Inside Nefarious: Steve Deace on Evil, Art, & Adaptation

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Speaker 2 You, um,

Speaker 3 you got?

Speaker 3 Don't play with me, James. You continue to ask stupid questions, and I'll end the session.

Speaker 4 Well, that would be unfortunate for you because I'd have to make my determination based upon limited information.

Speaker 3 And you think that scares me? Well, it should.

Speaker 4 I mean, it would me

Speaker 3 being so near to death.

Speaker 3 Death doesn't scare me, James.

Speaker 3 And why is that?

Speaker 3 Because I can't die.

Speaker 3 See, James,

Speaker 3 I'm a demon.

Speaker 5 That was a scene from the hit independent film Nefarious.

Speaker 5 The horror film surprised the 2023 box office and earned widespread praise for its unflinching portrayal of the roles of evil and faith in our culture.

Speaker 5 The movie is based on a novel written by Steve Dace, a conservative author, commentator, and host of The Steve Dace Show. And now it's streaming on Daily Wire Plus.

Speaker 2 In this episode, we sit down with Dace to discuss the making of the film, its cultural impact, and where the nefarious franchise goes from here.

Speaker 2 I'm Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. This is a weekend edition of Morningwire.

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Speaker 2 Joining us now to talk about his hit film Nefarious is Steve Day. Steve, welcome to Morningwire.
So great to have you on the show.

Speaker 7 You bet, guys. Thank you for having me.
I appreciate it.

Speaker 2 Look, your very successful movie is now playing on Daily Wire Plus. We're very excited to have it on the platform.
There's been a lot of buzz here at the office about it.

Speaker 2 Tell us, what inspired you to write the novel that the film is based on?

Speaker 7 Well, it was actually my very first trip to DC over 10 years ago. And I was there to do some publicity for my first wide-release book.
And I just hopped in the shower to get ready.

Speaker 7 And this voice in the back of my head says, this book is dedicated to all the useful idiots out there, especially those of you who had no idea you were being used all this time, for you proved to be the most useful of them all, Lord Nefarious.

Speaker 7 And I thought, that is a weird thing to have hop into your head in the shower. And so I got kind of creepy, I've got to be honest.
It is very creepy.

Speaker 7 And I got back to my hotel room that night and I just sat down at the keyboard and I started playing around. And I said, you know, what if we, you know, took C.S.

Speaker 7 Lewis's The Screw Tape Letters and expanded it.

Speaker 7 And instead of the temptation of us as individuals, what about a takedown of an entire culture? And I wrote the introduction that night in a couple of hours.

Speaker 7 I called a couple of friends of mine that have different theological backgrounds because I wanted to get kind of a broad view of what I had written. And they both thought I was onto something.

Speaker 7 And that was eventually became the introduction to a nefarious plot. Because guys, there's no better place to go get inspired about a demonic takeover of America than Washington, D.C.

Speaker 5 Now, just wondering, was your first book in a similar genre or is this totally different?

Speaker 7 Totally different. The first book I wrote, Rules for Patriots, was basically just a compilation of all the tips and tricks I've learned doing

Speaker 7 political activism over the years. So this wasn't on my radar at all.
I'd never written a novel before. And it's really not even a novel as much as it's a polemic.

Speaker 7 Basically, a senior general, a high lord of hell, just yells at you for 230 pages. All right.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 the movie, we were, obviously, we can't do a movie where a guy just stands up there and does a two-hour soliloquy, right? We can't, or monologue. We can't do that.
And so we needed a MacGuffin.

Speaker 7 And the MacGuffin we came up with is what if we actually told, the movie was a prequel. It told the story of where this novel, where this manuscript, where this demonic book came from.

Speaker 7 And that's the story that people see in Nefarious.

Speaker 2 So the adaptation process, I find this really fascinating. What were the biggest narrative or theological challenges when condensing or reworking your ideas for a movie audience?

Speaker 7 Evergreen topics, things that were timely, but not so specific that by the time the movie came out or later on we get into streaming windows, they would, you know, outlive their usefulness and we would date ourselves um the the other was also you know who's your target audience here and and ultimately me we made the decision that we wanted the movie primarily to be an evangelistic construct that that that we believed that if you show people darkness they might let you say things to them that they would not let you say to them if you just came in via the light and i and to me you know i grew up uh as a pagan So I was very familiar with the horror genre.

Speaker 7 I saw every meaningful horror movie that, you know, from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, at least 10 times.

Speaker 7 So I was very familiar with those kinds of tropes, how they used spirituality, you know, sort of counterfeit forms in order to tell a story.

Speaker 7 How those kinds of stories, because they thrill us, will let them assault our worldview in ways that if you just wrote like a straight up article, we wouldn't tolerate.

Speaker 7 And so we kind of thought, why not do the same thing, but from our side? I mean, why don't we make a movie?

Speaker 7 uh that we patterned it a lot after silence of the lambs you know remember that serial when we were kids where they took the Captain Crunch out, it was just the berries, right?

Speaker 7 Well, what's everybody's favorite part of Silence of the Lambs when Clarice and Hannibal are talking?

Speaker 7 So we took out all the other stuff and said, what if we just did a movie that was sort of like that?

Speaker 7 And seven, those were two of the movies that we based a lot of our sort of vibe off of. We were really kind of going for that, you know, mid to late 90s kind of dark thriller motif.

Speaker 7 That's kind of what we were going for.

Speaker 7 And then we thought if we hit that, if we're able to pull out those atmospherics, then the audience is going to let us, you know, attack their worldview in ways that maybe they wouldn't if it was just another article at a place like, say, Daily Wire.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the constrained time and place element of this film is very effective. It's going back to the classical mode.
This is part of a really winning combination if you can do it right.

Speaker 2 And you guys obviously did it really, really well here. The idea of the horror film genre, obviously you really like that, but were you afraid that it would be a turnoff for some audiences?

Speaker 2 Or did you always feel like this is actually a pretty broad tent genre?

Speaker 7 Yes, is the answer to your question.

Speaker 7 And so, you know, our our film, it will have the atmospherics of a lot of the demon possession horror films that your audience, that audiences, general audience, would be accustomed to.

Speaker 7 But there's no one's going to, you know, we're not going to have any vulgarities. You're not going to see the debasement of a young woman and defiling of religious relics.

Speaker 7 Nobody's head's going to turn. There's no swearing.

Speaker 7 There's no gore. There's no nudity.
So a lot of the kinds of tropes that are familiar with this genre, the atmospherics are there.

Speaker 7 But once you get past this, the atmospherics, this is a deeply theological film.

Speaker 7 And so the atmospherics are there to lure you in to the wider and larger argument so that by the time that argument is well in the middle of it, you are too invested in the story and the characters to want to turn it off.

Speaker 7 And so you're going to give us an opportunity to carry that narrative all the way to the end to challenge your worldview.

Speaker 5 So I want to mention, actually, I watched this film very recently before we even knew we were going to do this interview.

Speaker 5 And I just wanted to mention that a friend of mine actually recommended it to me and she told me it was her all-time favorite film.

Speaker 5 So just so you know, there are people out there who are crazy about this film.

Speaker 5 And another takeaway that I think our audience, as in the Daily Wire audience, will love about this is the character who plays the psychologist or psychiatrist.

Speaker 5 It's like if Michael Knowles was playing an actor, playing Michael Knowles playing an actor. It's very uncanny.

Speaker 5 You kind of have to watch it to know what I'm talking about, but that's something for people to look forward to.

Speaker 7 Well, when we finished the script, we always knew we needed a landmark performance for Nefarious. The movie's after all, it's called Nefarious, right?

Speaker 7 But when we finished the script, we were like, you know, we're going to need a better actor for James than we thought. And the actor you're talking about is Jordan Belfie.

Speaker 7 And Jordan does an absolutely terrific job. And

Speaker 7 on purpose, we chose to put a lefty in there. and turn the genre on its head.
Instead of putting the typical clergyman one-on-one with the demon,

Speaker 7 just just like i do in the book where i think using a demon to show the world where a lot of the terrible ideas that they think are good really come from and i use that as a tactic in the book we borrowed that for the film and we really wanted the you know jordan as a stand-in for the typical i've got it all figured out i'm smarter than god I've got all the degrees.

Speaker 7 I went to college.

Speaker 7 I'm progressive.

Speaker 7 I've unlocked the secrets of the universe. That kind of zeitgeist spirit of the age, Jordan is a stand-in for that.

Speaker 7 And so you can see his progression as a character by the, when he first walks in, he embodies that to a T.

Speaker 7 And then slowly but surely, you begin to see Nefarious unravel his worldview by attacking him from the left. And that's, that's what we think is so unique is Nefarious attacks a lefty from the left.

Speaker 7 And it completely deconstructs his worldview in ways that he never anticipated. And then, you know, I put in my contract, no cheesy conversion scenes.
That's literally in my contract.

Speaker 7 That has ruined way too many movies in the faith-based genre. And so you'll see that at the end, that Jordan's, he's open to a world that he did not think existed before the movie started.

Speaker 7 But he doesn't, you know, go off and, you know, say, you know, Calgon, take me away in the name of Jesus at the end. We wanted to completely avoid that.

Speaker 2 That's something I think the Daily Wire in particular finds very appealing about this movie. It's actually a mantra of sorts here.
We think the world is, you know, very messy.

Speaker 2 It's not black and white. And creative content should mirror that.
It should mirror the real world, not be so cut and dried or, you know, neatly packaged as it often is.

Speaker 2 Now, things like conversion, often it's a real process. It's not something that happens sort of magically.
It's something that takes time. It's incremental.
I really appreciate that about this film.

Speaker 2 Now, I wanted to go back to something you said. This doesn't have profanity, nudity, sexual scenes.
It still has an R rating, though. What do you make of that rating?

Speaker 2 And again, was that something you were worried about turning off audiences?

Speaker 7 They did this, my filmmakers, Carrie Solomon and Chuck Consulman, they did this to them with Unplanned as well.

Speaker 7 And I just think it's, frankly, it was a politicized attempt to limit and marginalize the audience.

Speaker 7 There's a lot of faith-based moviegoers that just automatically, if something is rated R, they will not go see. You know, it doesn't matter if it's Schindler's List.

Speaker 7 It doesn't matter if it's Passion of the Christ. They just won't go see it.
And so it was clearly done.

Speaker 7 There's nothing in this film whatsoever by today's standards or really any standards going back to, you know, the Hayes Code, which frankly I'm in favor of returning to. But

Speaker 7 there aren't any standards going back to the Hayes Code that would merit any form of an R rating in this whatsoever. It was clearly just an attempt to minimize the marketability of the film.

Speaker 7 And guys, we went through this the entire time.

Speaker 7 I could do an entire documentary on the making of this film, the kind of stuff that went on, the near-death experiences, myself included.

Speaker 7 We had to go to war with the with the federal government and a Hollywood union in a non-union state. I mean, every, there were so many times we thought there's no way this movie is getting made.

Speaker 7 No way at all. And

Speaker 7 what the MPA did to the film is just one of the object, the objections that obstacles that we had to overcome. I mean, it was real spiritual warfare to get this movie made.

Speaker 7 But the cool thing is, When we talk about things like spiritual warfare, we often talk about it as if it only comes from one direction.

Speaker 7 And if you got a second, I want want to give your audience a really cool story. I think they'll find very encouraging if you got a minute.

Speaker 7 We'd love it. So we were done with the shooting of the film and we're looking for an editor that we can afford.
And the film was made in Oklahoma where they have a very generous filmmaker credit.

Speaker 7 And so everything we do in Oklahoma is subject to the credit. So we found one filmmaker there who had been nominated for an Oscar, but he'd only done documentaries.

Speaker 7 And so we gave him our assembly cut, which means the total of all the shots that we filmed and said, hey, come up with a rough cut. You know, we'll give you six weeks and we'll see how it goes.

Speaker 7 The rough cut he turned in was such a disaster that my filmmakers did not want to come to me as executive producer and show it to me. That's how bad it was.

Speaker 7 Now, I did not know this until one day I'm in the middle of my own show and I got an email from a guy named Brian Jeremiah Smith. And he says, hey, you don't know me from Adam.

Speaker 7 I listen to your podcast on the blaze every single day. I love your show

Speaker 7 and I love this book and I've been waiting for this movie to come out. All right.
Well, you know, here's my resume. I'm one of the top editors here at Netflix.

Speaker 7 And I specifically do the horror thriller genre from them. I just finished doing

Speaker 7 the first Mike Flanagan, what was that? House on Haunted Hill or something. Okay.
And then he had just finished

Speaker 7 Midnight Mass, which is a terrific series, by the way. He had just finished that.
And he was about to do their rendition of Edgar Allan Poe's Fall House of Usher.

Speaker 7 And he said in his letter, but I just got suspended indefinitely because i'm the only editor at netflix that won't take the jab and they were going to fire me but the supreme court just ruled that it was on the man the biden mandate was unconstitutional so they don't know what to do with me so they just put me on indefinite paid leave here's my resume if i can help let me know well this guy worked on get out this guy worked on the shining sequel his whole career is right in our genre and he's a believer and i'm thinking wow too bad we didn't know about this guy right too late now wow so i sent it off to my filmmakers i'm like you know just in case in the future we need anybody or you need a future contact.

Speaker 7 Here's a guy to consider. And it was at that moment that they emailed me back and they're like, yeah, we've been trying to figure out how we're going to tell you.
The movie is an absolute mess.

Speaker 7 We're screwed. Okay.
And so we're going to call this Brian guy and see if he can save it. Right.
So Brian comes in like Mariano Rivera, man. It's the bottom of the ninth in the World Series.

Speaker 7 All right. We're on the road and the other team's got the bases loaded and nobody out.
We can't even have a fly ball. I mean, we need to strike out the side.
Brian comes in, saves our movie.

Speaker 7 Now, here's the thing: we could not afford him. No way.
And he says to us, he goes, you know what? Netflix just put me on paid leave. Pay me what you can.

Speaker 7 Let Netflix pay for it. Netflix paid for the editor of our film that ended up saving our movie.
A guy that we didn't even know exist emailed us out of the blue.

Speaker 7 So when we talk about spiritual warfare, folks, it's being waged on both sides. That's not just a one-sided affair whatsoever.

Speaker 2 That's great to hear. So final question.

Speaker 2 In light of the success of this film and the hunger for faith-based content that we've seen really growing over the last few years, any chance you'll be making movies with larger studios or bigger budgets, or would you rather stay independent?

Speaker 7 To me, and we had offers to go bigger with this, but we did not want to give up creative control. And I think that's always a challenge in this line of work.

Speaker 7 But my hopeful answer to your question is yes, and that there will be more nefarious content as well, for sure.

Speaker 2 That's great to hear. We'll look forward to it.
And maybe it'll be on Daily Wire Plus, too. Thanks so much for joining us.

Speaker 7 Thank you, guys.

Speaker 2 That was Steve Dace, author of the book Turned Movie Nefarious, now streaming on Daily Wire Plus. Thanks for waking up with us.
This has been a weekend edition of Morningwire.