Abraham's Boys arrives in theaters next weekend, inviting audiences to experience Van Helsing like they never have before. This revisionist period horror relies on the intricate production design of Steven Cirocco, who conducted heavy research, including reading the original novel by horror literature icon Joe Hill.

I was excited to sit down with Steven to talk all things horror production design, and seeing your work up on the big screen.

Let's dive into the interview.

  - YouTubewww.youtube.com

NFS: Hey Steven! Abraham's Boys tells the story of Van Helsing from a fresh perspective. What was your relationship like with the character and his history before signing on to this project? What kind of research went into your preparation for the film?

Steven Cirocco: I’ve always loved Dracula, Van Helsing, and especially Mina. Funny enough, the first and last monologue I performed in high school was Van Helsing’s “rallying the troops” speech from the end of the Dracula stage play (I believe the William McNulty adaptation). I also have always loved the 2004 Van Helsing movie from an art department standpoint; the set decorator, Anna Pinnock, has a really cool body of work. I’ve also played the Fury of Dracula board game many times, where I always play as Mina. Steven Moffat’s Dracula is also worth mentioning, though more for character than for design. Outside of media, I just think Dracula is just a cool monster: he’s almost like a superhero in the sense that he looks humanoid, but has supernatural powers. Plus, in his human form, he’s portrayed as charming, alluring, and cultured.

All of that makes creating a world and sets around the character particularly easy to lean into magical realism in a fun way because you have this character that has had hundreds of years to develop his style, with the wealth to do so, but has also been affected by an isolation from humans that could alter his sense of style one way or another. We often portray humans as losing touch with the “in” style as they get older, and it begs an interesting question: “If one were immortal, would they lose touch with the modern fashions, or continue to add to their personal sensibilities?”

Most of the design of the film was from Mina’s perspective, however, and not Dracula’s, and a lot of my previous knowledge of what her surroundings might look like came from some of the media I mentioned before, as well as intellectual properties of a similar era, like Sherlock Holmes, and Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. Mina’s style was developed in the industrialization of England, where she was considered middle-class but had upper-class friends, and she brought that part of her to California when she decorated the interior of their home. Their home had electricity, which was still uncommon in that era in this part of the country, so they would be limited in what lighting fixtures they could find in California, and the same goes for artwork, so I imagined they shipped many of these things with them when they moved to their current home.

NFS: The film is releasing in theaters nationwide. What does it mean to you for your production design to be seen on the big screen?

SC: It’s still very surreal to see something I’ve spent so much time working on up on the big screen, especially as the Production Designer. It’s very cool to see a title card with just my name and title on it instead of being one of a hundred names in the crawl at the end. Often, when I’m designing a film, I only get a few chances to look at a monitor or watch a take while they’re shooting, so seeing a completed feature cut together after it’s been colored and sound designed, with an added musical score, is a huge emotional payoff.

It’s always a funny situation working on a horror film and having to tell people in your support system, “it may not be something you want to see on a big screen…” knowing they don’t like horror films and you’re worried you may lightly traumatize them, but this is definitely one of those movies you want to see on the big screen if you can, especially if you’re trying to check out the work my team and I did. The amount of detail we put into these sets will be very apparent in every scene on the screen.

NFS: Can you describe the collaborative process between yourself and the other department heads on Abraham's Boys? How did you all work together to achieve a period-accurate setting?

SC: It was all very smooth for this film. I feel like whenever Natasha Kermani (writer/director) and Julia Swain (Director of Photography) ran something by me, or I ran something by them, we were all immediately on the same page, or at least that’s how I remember it. There have been times in my career when it has be challenging to work with a writer/director because they’re already so invested in an idea of the way the film should unfold, that when the inception of the creative elements begins to happen in pre-production for the other department heads, (which have their own creative sensibilities and set of past experience), pivoting to a new, or altered idea can involve a lot more emotional labor.

Often, these pivots need to happen because of time, budget, or labor constraints, and I think that’s a concept that Natasha understands on a very professional level. The few times I pitched her an alternative that I thought stayed faithful to her original intentions, but could be accomplished by my department’s resources, she was very good at communicating, “this is the narrative beat I need for this moment,” and if our new plan executed that, she never had a problem making minor changes to the script, props or sets to accommodate our capabilities in respect to our limitations. Some of that comes from Natasha’s level of experience, and some of it is just her being a strong, versatile creative, but all of it made the process extremely painless and enjoyable.

  'Abraham's Boys'Credit: Shudder

NFS: Abraham's Boys is unique in that it merges the classic Dracula tale with a coastal California setting. How did you creatively navigate the competing dimensions of the film's setting and tone?

SC: A lot of what made the exteriors period-accurate came from our location at Big Sky Movie Ranch in Simi Valley, CA, as the buildings we used were all already standing. We shot at Big Sky for 15 of our 18 production days, which made it really easy to work on different buildings of the Ranch as we needed them without having to do a company move or dividing the team too far apart.

The interiors were where we were able to incorporate Mina’s gothic London aesthetic into the sets. Dark wallpaper and paint, vintage wood furniture, metal and glass lampshade, and cast iron appliances. All the interiors (with the exception of the upstairs hallway and bedrooms) were a blank slate when we came in, and they didn’t even have electricity, wallcoverings, or finished cabinetry. There are some before photos of the location on my website to give you an idea of the scope of work we accomplished.

We were able to get in a week before production and give the interiors a full facelift, even adding a wall in the kitchen as well as all the light fixtures, down to the light switches. We did run into a problem where we were shooting exteriors in week one and didn’t have the budget to rent the interior furniture at the same time, and there were several shots close to the house looking through windows and glass door panes. In the end, we used a mixture of opaque green, as well as frosted vinyl, on the doors and thicker sheer curtains on the windows, and it all worked out.

I was very intentional not to use any fabric lampshades anywhere in the house, since the room was already so dark from our wallpaper and ceiling paint, and fabric lampshades swallow so much light. We used entirely glass (with one or two metal) lampshades, and I feel like you can really feel the difference on camera. Being a 1915 period piece and having the self-imposed “no fabric lampshades” constraint, I feel like we found every glass lamp in the Los Angeles rental houses by the time we were done (big shout out to Practical Props and Universal Props for providing a large majority of our fixture rentals).

A lot of the heavy lifting for the furniture and props staying in the period was accomplished through the research of my set decorator, Fiona Jett Robinson, and prop master, Starlette Cravings. Both of them did an amazing job of absorbing the era and putting their creative spin on it. There were several times when I would suggest a piece of furniture or a light fixture I thought looked cool, and Fiona would have to point out, “That’s from the ‘20s,” so a lot of the period accuracy is because of her hard work and ability to let me down easy.

NFS: Your work on the indie drama Singing in My Sleep can also be found in theaters this weekend. How did your creative approach differ between the two projects?

SC: Well, some processes are the same in every job: managing a team, breaking down scripts, digesting and executing massive workloads with mostly self-imposed deadlines, and a crazy amount of logistics and coordination of rentals, plus transportation of assets. Other than that, the rest was almost completely different between the two films.

Singing in My Sleep is a modern, grounded slice of life film, and Abraham’s Boys is a stylized, magical realism period piece. With Singing in My Sleep, the big chunk of the sets were within the main character’s house, and after we found the location, we wanted to switch out a good amount of the furniture and artwork, so it became a game of filling the space with the stuff of a hip single mother and her musician daughter. A lot cozier and more colorful compared to the dark gothic interiors of Abraham’s Boys.

It all comes down to character, though. You can tell a lot about someone by the stuff they surround themselves with in the spaces they’re comfortable in, especially in America, where industrialization and mass production of goods are very commonplace. There are always things that are necessary because they’re called out by the script or are needed to support the blocking of the characters during the scene, and the rest comes down to taste and trying to understand what an audience will think about a character when they see their material belongings, even if the audience is feeling a lot of those things subconsciously. That’s the biggest difference between the two films. In Singing in My Sleep, if my team and I are doing a good job, most people will never consciously notice our work, whereas in Abraham’s Boys, the Van Helsings’ surroundings are screaming to be noticed by the audience.

NFS: You also have a really cool background designing sets for BuzzFeed and Smosh. What were your favorite projects from this juncture in your career?

SC: BuzzFeed and Smosh were both huge learning curves in my career. I was doing so many sets a week at both of them, often by myself or with one or two other people, and very little time and money, that a big part of those jobs involved learning to put systems in place to make everything run smoothly and partially autonomously. Sometimes those systems sacrificed being able to take big creative swings, but it was the only way to stay afloat, as I was also managing the Wardrobe department.

The experiences got me comfortable with all the details in the process of bringing sets to life, however, and a better understanding of how the right schedule or paperwork created can leave brainpower free to focus on creative decisions. At BuzzFeed, we had two houses on the street behind the studio that the company owned and connected to the back of the studio lot, and I remember a set very early on where I had to dress one of the living rooms of one of those houses, which was entirely empty to start, and it was just this huge shift in my understanding of how much stuff it takes to fill a room and make it look lived in. You spend so much time in your house, but you rarely think about how much stuff is actually in the room, and what it would be like to go out and find all those things at one time.

Many people get an idea of the amount of stuff in their home whenever they are moving, and most people usually have some sort of thought of “where did all this come from?” or “why do I have so much stuff?” but most people will never have the job of starting with a bare room and taking it to a filled space in a matter of hours. There are sometimes hundreds of minor decisions that have to be made quickly to make something like that happen, and there is a ton of logistics, coordination, and adaptability that goes into it as well. It’s not a job that people who suffer from indecision could do well, I don’t think.

You have to learn to trust your instincts, and have to be able to have a strong sense of both imagination and spatial reasoning. All that to say, BuzzFeed and Smosh weren’t places I was responsible for these huge, groundbreaking sets, but rather a place to hone my skills so I was ready when bigger sets came along. I did, however, do a very cool Hogwarts Dungeon Classroom while I was at BuzzFeed that I’m still really proud of. BuzzFeed had a standing Midwest dive bar set, and in the matter of 24 hours, I turned it into a Hogwarts Dungeon Classroom for the video “If Hogwarts Taught Sex Ed”, produced by Mike Rose, and with help from some great superiors in the art department, Michael Chavez, and Laina Kaffenberger. I’m still really proud of what we pulled off in such a short time. There are photos of the set still on my website, all these years later, after hundreds of other sets have come and gone, because it still stands out as a good representation of my work.

Of course, the video was shot, and 24 hours after that, the set was back to a mid-west dive bar, but that’s the nature of the job: we create, cameras roll, everything gets packed up and carted out like it was never there. It’s why I’ve always loved Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace for the first World’s Fair, a structure, created for a specific event in Hyde Park, that had to be constructed in a way that had not been done yet, with new materials of the age (large glass panes), and then had to be deconstructed just as quick, all without modifying or damaging the surroundings.

NFS: Abraham's Boys traces complex themes of hereditary sin. How did you aim to express these ideas through the production design on the film?

SC: I thought a lot about isolation when designing this film, which is one of the integral elements of horror as a genre. The decision not to put a phone in the Van Helsing home was maybe the most tangible example of that intention within my department, and the location of the movie ranch did a lot of the subconscious heavy lifting for the audience.

I think, when people are isolated from other humans or are isolated from new ideas and new ways of thinking, it tends to weaken our resolve against the difficulties we face in the world, as well as diminish our sense of community, making it harder to value what we have that’s worth being grateful for. There are plenty of studies that show how isolation can shorten a lifespan and diminish happiness, but even on a more zoomed-in thought-to-thought basis, I think isolation can make us lose touch with our sense of identity, sense of community, and, to some degree, our sense of our humanity.

This idea shows up a lot during the film, especially through the character Abraham, but I think most of the idea is reflected through the script, directing, and the acting, more than the production design. My intent was to make sure that when those moments were expressed, the actors, and later the audience, felt like the environments they were expressed in supported the way the characters were thinking and feeling.

NFS: Is there anything else you would like to share about Abraham's Boys or your career at large?

SC: I have another film that I was the production designer of coming out, I believe, later this summer, titled Beneath the Light, written, edited, and directed by my good friend, John Baumgartner. A pretty cool horror film, a lot of which takes place in a lighthouse on Lake Erie. A really interesting and unique experience where we literally had to take boats out to the lighthouse to film and were regularly fighting weather that would create moments where we had a very limited window to get off the lighthouse or we'd get stuck on the island overnight, whether we were done filming or not. It was all shot in Lorain, Ohio, John's hometown, and is worth checking out once it finds its release date!

Other than that, I do some pretty cool Creator to Creator shoots for Sony (produced by Illium Pictures, the production company that made Abraham’s Boys), a few times a year. Right now, they're focused on the filmed podcast version of the show, where the set is consistent every episode, but we have some cool past videos for Uncharted, Spider-Man, The Last of Us, and some other big properties that are worth taking a look at on YouTube. Other than that, I have an island western film on Tubi that I art directed in Hawaii a few years ago called Paradise (2024), written and directed by Max Issacson, starring Patricia Allison, and production designed by the amazing Chad Harris.

Also, check out Abraham's Boys in theaters if you get a chance, and on Shudder after that! Same with Singing in My Sleep, which, in addition to having a limited theater run, is also available to rent on Prime Video, Fandango at Home, and Apple TV.