In Nix, we are introduced to the Coyle family. What starts as a lakeside outing turns to tragedy, possibly due to a malevolent water spirit that attaches itself to the survivors. Twenty years later, matriarch Donna (Dee Wallace), continues to spiral further into misery. As her brother Idres (Michael Paré), two now-grown sons Jack and Lucas, played respectively by James Zimbardi and Skyler Caleb, both co-writers and producers on Nix, and young granddaughter Zoey (Niesha Renee Guilbot) all explore the mystery of what happened on that fateful day.
Nix director/co-writer/co-producer Ferrante started as a journalist, with the print version of FANGORIA as one of his regular beats. As a filmmaker, he’s worked in various genres, though he’s probably still best known as the director of all six Sharknado movies.
Ferrante and Nix leading lady Wallace first worked together on his 2005 feature directorial debut, Boo. Ferrante had interviewed Wallace a few times by then and says, “I knew we needed a name, and I love Dee. We got her in the film, and she’s done a bunch of my projects since then. She’s my good luck charm.”
Nix started life as a very different original screenplay by Zimbardi, Caleb, and fellow producer Woodrow Wilson Hancock III. Ferrante had previously worked with them as a producer on 2017’s Awaken the Shadowman. When that film did well, the trio got the money to make Nix and invited Ferrante to join them as the director, co-producer, and writer.
But then, Ferrante says, “COVID hit. So, we took the downtime to develop the script further. At some point, I wrote a new ending that was really crazy.” This meant revising the rest of the script substantially, but everyone agreed, “‘Let’s push it in this direction.'”
The origins of the Nix, Ferrante explains, are in German mythology. “It’s a water fairy called the Näcken, but we started turning it into this other thing. So, it became a movie about trauma and addiction and how we deal with grief, and at the center of it is a monster.”
Ferrante discussed concepts for the Nix’s appearance with his artist friend Jacob Hair, a director on Rick and Morty who helped create the Nix’s final design. “We started with the idea of a half-face in the water, there are images of that out there, but we kept talking about, ‘What can we do to make this thing different?’ We found different textures. One of the things that came out of that session was the webbed eye that I don’t think I’d really seen before, so that became an anchor point.”
Makeup effects artist Vincent Guastini did the creature design for the Nix, which Ferrante describes as “a creature suit, and a slip-on head, blended into the actor’s face.” The webbing is achieved by “latex over the eye.”
This was a case where size mattered. “Most of the time, these [creature-suit performers] are very tall, and there are story elements why the creature needs to be smaller. Vincent recommended this amazing performer Tej Limlas Ly, and the suit was designed around him.”
Once the world opened up after COVID, Ferrante says that the independent-film budget ruled out a shoot in Southern California. Instead, Ferrante found affordable locations in his Northern California hometown of Antioch. “It added a whole other layer and texture. I had access to the high school, I had access to a movie theater. So, we started opening the film up. By shooting in my hometown, the movie became more personal.”
Other aspects made it personal as well. “James and the other writers wanted the lead kid to have the videotape camera and start filming stuff. Even though I didn’t originate that concept, that kind of was me,” Ferrante laughs. Like the character, he started making short films when he was a youngster. Indeed, in a Nix movie theater sequence, one of Ferrante’s college shorts, Bum Rap, is on the screen.
Then there was pure serendipity. “There was a moment where we had to have the actor walk through [a street location]. One wall had this gigantic graffiti thing of a shark, and for half a second, I was like, ‘I can’t have him walk past that.'” Then he decided, “‘Yes, I can have him walk past that.'”
Between the Sharknado franchise, Zombie Tidal Wave, and his recent musical comedy Time Pirates, how does Ferrante feel about working with water again? “I can’t get away from water, it doesn’t matter what I do,” he laughs. But it works for horror. “There’s something eerie and spooky about water.”
Ferrante observes that this was the most difficult part of the shoot. “We were filming in winter, so we couldn’t put anybody in that lake because it was below freezing. We did some close-ups in a heated pool that we dressed to look like the lake. Six months later, we did a pick-up day where we put the Nix in an actual pond.”
Ferrante describes Nix as “A little bit more of a psychological thriller than a typical monster movie. We wanted to see if we could try to take some risks narratively and cinematically to tell the story. Obviously, we don’t have millions of dollars, we’re not going to have the Nix crawling on walls and hanging from ceilings. So, it becomes a more intimate movie, and it’s more about the characters. The cast is fantastic. Dee is phenomenal. She deserves kudos for what she put herself through to go to that place to play that tortured mom. Michael Paré is great. James [Zimbardi] is the anchor. And the kids are just so good and believable, especially Niesha.”
The Nix itself “is a creature that feeds off of grief. The metaphor throughout is that it’s a movie about how people deal with grief, trauma, and addiction. It’s very clearly there if you pay attention to everything that’s going on, but it’s not spelled out A-B-C-D. It goes A-B-F-X-M-Q-Z-G. And that was by design.”
Ferrante notes that making Nix without a studio or network was financially challenging but creatively freeing. “With an independent film, we have the ability to make the movie we wanted to make, to push things as far as it goes. Some people are going to love it, some people are going to hate it, but since it’s not a hundred-million-dollar movie, it’s easier to make back its budget, so we were able to take chances.”
As far as Ferrante’s main aspiration for this film, he says, “Hopefully, people discover it, but hopefully, it’s also something that has a little more emotion and depth that people get out of it, too. It is about people not falling into patterns. With grief, we tend to get absorbed to the point where we don’t see reality and don’t want to see the truth. I’ve shown it to a few people who’ve experienced trauma or know people who have had addiction problems or family members that have, and they go – ‘That’s my mom,’ or ‘I relate to that.’ That’s why I’m really proud of what we did in this film.”
Nix is now streaming, click below to watch.
