Movie Spotlight: Vacant

The tenants keep disappearing. Trevor has inherited a building that nobody in their right mind would want, and the more he looks into what’s happening, the more it becomes clear that the answers are directly beneath his feet.

Joshua Sowden wrote, directed, and produced Vacant, a horror film shot almost entirely by himself during the final stretch of the pandemic. The building was real, the isolation was real, and the premise grew out of both. “I had access to an apartment building, and everybody seemed to be locked away,” he says. “That was the inspiration for writing this.”

It started with the job

Sowden was a property manager when he wrote the film and saw things in that role he describes as genuinely horrific. That was his entry point. He thought a mystery horror set in that world would be interesting, “especially when you layer in the isolation that the pandemic forced on so many people.” The combination of the job and the moment felt like exactly the right material. Property management is already a lonely job, he says. During the pandemic it became something else entirely. “You didn’t know what you could do, what you couldn’t do, who you could be around. That fear shaped everything.”

Connected through the pipes

The visual center of the film is the piping in the garage. “It does a lot of work on its own,” Sowden says. “It’s dim, dark, creepy, rusty.” He used it as a metaphor for what the pandemic revealed: everyone isolated in their own unit, but all connected through the same system. The timing has a strange quality to it. Before COVID, buildings were never fully occupied at once. Night shifts, weekend trips, travel. The pandemic forced everyone home simultaneously for an extended period, and Sowden found that deeply unsettling. “That energy flowing through the pipes felt especially significant.”

From Extramundane to Vacant

The film was originally called Extramundane. Sowden explains the word precisely: it refers to that which exists outside the material world, which he felt was directly relevant to the story. The problem was that audiences couldn’t get a sense of what they were walking into. “Part of the business of filmmaking is giving people at least a feeling from the poster and the title of what the movie is going to be,” he says. Vacant felt stronger. The retitle also gave him a reason to revisit the pacing, the color, and to bring in stronger VFX work. Everything now operates in unison under the new title.

Shot alone

Sowden shot the entire film as a one-person crew. He didn’t want to put anyone at risk while the pandemic was still present. The first scene he shot was Bobby going to his car for a USB charger. “After we got that scene, I thought: if I can pull this off completely solo, I can shoot the whole movie. And I did.”

Sound design came from mixer Neisha Heinis, who Sowden says built the dread exactly as the film needed it. The score is by Brandon Lau. “He has a real gift for constructing exactly what a scene needs to pull the audience in.” For the video chats and on-screen texts, Sowden made a deliberate choice to keep the audience oriented, framing the other character directly rather than zooming in on a phone screen. He says it invites you into the character’s headspace rather than watching from a distance.

The thing beneath the building

The basement was always the destination. Sowden was drawn to the question of what’s in the dark corner nobody goes to. The maintenance room they used worked perfectly. But the space wasn’t the real interest. He wanted the villain to have a genuine motivation, one that made sense from inside his own logic. “A villain never really thinks of themselves as a villain,” Sowden says. “What Jerry is doing, in his own mind, is righteous and justified.” Jerry’s trauma runs parallel to Trevor’s throughout the film, and the collision between them was always going to come. The garage, the basement, all of it represents “those deep, dark secrets and traumas we lock away in the furthest corner we can find.”

What to know before you press play

“Sit back and enjoy the ride,” Sowden says. “It’s a slow burn, that’s no secret. Hopefully the mystery keeps you guessing. And by the end, it leaves you wanting a little more, but also giving you just enough closure.”

Horror

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Streaming now on Relay.