Presence, which is now in theaters, turns the typical haunted house film on its head by following the point-of-view of a ghost rather than the people it’s haunting.
The story begins to unfold when a family of four moves into a new suburban home after the teenage daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) experiences the tragic death of her friend. She’s the focus of much of the film’s paranormal activity, as the presence seems to have a fondness for her.
Liang told Yahoo Entertainment that the cast dealt with paranormal activity while filming, especially her, which she credited to their hotel situated close to “an old people’s home.”
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“I experienced my alarm blaring when I didn’t set it, my toilet flushing and we all had really weird dreams,” she said.
Liang’s co-stars Eddy Maday and West Mulholland, who play her brother and her brother’s friend, respectively, were a bit more skeptical — though they admitted that their dreams were indeed unusual.
“She started telling us that she was having these paranormal experiences, so maybe some of the ones toward the end weren’t so paranormal, but they were definitely experiences,” Mulholland told Yahoo Entertainment.
Lucy Liu, Eddy Maday, Callina Liang and Chris Sullivan in Presence. (Neon/Courtesy Everett Collection)
Liang said that after she spoke up about the initial haunting, she heard “random scratches and knocks on my wall and door and stuff [that] really scared me.”
Mulholland and Maday chuckled, then fist bumped. “These ghosts, man,” Maday said..
Still, Liang maintained that she felt haunted.
“It was my second time, so I wasn’t that creeped out,” she said. “My first was in university in New York. The dorm I stayed at for student housing, it was haunted. There was a presence in there.”
Liang said she would wake up from naps with writing on the wall, see inexplicable shadows and feel something walking behind her. She was living with three other girls at the time, and they coexisted with the presence, which they named Peter.
Mulholland interjected to add that Presence director Steven Soderbergh used the pseudonym “Peter Andrews,” his father’s name, as his cinematographer.
“He was the one manning the camera, so he himself was the presence while filming,” he said. “In a way, Peter came back.”
In keeping with his big brother character, Maday told Yahoo Entertainment that he’s doubtful about hauntings.
“I haven’t had any particular experiences where I’ve seen something that I couldn’t explain, so I look forward to it,” he said. “I think it’d be cool when it happens, but [it hasn’t happened] yet.”
In Presence, the ghost isn’t horrifying. What the family is dealing with is, though.
Lucy Liu in Presence. (Neon/Courtesy Everett Collection)
Lucy Liu plays the mother, a serious businesswoman named Rebekah. She pushes back against any suggestion that her daughter might need professional help with her grief and openly expresses her preference for her son.
“I think processing loss and grief is everybody’s business when it comes to a family,” she told Yahoo Entertainment. “I think she doesn’t have that recognition until it’s kind of stabbed into her soul.”
Liu said that taking on a character so rough around the edges was “challenging,” but she wanted to work with Soderbergh. She said that on the first day of production, instead of asserting that this would be a “great movie,” he announced that “this is either going to work or it’s not.”
That was “titillating” for her.
“Everything he does is risk-taking and experimentation … there was no such thing as failure,” Liu said. “There was only experimentation, which is what science is, which is what nature does, which is what life is.”
Presence is now playing in theaters.
