The film centers on a cult leader and his multiple wives.
Jo Shaffer and Adam DeSantes were more than a little surprised when their latest film, Hell Is Empty, a thriller about a messianic cult, made USA Today’s list of must-see films of 2022, right along with The Batman, Top Gun: Maverick and Downton Abbey: A New Era.
That’s prestigious company given that it’s only the filmmakers’ second full-length film. Its inclusion in the newspaper’s list makes a strong statement about their budding talent — and moviegoers’ continued appetite for low-budget horror films.
“We certainly weren’t expecting it, especially to be listed right next to The Batman. It was quite a thrill,” says DeSantes, 26, the film’s producer/co-writer. “But mainly we were excited that the film is going to reach a wider audience.”
It was released March 1 for streaming or purchase via AppleTV, iTunes, Google Play, Vudu, and possibly on a cable network near you (DeSantes explains that the distribution company delivers to Vubiquity and iNDemand, which then work with different cable providers).
The film’s title comes from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” Its story focuses on a cult leader known as The Artist and his harem of “sister-wives,” one of whom he’s convinced will bear him a child who is the second coming of Christ.
The narrative was also inspired in part by a line from a song by The Ophelias, a rock band formed in Cincinnati by Spencer Peppet, Shaffer’s domestic partner, who also wrote the film’s spare and haunting score and who plays Lydia, the savvy sister-wife who helps engineer the cult’s undoing.
“Jo and I spent a lot of time going back and forth with the script and learned a lot about cults in the process,” says DeSantes. “I just wanted to make a scary movie, but it turned into an intense psychological thriller about how people behave under abnormal circumstances.”
Shaffer, 25, the film’s director/co-writer, always found movies important in providing comfort and a sense of identity and confidence.
“I saw The Godfather at age 8 while standing behind the couch, with my mother pushing my head down during the violent scenes,” the filmmaker remembers. “Something about making movies ignited a mania inside of me. I never knew anyone else with that same unhealthy obsession about filmmaking until I met Adam.”
DeSantes, at age 8, started making his own short films, including comedies, stop-motion animation films, and other projects. He was in ninth grade when he made a 40-minute film he co-scripted with his father about a hot tub prank gone wrong that took several months to film. “It was a total disaster,” he remembers, “but I learned an enormous amount while making it.”
DeSantes and Shaffer met the following year during an improv class held by Children’s Theater of Madison.
“I had a slightly better camera than Adam, but he had a mic on a boom pole,” Shaffer remembers. “When you have a boom mic you really feel like you’re a filmmaker.”
While attending different area high schools, they managed to make short films together, as well as work on their own projects. In fact, Shaffer won a Golden Badger Award at the 2015 Wisconsin Film Festival for the short film The Searcher. Together and apart, the filmmakers further honed their skills.
Following graduation, DeSantes headed to Connecticut to double major in film and psychology at Wesleyan University. The next year, Shaffer was off to New York University to study film and filmmaking. The two remained in touch, working together throughout their college years. DeSantes has since joined Shaffer in New York.
It was summer 2016 when the pair, back in Madison, embarked on Calliope, their first feature-length film, a 78-minute sci-fi story described on its IMDB entry as the story of “a burnout couple who enters the dangerous world of dreamfarming, a counter-economy in which the impoverished sell their dreams to the wealthy.” It was funded mostly through a Kickstarter campaign.
Released in 2018, the film gained minimal traction, but it proved to the filmmakers what they could do, further cementing their commitment to film.
“Each film leads to the next one, enabling us to improve on mistakes made in the previous process,” Shaffer says. “I never questioned the art part of it. It was always a case of, ‘Can we get to the point where the execution matches the intent?’”
Spencer Peppet
Filmmakers DeSantes, left, and Shaffer.
Right now, Hell is Empty is as close as either filmmaker comes to achieving that goal, and the pair is pleased by the response the film has gotten. DeSantes says it was funded through an investment from executive producer Jason Dreyer, “who we met through the Kickstarter for our first film and he was intrigued by our story and pitch.”
The production was filmed in a mostly abandoned farmhouse owned by friends of Shaffer’s parents (writer Ann Shaffer and former Isthmus editor and children’s book author Dean Robbins), south of Cedar Lake, Indiana. One day was spent filming at Indiana Dunes National Park.
Both filmmakers agree there are things they would have done differently, and plan to improve in their next as-yet-unnamed film about a rock band invited to record at a studio located in a former (and reportedly haunted) Masonic lodge, DeSantes says. There is a good chance The Ophelias may be the band, since Shaffer has filmed several expressionistic music videos for them and plays bass with the group. They expect their working partnership to continue in the same way in which they’ve always worked.
“I take the producer role and Jo takes the director role,” DeSantes says. “Jo’s a better writer than I am. We love talking over ideas, taking plots to their conclusions, and building imaginary worlds.”
Shaffer agrees: “Much of the time we’ll both have similar ideas, but as inverted and dialectical opposites. We’ve perfected a healthy way of disagreeing, which results in a lot of interesting results. We’ve grown up together both as filmmakers and as people.”
