JordanskaleMonkeypaw Productions has become known to make some of the most visually and narrative adventurous studio horror films over the past ten years, from Peele’s own ”Us“And”Pacifier“For films, the company has rented by other directors such as nia Dacostas” Candyman. ”
Their latest offer, hallucinatory football freakout ”Him“Is one of Monkeypaw’s boldest offers so far thanks to director Justin Tipping’s Audacious merger of sports iconography and horror prays; his story of a traumatized young athlete whose second chance in greatness turns into a nightmare combines Jitterry energy from the streets of a stannoner David Lynch film.
The cinematographer who has the task of translating Tipp’s concept into lively images is Kelly KellyAn Emmy-nominated (for AVA Duvernay’s documentary “13th”) head of photography whose work here is her best so far and puts “him” along with “sinners” and “a battle after the other” as one of 2025’s major visual performance. By finding inspiration in very varied reference points that range from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “The Holy Mountain” to Nike advertising, Kelly has created a distinct film language for “him” who powerfully conveys his young hero’s mental and physical division.
“Early on, it was clear that Justin wanted to do something really different,” Kelly told IndieWire. “When we shot, there were scenes where I would look at him and be like,” is it too much? “And he would be like,” No, more. “He was really pushing us. The key to Kelly was to find a visual language that would put the audience directly in Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers), the rising football star who starts to wonder if he is in grace for an evil supernatural for a malnun -The training session.
“We really tried to play with the idea of levels,” Kelly said, explaining that the lighting and production design was intended to express Cameron’s literal and metaphorical origin when he comes to Isaiah’s composition, a place that seems spiral into the ground. “He only continues deeper and deeper into this crazy place, and the lighting is very integrated on the site.” Kelly begins Cameron’s journey on the football field with dynamic cameras and light lighting, but as he spends more time at the association, the compositions become more static and oppressive, with locked frames and more Chiaroscuro lighting.
“We went with many graphic frames, a lot of center punch,” Kelly said. “I think I was running my camera operator Scott Dropkin crazy and asked him: ‘Okay, we are Total Centered? “Kelly also relied strongly on the top light in the film’s early scenes to give the film an almost religious feeling; then, when Cameron throws himself into hell, Halo gives the place for more shadows and color combinations – as a beautiful but eerie composition of green and blues in a hyperbaric chamber where the camera is confused – which is confused – which is confused – which is confused.
Finding a new film language meant finding new film tools, and Kelly credits collaborators such as Key Grip Rudy Covarrubias and lens technician Dan Sasaki in inventing brilliant solutions to the film’s countless technical challenges. For scenes where Kelly wanted to create a visceral sense of cams energy in the field, for example, the crew created a rig that was designed to capture the speed of sports effect in an atypical way. “We could make the camera move as fast as the ball,” Kelly said. “40 miles per hour or something similar.”
The desire for the tipping to see the action from the ball’s point of view led to the creation of the “Boomerang” rig. “It was only this crazy amount of compartment where we underestimated the camera and then used this winch system that released the camera to fly to the other end,” Kelly said. The camera department also attached red komodo cameras to Withers to capture his perspective under intense sports scenes, and at other moments simply attached a football hero to the lens and got Wayans to scream in it to prevail Cam’s point of view.
In the case of lenses, Kelly worked near Panavision’s Dan Sasaki, which adapted T-series Anamorphics to give the cinematographer the unique look she imagined. “He figured out a way to get the lens flares to get the color on which light source hit them,” Kelly said. “Historically, with anamor fish, you get a blue flare, and he could change the color of that bloss.” Sasaki also modified lenses to get the most out of Kelly and Tipp’s decision to rely strongly on centered and symmetrical compositions for their emotional effects.
“He created a beautiful fall on the sides of the lenses that really lent to that centerpiece,” Kelly said, leaving that the most extreme example of this was a lens that Sasaki created that became known as the “Ghost” lens. “It is an old D portrait lens that is 50 mm where the center is resolved, but on the pages, Bokh struggles in this crazy way.”
That lens is widely used in a party scene after CAM takes a drink that is probably nailed and feels that his already weak grip on reality is completely slipping away, one of many sequences in the film where lenses and lighting are used to put the audience in a state of psychological horror. There is also a recurring image in the movie about Cameron that meets and the camera presents an impressionistic picture of the inside of his head as he suffers from a concussion – it is one of the most frightening and unique motifs in the film, and another that required an unusual technical strategy.
“Jordan and Hoyte van Hoytema had just made all their stereoscope days for night films in ‘nope’, so there was a conversation if there was a way we could shoot those pictures with both a thermal camera and Alexa 35,” Kelly said. Covarrubias built a rig where a flir thermal camera was mounted directly on top of Alexa, which allowed the filmmakers to capture a thermal image that could be seamlessly cut in at moments of influence to show Cam’s concussions.
“It took two ACS, a drawing focus on flir and a drawing focus on Alexa,” Kelly said. “Our first AC Megan Noche 3D pressed a focus ring to glue on it, it was the craziest homemade installation. But when we started to see how everything worked it was really exciting.” Kelly experimented with different forms of ice and heat to get varying appearance on the screen, and in visual effects more images were added – “brains slosing and all that” – to complete the upcoming depiction of Cameron’s physical trauma.
“It was a lot to just try to find out how to make these pictures happen,” Kelly said. “Justin created an environment that inspired a lot of visual story outside the box. It made the project really gratifying, especially considering what we stopped pulling off with the time we had and the budget. It’s really exciting.”
Universal images Will release “him” in theaters on Friday 19 September.
