Joshua Sowden was originally from Virginia, but moved to Los Angeles more than a decade ago. Originally, he wanted to be an actor, but eventually moved behind the camera. He now runs production company, Self Esteem Productions, and has recently finished a feature film, The Book of the Witch. He spoke to us about the movie, the constraints of “solo film-making”, and the need to stay flexible.
How did you get into film-making?
I moved to Los Angeles in 2013 without knowing anyone or having a plan. I didn’t even have a place picked out — I just packed my car and drove across the country to pursue a career in the entertainment industry. I spent a few years acting, but it was when I put on a production of a play that I realized I wanted to direct. I worked on a two one-act play evening with some other folks. I directed the first play and acted in the second, and it was during that first play that I knew I wanted to be behind the camera instead of in front of it. That was around 2015. From there, I started making my own short films and working with really talented actors I had known for years. I built everything up step by step, trying to improve with each film.
Now I have my own production company, and focus on solo film-making, often with little-to-no crew. That approach has allowed me to stay true to my vision while creating films that mean something to me. It’s been a rewarding journey, and The Book of the Witch is the most recent step in that evolution. While I don’t think I can stay a one-man band forever—my back certainly doesn’t think so!—I’ve loved what I’ve done so far.
How would you sell The Book of the Witch to a prospective viewer?
I think it’s a really good time. The film harkens back to the old-school horror movies that I loved growing up, like the original Wolfman or even The Exorcist. It’s not overly gory, but it’s still quite frightening, and I think it really connects on a human level. At its core, the film is about the fear of death—something we can all relate to. Plus, let’s be honest, who doesn’t love a classic witch outfit in a film?
Where did the concept come from?
My very first solo film-making experience was a film called Extramundane [Jim: it’s available on YouTube] At the end of that film, there’s a ritualistic book, and when I finished, I knew I had to tell a story about that book. That’s when I started brainstorming ideas. The book itself was crafted by a dear and talented friend of mine, Daniel Page, and I wanted to find a meaningful reason to explore its story.
Ultimately, the inspiration came from my own fear of death. I began thinking about what the book could do. Inside the book is a ritual to take life, and that made me wonder: What if someone had the chance to use the book to live forever, but at a terrible cost—having to take another person’s life?
I had always wanted to tell a witch story, so I thought, “What if I could tell a grounded, realistic witch story that also explains how the book ended up in Extramundane?” I’d call it a loose prequel. It gives the book a background—what it does, how it works. From there, the character of Victoria was born. Her immense fear of death and desire to avoid it made her the perfect vessel for exploring this story. It felt like the perfect mix of concepts to bring to life.
With a small cast and limited locations, it seems created to fit your resources. Was that a concern, and did you end up cutting out ideas for that reason?
I believe you can tell a great story without having to jump between 14 different places.
For The Book of the Witch, the locations used in the film were all I truly needed to tell the story. There were a few scenes we couldn’t shoot due to time constraints, but not because of location limitations. Ultimately, the final product reflects my overall vision—how I wanted to portray the witch, explore the fear of death, and bring everything to a satisfying conclusion. While there are always challenges on this scale, I didn’t feel restricted in a way that compromised the film. It’s about staying flexible and making it work.
How did you go about casting? I noticed you had worked with Krishna Smitha and Danny Parker-Lopes previously
If you watch my work on my YouTube channel or any of my other films that are streaming, you’ll notice a lot of familiar faces. I take a Quentin Tarantino or Christopher Nolan approach in that sense—I enjoy working with talented people repeatedly for a few reasons. First, at this level, none of us are making huge paychecks, so it’s important to me to showcase actors in different lights, especially those I know are talented, excited to work, and collaborative.
Yes, Krishna Smitha and Danny Parker-Lopes were both in my previous film Our Man in L.A., and while I was working on that movie, I was conceptually planning The Book of the Witch. Based on their talent and what I’d seen in our previous collaboration, they were perfect for the lead roles. Once they were in the same room working together, the chemistry was incredible. I also knew Ali Williams, who plays the witch, prior to filming—she was one of my first roommates when I moved to Los Angeles. She’s extremely talented in cosplay and acting, and it was a perfect fit. She even designed and created the witch costume, did her own makeup, and brought the character to life in a way that was seamless.
Did production go well? Any amusing stories?
Production went surprisingly smooth. We shot the entire film in six days as planned. On set, I rely on pre-visualizing everything—I’ve already “watched” the movie in my head a thousand times by the time we’re shooting, so I know exactly what I need. This approach allowed us to move quickly, shooting only what was necessary for the final edit.
One of the more amusing moments came during the desert shoot. We started early in the morning, and everything was perfect. But by 11 a.m., the winds started picking up, and before we knew it, we were dealing with 30 mph gusts, sand hitting our faces, and everyone squinting through the chaos. I had to cut down the shots to just the essentials, and as soon as we wrapped, we all ran out of there. It was a challenging but fun day that added some excitement to the process!
The score was a particular strength. What can you tell us about that?
I’m so happy you mentioned the score—that was composed by Brandon Lau. I’ve worked with him before on short films and my first feature, Extramundane, and he just keeps getting better. He’s a true up-and-coming talent. For The Book of the Witch, I sent him the script and gave him a few notes. I wanted the strings to evoke the eerie tension of the witch transformation in Snow White, and I told him to “Hans Zimmer the hell out of it.”
Brandon delivered a score that elevates the entire film, especially at this budget level. Music plays a huge role in enhancing the viewing experience, especially since I know a lot of people will watch this on laptops or phones. The sound mix, done by Lars Knudsen, tied everything together beautifully. One of my favorite sequences is the ending with the witch—the score during the stabbing moment is just perfect.
Tell us about some other aspects of the film that you’re particularly proud of.
I’m incredibly proud of how smoothly we shot the film, given the limited resources.
And conversely, what might you have done differently, i.e., if you had more time or money?
If I had more time or money, I would have slowed down. Moving quickly meant there were things I could have shot better or lit differently, and having a director of photography or a line producer would have allowed me to focus more on directing and refining the process. Additional resources might have given us more time to tackle scenes like the desert sequence more thoroughly. That said, I’m incredibly proud of what we accomplished. The Book of the Witch is my best work so far, and I see it as a stepping stone. With more time and money on the next project, I hope to deliver an even better result.
What’s next for you?
Well, I just had a newborn son, so I’ll be taking 2025 off from filmmaking to focus on family. However, I’ll still release a couple of Director’s Cut short films on my YouTube channel for Self Esteem Productions. I’m also working on my next script, which I hope to shoot in 2026. It’s about two brothers who are paranormal investigators called to a haunted house in Virginia. Think Paranormal Activity meets The Haunting of Hill House—a mix of suspense, scares, and emotional depth. I’m aiming to make it a scary yet heartfelt ride, and I hope audiences will check it out when it’s ready!
Below, you’ll find our reviews of The Book of the Witch, as well as Joshua’s previous two features mentioned above, Extramundane and Our Man in LA, along with some quick thoughts from him about those.
The Book of the Witch (2024)
Rating: B
Dir: Joshua Sowden
Star: Krishna Smitha, Danny Parker-Lopes, Ali Williams, Ian Cardoni
With a small cast – barely a handful of speaking parts – and largely unfolding in an empty warehouse, this is clearly a film with limited resources. However, it manages to punch above its weight and deliver some effective chills, despite occasional missteps. Our protagonists are Victoria (Smitha) and August (Parker-Lopes), who share the security detail at a vacant industrial building. They’ve worked together for a while, and are united in their personal solitude. Victoria, however, has a plan to deal with that, having been researching reports of an immortal witch, who has used human sacrifice to prolong her life and resurrect the dead. The sorceress (Williams) is now living in the desert, a convenient bus-ride away for Victoria.
Victoria intends to pay her a visit, and swipe the occult tome which is the source of her power, in order to… Well, that’s one of the areas where the script could perhaps have used more decisiveness. It also feels the actual theft should have been harder – the witch clearly knows Victoria is after her, yet it’s largely a case of sneaking in and picking the book up off the table. From here, it’s not too difficult to work out where things are going to go, and who is going to be the human sacrifice necessary for Victoria to complete the ritual. But will she be able to go through with it? Especially since the previous owner of the volume is not exactly going to get a replacement on Temu.
What lifts the film up are the performances of Smitha and Parker-Lopes, in particular the former. From the moment we meet them, August and Victoria feel real people, in a way that far larger movies often fail to achieve. It is clear Victoria is at the end of her tether, and has been pushed into questionable actions as a result, but we never lose sympathy for her. Sowden has a good eye, especially for lighting, and the growling, electronic score by Brandon Lau does its share of lifting too. Less successful is the witch’s look, which seems to embody every black magic cliché, literally down to a pointy hat, and feels a bit as if it was costumed out of the “sexy Hogwarts” aisle at Party City.
It is one of the few occasions, however, where the low budget pokes through. It looks and, perhaps more importantly for me, sounds impressively like a a fully-funded production. Although the effects are limited, the story doesn’t require much to function, and what there are, prove perfectly serviceable. While I was able to predict the road down which this would travel, I was uncertain of the final destination until the very end – and just as critically, remained interested in the outcome. Again: that engagement is something not always sustained in this jaded horror fan. It’s imperfect, to be sure. Yet there was really nothing I couldn’t forgive, and was often able to forget, courtesy of the solid core elements.
The film is out now to rent/buy on Amazon Prime
Joshua: Extramundane was my very first attempt at making a feature as a solo filmmaker. It was during COVID, so I wrote it in a way that no two characters were ever too close. It was meant to be a total experimental piece, but once I finished editing, coloring, and everything else, I really liked it and decided to put it out into the world. It was made for about $3.5k total and was shot over weekends from December 2020 to March 2021. It was another great collaboration with Brandon Lau on the music.
Extramundane (2022)
Rating: C+
Dir: Joshua Sowden
Star: Brant Rotnem, Craig Gellis, Brock Jones, Cherie Corinne Rice
Anyone remember COVID-19? Five years ago, it was just another over-hyped disease out of Asia. Seems a lot longer ago somehow. It’s a significant factor in this film, with people wearing masks and muttering about “six feet”, which dates it in the same way as flappers jitterbugging to celebrate the end of prohibition. Someday this movie will need to be shown to my grandkids, as an example of what lock-down cinema was like: a handful of cast members, very obviously not getting too close to each other, in a limited location. Helps keeps things cheap though: the IMDb estimates the budget was $3,500. Mostly spent on hand sanitizer and supplies for baking bread, I guess.
Into the pandemic comes Trevor Wilkinson (Rotnem), who has just taken over as property manager for a block of apartments. It’s not long before he is butting heads with the abrasive maintenance man, Jerry (Gellis), and meeting tenants Bobby (Jones) and Jasmine (Rice). However, Trevor gradually comes to believe that not everything is quite right in the building, with a series of tenants – and even his predecessor in the manager position – having suddenly vanished from the complex. Jerry isn’t concerned, stating people leave all the time. But the more Trevor digs up, the more he comes to the inexorable conclusion there’s something sinister going on. Maybe it’s connected to Jerry’s warnings to Trevor, about not going into the maintenance room in the basement?
Certainly, this is one of those cases where Jerry is either an extremely obvious villain, or an extremely obvious red herring. I won’t say which. Either way, settle in, and get ready to watch Trevor slowly walking round a remarkably dimly-lit building. However, this ends up being more effective than it sounds, with some nicely done, almost monochrome photography. The lack of characters works for the film too, providing a sense of near-Gothic isolation. Could probably have used Jasmine flitting along corridors, holding a candelabra there. After initially seeming likely there’s a natural (or, at least, psychotic) explanation for the disappearances, things take a sharp turn for the weird in the last fifteen minutes. It’s here the film is likely at its best, and I wish it had taken this direction earlier.
For in this final chunk, various elements snap together, such as Trevor’s relationships with his mother and father – strained and non-existent, respectively. I thought the latter was going to play a particular pivotal role, before the movie swerved in another direction. It does feel somewhat rushed, perhaps as a result of being so back-loaded, compared to the first hour and a quarter where… not much actually happens. Hey, what do you expect, on a budget that probably would barely cover a month’s rent in Los Angeles? As COVID cinema though, it works reasonably well given the clear restrictions, and provides a glimpse into a time where the end of the world seemed, if not nigh, then at least nigh-ish.
Joshua: Our Man in L.A. was a film I was hired to direct, produce and work as the cinematographer for Saville Park Studios. This was truly a labor of love. The star and writer, Guy Birtwhistle, and I shot the whole thing pretty much by ourselves. The voice-overs were done at his house in a makeshift studio. We had a lot of fun making this film, which was also a product of COVID. When it was written, the idea was to only have one character on screen, and it worked well. It even screened at San Diego Comic-Con in 2024.
Our Man in L.A. (2024)
Rating: B-
Dir: Joshua Sowden
Star: Guy Birtwhistle, Brant Rotnem, Abigail Kate Thomas, Amy Motta
I think I begin to grasp what Sowden said about “focusing the narrative”. Because this is a film with, really, only one actor physically present on screen. When you hear that, it’s difficult to see how this could work – especially in a movie which combines the notably expansive science-fiction and thriller genres. Yet, in the main, it succeeds, using phone calls, virtual reality and other approaches, to work around the self-imposed limitation and keep things interesting. Birtwhistle plays artifact broker Percival Whitby, who retrieves objects, apparently of extraterrestrial origin, from the ocean floor with the help of a sea-faring partner, and sells them to select clients, who can use the items to reverse engineer advanced compounds and tech.
For obvious reasons, this is a fairly shady line of work, and Percival gets burned after trying to broker a deal with a new customer, Dr. Christopher Mercy (Rotnem), and getting paid in counterfeit money. The buyer works for the Hollow Corporation, an arms outfit, and Percival decides he’s going to retrieve his property. However, arms companies do not take kindly to that kind of thing, as our hero quickly discovers, since his estranged wife (Motta), along with his disabled daughter (Thomas), are put in peril, in addition to his partner. For Dr. Mercy wants Percival to divulge the location from which the artifact was pulled, so he can retrieve the whole alien enchilada for… oh, the usual Evil Arms Company purposes, I would imagine.
It’s probably wise that this runs a crisp 72 minutes, and even at that length, the cracks occasionally show. Most obviously, Hollow Corporation really need to review their security precautions, because the ease with which Whitby sashays in to their facilities will not be winning them many defense contracts. I mean, advanced alien technology, folks. You don’t just hand that over to the first guy who shows up with a clipboard and a truck. It might have benefited from making Hollow into a more ominous threat, since it’s all a bit vague: one guy on the phone can only be so menacing. However, if you can squint past elements like these, I’d suggest this plays at a higher level than you might expect.
That said, I went in more or less blind, so had no real preconceptions. It could be considered as a “gimmick” film, like those filmed in a single shot. Although I feel this would be doing it a disservice. Because once I got past my surprise at the notion, I found it unexpectedly easy to forget, providing a fresh approach to the topic. Birtwhistle comes over a bit like Jason Statham’s smarter older brother, who went to college rather than majoring in banging heads together. For obvious reasons, he has to do a lot of heavy lifting, frequently acting against nobody, and does a good job. I certainly found myself rooting for Percival as he tries to protect both his turf and his family.