There Has Never Been a Ghost Story Like Presence

Steven Soderbergh’s Presence is an end point for found-footage horror

The blowout success of 1999’s The Blair Witch Project really did a number on the horror genre. It wasn’t the first faux-found-footage movie, or even the first found-footage horror movie. But it landed during a period where handheld cameras were increasingly small and cheap, horror was becoming more popular and mainstream, and internet-based marketing let the creators target their ideal audience, effectively turning their film into viral creepypa…

How ‘Presence’ Writer David Koepp Reinvented the Haunted House Movie From the Perspective of the Ghost

In 1989, both Steven Soderbergh and “Presence” screenwriter David Koepp had movies at the Sundance Film Festival. While the two didn’t meet that year — Koepp was not in attendance for his “Bad Influence,” the lowkey thriller by future “L.A. Confidential” filmmaker Curtis Hanson, as Soderbergh took his “Sex, Lies and Videotape” into the history books of American independent cinema (and to Cannes, where it won the Palme d’Or) — their professional …

Steven Soderbergh's horror film “The Presence” has been released in Russia. Horror has a standard beginning for the genre: the family arrives at a suspicious house where something otherworldly seems to live. But closer to the end, the film suddenly turns out to be a drama about violence. Film critic Elena Smolina talks about how the director has once again rethought the classical genre.

Review: Presence Is Low-Key Horror with a Big Impact

Sometimes what’s absent from a film defines it as much as what’s present. Negative space is the great underused resource in filmmaking. It demands that you trust your audience to follow along, to fill in every intentional gap, to pick up the meaning of every invisible whisper. Steven Soderbergh was the brash young kid on the block when he made Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), in which then-new technology cracks the world open for a married coupl…

‘Presence’: A Haunting We Will Go

Steven Soderbergh's unsettling "Presence" lends a chilling new perspective to the haunted house thriller.

Director Steven Soderbergh and Screenwriter David Koepp Team Up for a Second Film, ‘Presence,’ a Notable Addition to the Haunted House Canon

Campfire tales of spectres, spirits, and spooks have been with us since Day One. Certainly, they’ve proved good fodder for the cinema.