000, you can’t compete with a multimillion dollar movie on effects, so the mystery is your weapon, and the job after the story is making it look and sound professional enough that nobody gets pulled out:

“Make it look good enough that they can actually get immersed in the story.”

When I asked what he hopes stays with people after the credits, he said that if he did his job right, some of the mystery isn’t over. His biggest win would be one person saying that was very different, I’m confused, and I need to watch it again. If one person does that, “I’ll be a happy cat.” He’s also upfront that “it’s not kick back, relax, have a bucket of popcorn.” I started mine with screeners and popcorn, and ended up sitting up, adjusting my seat, and locked in. (I don’t even watch movies on my phone, so that tells you something.)

He’s distributing through Indie Rights, hoping to land on Tubi this spooky season, and would love to see it on Shudder. For now, it’s going on my Halloween list, and I told him I was manifesting a 10 minute standing ovation. The last thing I said to him on the call is the thing I’d been wanting to say since the first scene: seriously, somebody let Casey sleep.

Your Move

Watch It Hunts on Google Play, or YouTube Movies, with the lights low and your phone in another room. Gabe says you’ll get lost even with your full attention, so give it all of it. Then come tell us what you think the twist means. Follow Gabe and follow @newhollywoodmagazine and visit newhollywoodmagazine.com for more conversations that go beyond the press release.