A snapshot of a surreal horror film has hit Port Adelaide. CityMag met the artist and director to learn more about the film, its overseas success and portraying auditory hallucinations on screen.
There’s a tried-and-true colour palette to promote a horror film: black, white and red.
This made it easy for filmmaker Pirie Martin, who painted his first mural to accompany the release of his feature film Psychosis.
“I didn’t want to do like a photo, real character portrait, because I could have gone down that road, but then it wouldn’t really have shown what the film was about,” Pirie tells CityMag.
“Given that a lot of the audience won’t be familiar with the film, even if it’s like an iconic shot from the film, they’re not going to really know what that means.
“So I wanted something that would be engaging and draw people in and could be interactive.”
The result is an optical illusion threatening to suck you into Port Adelaide’s Graffiti Wall in Black Diamond Square.
Pirie painted it with the help of his dad, who is also an artist, and muralist John Whitney.
“It ended up taking way longer than we thought; it took us four or five days to paint the whole mural, even just with the simple three colours,” Pirie says.
“I think because I was a bit naive going in saying, ‘oh, I’ll just paint a mural, it’s not that complicated’.”
Hard at work. This picture: supplied
A key challenge in the painting process was making the mural glow in the dark, a task that was interrupted by rain and required much deliberation in Bunnings working out how to seal it to protect the UV paint.
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“I think there’s a reason people don’t do UV murals very often, they’re not going to last very long, and they’re a massive pain in the ass,” Pirie says.
“But even if it’s just for a couple of weeks, just to give people something fun to do and fun to interact with.”
Psychosis is a black-and-white film, but the villain’s calling card offers the only colour: a neon-orange and ultraviolent purplish-blue.
“The mural ended up matching that perfectly when it’s glowing, so it all tied together really nicely.”
Grab a UV torch and head down to the Port at night to see it while it lasts. This picture: supplied
The crime-scene style UV paint and overall effects of the mural echo the intensity and mysterious themes of the film, without being too scary for younger passersby – something Pirie had to consider since portraying some of the darker parts of the film in the Port Adelaide square wasn’t going to fly.
“The villain of the film who is on the mural, he is a hypnotist and he drags people into, he pulls them into their own mind and kind of messes with them,” Pirie says.
The film has an octopus motif and characters smothered by hands reaching for them, which Pirie thought would be effective in mural-form, and a fun way to draw in passersby.
“It’s something that people can interact with, like standing under the hands and pretending they’re going to get grabbed and making that look like it’s three dimensional, and being pulled,” he says.
“The hypnotist spiral, and then the 3D illusion of the spiralling wall mural was something I saw a lot on online, and was something I was relatively confident I could do.”
Though new to murals, Pirie has been making films for well over a decade. Psychosis is his first feature film and has been in the works since 2016.
“The film is about a criminal fixer called Cliff Van Aarle who hears voices,” Pirie says.
“He has a similar condition to schizophrenia, but it’s somewhat fictionalised, and he handles problems for criminals and gets hired by these two young, entrepreneurial street dealers who’ve gotten themselves in over their head.”
The idea took shape as a script after Pirie met Adelaide actor Derryn Amoroso when Derryn auditioned for another short film project.
“He was such an amazing actor, like he was perfect for every single role, he ended up going on to be nominated for an award off of like three lines of dialogue,” Pirie says.
“I thought, given the character has a psychological condition, he’s hearing auditory hallucinations, he was going to be quite an intense character.
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“I wanted someone who I knew going in would be really great, and I didn’t want to have to spend forever auditioning.”
Derryn plays protagonist Cliff, and picked up a best actor award from the 2023 Vesuvius International Film Festival for the role.
Psychosis hasn’t officially premiered in Australia aside from a cast and crew screening, but it has found success on the American film festival circuit.
It’s picked up the best feature award at Philadelphia Unnamed Film Festival, best screenplay at Sherman Oaks Film Festival and best experimental film at HorrorFest International Film Festival among others.
Psychosis was also nominated in the best feature film category at 2023’s Popcorn Frights, the largest genre festival in the Southeast United States.
Of the six nominations, four were Australian, three of which were South Australian productions: Psychosis, T Blockers by locals Alice Maio Mackay and Erin Paterson, and Puzzle Box, a Sydney-Adelaide co-production.
Pirie says there were so many Australian horror films featured at the 2023 Popcorn Frights that they named a lineup the “Australian Invasion”.
Psychosis showcases South Australian talent in all sides of the production, from acting to sound, with music composed by local heavyweights Mat Morison and Adrian Schmidt Mumm from funk-fusion band Slowmango.
When creating the film, it was important to Pirie that the auditory hallucinations were not just a plot-driver, but that presented the experience of seeing and feeling the world differently – something he says is not often portrayed well in film.
“Film does a terrible job of representing mental health like that, it almost always becomes ‘the villain has schizophrenia’, or the villain has a condition which is evil voices or an evil part to their personality,” he says.
Pirie leant into the challenge of depicting the nuance and reality of conditions that lead to auditory hallucinations, including listening to schizophrenia simulators, to understand the different ways they can manifest.
The voices in the film act as a narrator, and the character of Cliff interacts with them in subtle and overt ways, with the audience knowing he can hear it.
“I really liked the idea that you could do a film trope, present it as a real condition and have fun with it,” Pirie says.
“A lot of people [with conditions like schizophrenia] are just kind of getting by.
“It’s obviously causing a struggle, but it’s more of an internal thing, it’s not causing them to go out and be violent or, you know, run amok.
“It annoys the shit out of them, but they get by, and they’re trying to use it to their benefit as much as possible.
“I just got very excited about giving the main character the condition that’s typically associated with being a villain, and making it not necessarily an asset, but something he can try to use, something that’s important to him and not just a detriment.”
The film is available to rent or buy via Amazon Prime in Australia.