Magick Mtn Interview | Fantastic Fest 2026
There are movies built from screenplays, production schedules and carefully controlled sets, and then there is Magick Mtn, a handmade occult oddity that appears to have grown as organically as the strange collection of artists, musicians and practicing occultists who inhabit it.
At Fantastic Fest 2026, Horror Movies Uncut sat down with filmmakers Hana Mae Lee and Hal Satin alongside stars Daniel Adkins and Ben Price to discuss the unconventional process behind the film, its black-and-white aesthetic, extensive improvisation and the strange underground world that emerged when the filmmakers allowed their collaborators to help shape the movie around them.
For Lee and Satin, Magick Mtn began close to home.
The filmmakers traced part of the inspiration to their neighborhood and an interest in curses, folklore and the legends surrounding Laurel Canyon, an area with a long history connected to musicians and counterculture. Rather than constructing that world around a conventional cast, they turned toward people already living within the artistic communities the movie wanted to explore.
“Everybody that’s in the movie is a practicing occultist, practicing musician, architect and artist and costume designer slash fashion designer,” Lee explained. “No one’s a professional actor, but they’re all our professional friends.”
That distinction became fundamental to the finished film. Magick Mtn doesn’t simply attempt to recreate an underground culture from the outside. Its performers bring pieces of their own lives, professions and personalities into a world populated by goblins, metalheads, ghosts, bank robbers and occult imagery.
Adkins’ involvement provides one of the clearest examples. A tarot card reader and performer in real life, he initially connected with Lee through a reading before becoming involved with the film. Rather than arriving to perform a rigidly scripted role, he was given footage and information about the world that had already been created and allowed to respond to it.
“The whole process was super fun and kind of free flowing,” Adkins said. “Honestly, I didn’t really know what I was getting into because I hadn’t seen any of the clips or anything like that.”
When he arrived to film, the process became something closer to guided improvisation.
“They would kind of just give me an idea of the scene and I would kind of just try to narrate it with the information I had,” he said.
That freedom wasn’t simply an acting technique. It reflected how Magick Mtn itself was constructed.
The movie did not follow the traditional progression of completing a screenplay, entering production and shooting predetermined scenes. Lee and Satin had already filmed portions of the project when a drive to Joshua Tree helped reveal what the larger structure could become.
“What if this is like a fairy tale?” Lee recalled thinking.
That realization allowed the filmmakers to treat the material less like one uninterrupted narrative and more like a collection of stories connected by a common thread. Adkins’ character could then function as a kind of guide through the pieces of the world the filmmakers and performers had been assembling.
The result is deliberately difficult to categorize. During HMU’s conversation, we described the film as something resembling Aleister Crowley colliding with Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes — an occult object built as much around conversations, personalities and atmosphere as conventional narrative machinery.
Its visual identity follows the same philosophy.
Magick Mtn is presented in black and white, a decision partly born from the limitations of the production but also heavily influenced by black metal album artwork. Satin wanted the movie to possess the degraded quality of something simultaneously digital and strangely displaced in time.
“I wanted something that was digitally degraded, but also looked like it was from the past,” Satin said.
Limited equipment became part of that aesthetic rather than an obstacle to disguise. Lenses were borrowed. Makeup and graphic design were handled within the filmmakers’ community. Locations came through friends and collaborators. The restrictions forced Lee and Satin to continually rethink how scenes could be captured rather than waiting for ideal production circumstances.
That process gave Magick Mtn its punk-rock character.
“I love handmade ephemera,” Satin said. “I’d like something that had that texture and that feel as you’re watching it.”
Lee similarly found that the production’s limitations could become useful. Without the resources of a commercial production, the filmmakers had to remain flexible, changing plans when light, equipment or circumstances made the original idea impossible.
Instead of attempting to conceal those limitations beneath artificial polish, Magick Mtn incorporates them into its identity.
“Everybody put in their own projects in this,” Lee said, noting that music from her brother’s bands dating back to the 1980s and ’90s became part of the film.
That collaborative philosophy extended directly to the performances.
Price described receiving a phone call from filmmakers he already cared deeply about and agreeing to participate before fully understanding what that participation would involve. His eventual character description wasn’t exactly conventional: a “stoner plumber” who transforms into a “demented god.”
For Price, that was enough.
“I’m not an actor, I’m just a musician,” he said. “I was like, I will do anything for you, anything.”
Once on set, he met one of his scene partners roughly 20 minutes before filming. Instead of rehearsing tightly scripted dialogue, the pair began reacting to one another, discovering the rhythm of the scene as the cameras rolled.
“He would say something wild that I would instantly just respond immediately, and then kind of vice versa,” Price said. “We were able to just play off of each other.”
Lee admitted that relying so heavily on improvisation initially made her nervous. As a professional actor herself, she was familiar with how quickly poorly controlled improvisation can slow a scene or pull attention away from the story.
Her concerns disappeared once filming began.
“Everyone was so good at the improv,” Lee said. “Like, better than many professional actors.”
That success depended heavily on trust. Satin and Lee knew their collaborators as friends, but they also understood them as performers, musicians, designers and artists accustomed to expressing themselves in front of others. Instead of asking them to disappear completely inside traditionally constructed characters, the filmmakers found ways to use qualities that were already there.
Sometimes the collaborators pushed things further themselves. Satin recalled expecting one architect appearing in the film to require a more restrained approach before the performer instead encouraged them to cover him in blood.
That willingness to embrace the strange appears everywhere in Magick Mtn. The film moves through occult philosophy, music, architecture, black metal imagery, supernatural folklore and eccentric conversations without sanding away the seams connecting them.
Fantastic Fest consequently provided an appropriate place to finally put that experiment in front of an audience.
The team had watched the movie repeatedly during production on laptops and projectors, but experiencing it alongside a festival crowd was different. Price recalled being able to “hear and feel the energy” as viewers reacted to something the group had created together.
For a movie constructed through experimentation, that communal response completed another stage of the process.
But Lee and Satin’s hopes for Magick Mtn extend beyond its initial festival screenings. They imagine a life for the movie that sounds appropriately similar to the object they created: something that might disappear for a while before being rediscovered by the right person.
Satin described the appeal of creating a physical release that might feel as though someone unexpectedly pulled it from the back of an old record store — an artifact whose origins aren’t immediately obvious and whose contents feel slightly forbidden.
“I think it has potentially a future where it would be discovered,” he said. “It gets buried and gets pulled out.”
That may ultimately be the most fitting future for Magick Mtn. The movie wasn’t manufactured to look like a strange underground artifact. It was built like one — assembled by friends, musicians, occultists, architects and artists who contributed pieces of themselves until a film emerged.
And if, years from now, some curious horror fan finds a copy buried behind a stack of forgotten records and wonders exactly what they’ve stumbled across, Magick Mtn may have accomplished precisely what its creators intended.
Looking for your next horror watch? Explore Bloodstream, an HMU streaming partner, for independent horror, cult discoveries, and more.
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