How 2025’s Creepiest Cosmic Horror Movie Was Made On An Indie Budget
Ash director Flying Lotus reveals the secret to making his microbudget sci-fi horror.
A destroyed space station. Bloodied corpses littered around the hallways. And a lone survivor plagued by mysterious visions of melting faces and demonic visages. They’re striking images that kick off the intriguing premise of Shudder’s new cosmic horror movie, Ash. And they were images that came fully formed from director Steven Ellison, better known as Flying Lotus, who came to his feature directorial debut with a deck and concept art already ready to show his cast.
“I made a deck really early on and it had little elements of a lot of sci-fi films,” Flying Lotus tells Inverse.
The sci-fi movie inspirations are clear: Ash, which follows astronaut Riya (Eiza González) as she awakens in a space station to find her entire crew murdered by something, is a little bit Alien, and a little Event Horizon. The script, penned by Jonni Remmler, couldn’t help but evoke those sci-fi classics, so Flying Lotus wanted to make sure that he didn’t try to tread on their well-worn territory. “I watched those ones early on just to be like, ‘OK, don't do these,’ because those were done so well and they're so infectious in culture. Maybe try to take the road a little less traveled if you can,” he says.
So Flying Lotus instead turned to a different inspiration: video games. “There were a couple titles specifically that I was really into,” Flying Lotus reveals. “The Resident Evil series, Silent Hill, Dead Space... There were a few games that I played that really impacted me and informed some choices that I made, because when I got the script, it reminded me of a video game.”
As a groggy Riya awakens and tries to piece together what happened, Ash certainly feels close to the opening hours of a video game. Riya has no memory of who she is or what transpired, and spends the first moments of the film wandering through the devastated space station — she grabs some water, she gives herself a medical procedure (via helper droid), and she gathers information about the bodies of her crewmates littered around the halls. Some were stabbed, some were ripped open — and it all seems the work of some horrible monster. But most mysterious of all is the planet this station is on — a strange, desolate world with purple skies and dazzling lights. It’s an awe-inspiring cosmic vision that seemed impossible to achieve on the limited budget that Flying Lotus was given.
“When I first sat down with him, he showed me the world a little bit, and I was just blown away, and I thought to myself, ‘How are we going to do this with the budget that we have?’” Aaron Paul, who plays the other lone surviving astronaut, tells Inverse.
Adds Gonzalez: “I kept thinking that, because he would show us the imagery, and I was like, ‘OK, but like... the budget.’”
Eiza Gonzalez and Aaron Paul in Ash.
So how did Flying Lotus manage to achieve his awesome cosmic vision on an indie film budget? “We were really lucky to have had our complete sets built,” Flying Lotus says.
Most of the movie takes place entirely in the space station, which was a completely practical set housed inside a warehouse. “That alone just creates this immersive feeling and you know it's real. You know it's tangible. There's no fake walls or anything like that or we're not hiding anything.”
As for the visual effects of the dream-like, alien planet? Flying Lotus says he taught himself enough about visual effects to create an almost-finished pre-visualization that the VFX house could use. “I spent some time learning visual effects while I was waiting for the movie to kick off,” Flying Lotus says. “Some of those pre-viz things got beefed up by the VFX house and they ended up in the film so it wasn't necessarily time wasted, I guess, and I learned so much.”
The effect is nothing short of out of this world. The planet is a desolate space full of beautiful, vibrant colors. But there is a haze settled around the surface that is inarguably eerie. And when Riya spots a figure in the distance, waving at her from afar, it only cements Ash as being a truly creepy piece of indie sci-fi cinema.
“[Flying Lotus] really had a vision,” Gonzalez says. “He crushed it,” Paul concludes.
