Character: Sally Owens

Directed by: Rodrigo Cortés

Written by: Rodrigo Cortés

Produced by: Cindy Cowan, Irving Cowan, Lisa Wilson

Cast Members: Cillian Murphy, Robert DeNiro, Sigourney Weaver

Released date: March 2, 2012

Genre: Drama, Fantasy, Horror

Psychologist Margaret Matheson and her assistant study paranormal activity, which leads them to investigate a world-renowned psychic who has resurfaced years after his toughest critic mysteriously passed away.

RELEASE

The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2012, and received a limited release in the United States on 13 July 2012.

FILMING

Filming occurred in Spain and Canada, with ten of the filming locations based in Barcelona, Spain; a week of filming was undertaken at the Fairmont Royal York in Toronto, Canada and significant shots were taken on James Street North in nearby Hamilton, Canada. The filming process for Red Lights commenced in February 2011 and concluded in April 2011.

PRODUCTION STILLS

TRIVIA

• The interception of the wireless transmission and the fake horoscopes handed out in class are taken from James Randi’s actual work of exposing frauds.
• The scene in which Margaret Matheson exposes a psychic healer by listening in on a partner feeding him instructions wirelessly was based on the case in which skeptics James Randi and Steve Shaw (better known under his stage name Banachek), with technical assistance from crime scene analyst and electronics expert Alexander Jason, exposed Peter Popoff in 1986. In that case, as in the scene, Popoff’s wife Elizabeth was feeding him information that she and her aides had taken from prayer request cards filled out by audience members over wireless radio. Some of the dialogue is taken almost verbatim from the actual case. In May 1986, Randi presented the evidence on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962), exposing Popoff’s fraudulent practices. In 1987, Popoff declared bankruptcy, only to make a comeback in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
• In the video lab where Buckley works, there is a copy of the famous poster “I Want To Believe” from The X-Files (1993), but the quote is changed to “I Want To Understand”.
• The song the guy on the toilet is whistling is from the bird-catcher in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”.
• Dr. Matheson (Sigourney Weaver) makes a comment in the movie about Leonard Pallodino being from Argentina. He is played by Argentinian Leonardo Sbaraglia.
• The cards used by Sigourney Weaver to test psychic ability are the same cards Bill Murray uses in the opening scene of Ghostbusters (1984), which Weaver was also in.
• The black and white clip of the Russian woman moving metal objects and matchsticks around on a table shown by Tom Buckley (Cillian Murphy) in class, is the same clip used in The Atticus Institute (2015), another film about clairvoyants.
• The videos of the parapsychological experiments done with Silver at the university mimic those done in real life with Uri Geller at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s. These experiments are discussed at length and clips of the actual video are shown in the James Randi documentary, An Honest Liar (2014).
• Toby Jones, Elizabeth Olsen, and Sigourney Weaver appeared in several movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Cillian Murphy and Burn Gorman appeared in movies in the DC Universe.The interception of the wireless transmission and the fake horoscopes handed out in class are taken from James Randi’s actual work of exposing frauds.
• The scene in which Margaret Matheson exposes a psychic healer by listening in on a partner feeding him instructions wirelessly was based on the case in which skeptics James Randi and Steve Shaw (better known under his stage name Banachek), with technical assistance from crime scene analyst and electronics expert Alexander Jason, exposed Peter Popoff in 1986. In that case, as in the scene, Popoff’s wife Elizabeth was feeding him information that she and her aides had taken from prayer request cards filled out by audience members over wireless radio. Some of the dialogue is taken almost verbatim from the actual case. In May 1986, Randi presented the evidence on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962), exposing Popoff’s fraudulent practices. In 1987, Popoff declared bankruptcy, only to make a comeback in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
• In the video lab where Buckley works, there is a copy of the famous poster “I Want To Believe” from The X-Files (1993), but the quote is changed to “I Want To Understand”.
• The song the guy on the toilet is whistling is from the bird-catcher in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”.
• Dr. Matheson (Sigourney Weaver) makes a comment in the movie about Leonard Pallodino being from Argentina. He is played by Argentinian Leonardo Sbaraglia.
• The cards used by Sigourney Weaver to test psychic ability are the same cards Bill Murray uses in the opening scene of Ghostbusters (1984), which Weaver was also in.
• The black and white clip of the Russian woman moving metal objects and matchsticks around on a table shown by Tom Buckley (Cillian Murphy) in class, is the same clip used in The Atticus Institute (2015), another film about clairvoyants.
• The videos of the parapsychological experiments done with Silver at the university mimic those done in real life with Uri Geller at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s. These experiments are discussed at length and clips of the actual video are shown in the James Randi documentary, An Honest Liar (2014).
• Toby Jones, Elizabeth Olsen, and Sigourney Weaver appeared in several movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Cillian Murphy and Burn Gorman appeared in movies in the DC Universe.

QUOTES

Sally Owen: How did you know that?

Tom Buckley: Because I’m psychic.