Piercing Cameron Beyl’s The Veil and Forbidden Mysteries Answered–An Interview

Some movies like Cameron Beyl’s The Veil need to be savoured, and while the wait for it to arrive on home video/streaming felt long, that’s because to find the right window to release it meant waiting for a certain time of the year to arrive. People believe that the curtain separating the world of the living from the dead is at its thinnest during Halloween. Readers can check out my original review here.

As an enthusiast who has studied the behaviours of spirits through reading other case reports and participating in client-based (not the holiday style) paranormal investigations, everything told in fiction felt spot on. But in order to understand everything that went on in this film, the opportunity to interview this filmmaker to learn about his thought process made this movie what it is:

For readers unfamiliar with your work, can you please introduce yourself?

I’ve been making films, using the DIY approach, ever since I was eleven, and went to Emerson College to get a formal education. I made my feature debut with So Long, Lonesome (2009), and a couple of years later, made Here Build Your Homes. During that time, I made other short films, did commissioned jobs and also worked on documentaries. My “The Director Series,” is well known [it delved into examining notable talents like Stanley Kubrick, David Fincher and Paul Thomas Anderson -ed], and after that The Veil.

One thing I’ve always wondered is why some films get fast tracked to distribution and others not. For your piece, I get the sense it took a long time to materialise elsewhere. Why is that?

So part of that was because we started our festival run without a distributor in place. We screened out film at the Austin Film Festival and the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in 2023, along with Victoria Film Festival in 2024. And during that time, we were talking with the great folks at Buffalo 8 who had finally watched the film. Shortly after our festival run, we signed with them to distribute The Veil. That was in February; It’s just been getting the deliverables up to speed and having all the legal stuff approved. It’s a very huge, unwieldy process. And there was also the element of waiting until October as a prime release window.

Would you say that date was on purpose because The Veil between our world and the dead is thinner on Halloween? And do you believe in that piece of folklore?

For sure. We talked about when it would be ideal. I’ve always been really interested in the unknown and the paranormal and in a more fun way, all that spooky Halloween stuff. I’ve always been a fan of that and in my experience, you become a little more pragmatic about how the world works. Quite often, you get buried by the science of everything and how things are as they’ve been observed. And I’ve always had a child-like wonder about the unknown possibilities that are beyond the limits of our perception. I think there is some sort of element, force or intelligent creation behind the chaos (in the everyday).

The way I like to think of it is in how music exists. It’s something where when you pull it apart, it’s just a bunch of distinct sounds and different pitches. That’s chaos. But you put it together and you arrange it distinctly. It’s beautiful and transcendent. And I apply that mode of thinking towards the cosmos and to the universe and to the concept of creation.

In terms of your movie, how successful would you say you’ve applied that idea to the narrative? Ultimately, it boils down to how Father Douglas realises what’s going on, and he’s being given a second chance once all the puzzle pieces come together.

A lot of it has to do with the presence of the Aurora themselves, which kind of speaks to this conflict between the physical scientific world and the more spiritual unseen world that exists beyond our perception. Because when we look at the Northern Lights, we still don’t quite know what their function is. In science, they’re a reaction of particles from the sun bouncing off the atmosphere.

But the thing is, it’s so otherworldly and beautiful; it’s such a cool thing that we get to experience as creatures living underneath it. It really speaks to this idea of beauty and cosmic grace. And that can be extended towards the idea of second chances and missed opportunities.

That was what was inherently attractive to me about the project. And how these fundamental forces can act on time as if it is its own distinct dimension is equally weird. This is really ripe territory for exploring in a story about redemption and second chances, but told in the cadence of a ghost story.

Would you say the Aura Borealis is intelligent? (like I think, therefore I am, or in other sense, God somehow exists in this maelstrom?)

• Yeah, I mean, I would say for the character of Douglas, he sees something in that Aurora that puts the fear of God in him. That’s because it was present on the fateful night from his youth that kicks off The Veil. He doesn’t regard it with the same kind of wonderment as you or I when we see it in real life.

It holds an inseparable connection to a very formative negative influence in his life. And the fact that it’s only really visible from certain parts of the earth, means not everyone is lucky to see it.

Last summer, we had that and people were posting photos on social media left and right. I live in Los Angeles and when I saw those came from here (the people who took them hiked up to a nearby mountain and got high enough), that wisp was unmistakably Aurora. And that was so fascinating to see.

How rare is it to see the Northern Lights so far down South? As for the film’s setting, where was it?

It’s set in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which is just outside of Philadelphia. I don’t think the Aurora can be seen as far south as that and I was very deliberate in choosing a place where it would be rare to see it. If you were to see it that far in the USA, that would often come with consequences. This concern kicks things off in my film. When there’s a phenomenon that’s powerful enough to take down our energy grid, what else can it do?

Douglas is living in isolation. As a Catholic priest, they’re used to it in a certain sense. They are very much present in various communities and often regard their congregation as their family, but when it comes down to just them alone, they don’t have that. They don’t have a family life in the traditional sense. So there is that sense of solitude. I wanted to lean into this idea of himself–imposing his own exile out of his inability to deal with what happened long ago.

To prepare Sean O’Bryan for the role, I created an interview between the priest and a random interviewer, asking him about his life. One question was why don’t you just go to confession? His response was that he did, but he’s not able to forgive himself as well. Penance must be paid. On a more practical level, that also just kind of heightens the spooky atmosphere we wanted to create.

And when Hannah shows up, asking for help, it’s even more stark, all the more out of this world for him.

A more technical question, what cameras did you use just to get all that milky darkness and perfect mood lighting?

We shot it day for night the entire time. A lot of what you’re seeing is sky replacement and actual footage of Aurora that we sourced from other places. The colours were graded and blended together; and the shadows were brought down to make it look like night.

And we utilised Red Gemini cameras, which engineers specifically designed the sensor for space photography. When you have a film that is lit entirely, at least with the interiors with candlelight, we needed something with a really strong sensor.

Was there a reason behind making Hannah part of the Amish community?

I lifted the idea up from the idea pile that had been percolating for years. I’d been developing two separate concepts: One about an Aurora event that takes out the power grid in Los Angeles, but I didn’t know where it went. The other one was a more classical ghost story about a man who was visited in the middle of the night by a woman who ran away from her husband on her wedding night. On their own, these two stories didn’t really click.

It wasn’t until I came home to Lancaster that I found myself with Amish iconography everywhere. You can’t go driving anywhere without running into something from that world and I thought that this would be a really fascinating visual idea to explore.

When you have a story where the power goes out, what can you do? There’s people who are not dependent on technology. But when I read an article about the crisis of domestic abuse in the Amish community, because it is so insular and so self-contained, the concept lent itself really well to the story that I was building.

And when there is a very long, centuries-old tension between the Catholics and the Amish, dating back to the 1600s when Catholics were openly persecuting the Amish, everything fell together. It was so bad, where a book called The Martyr’s Mirror was written. It was passed down from generation to generation to document those atrocities. I found it really fascinating when I was talking to a priest for research that they had no idea that this book existed. They had no idea about the history of this conflict. It was just something that was not taught to them.

Because our sense of history is still very much shaped by the victors, there’s a story I could put together.

How long did it take for you to get the story put together to pre-production, production, and post?

I would say as an amorphous blob, it took about six or seven years. Then, once things started coming into clarity, probably about a little under a year to go from outline to finished scripts. The shoot only took 10 days—that was the actual production timeline, which was the shortest thing. With the rest, I’d say almost 10 years!

Wow. That’s quite the commitment.

Yes. And it pays off.

Since we’re deep into the Halloween season, do you believe in the existence of ghosts, especially the self-aware kind?

They have always fascinated me. When I was really young, my grandmother’s second husband had a big book about the unknown and I would spend holidays whenever we were over reading all of it. And anytime I went to the library at school, there would always be something about the paranormal in the stack. So that’s something that’s always just captivated my imagination; I want to believe.

As for why they exist, I would say that there’s the scientific principle that energy and matter cannot be created or destroyed. It simply takes on different forms. And I think the same is true of our energy as people. A more straight laced way of looking at it concerns when people pass on, we carry their memory with us. And when you have hauntings, especially in circumstances of really serious trauma or tragedy or things like that, there are echoes of that power which can linger on forever. That’s something that I don’t know if science can fully explain.

Would you want to do another movie in a similar vein just to explore all those interests?

I think so. Many people have described this film as like a lost episode of the Twilight Zone. A lot of the ideas that I have in the pipeline, while not necessarily in the same world or dealing with the same themes, definitely have that sense of the possibility of conquering the unknown.

Do you have any movies/shorts that’s actually in pre-production while we’re waiting for that to happen?

My company, FilmFrontier Studios, is currently developing a handful of new films that are manoeuvring towards production next year. Although they span different genres, they all share a lot of The Veil’s DNA in that they are driven by the mysteries of the supernatural world and the unique storytelling opportunities they offer.

The Veil Movie Trailer