Jason Blum has a rule for cheap horror that every producer in this tier can recite with a drink in hand: you may have a big cast, many locations, or heavy practical effects, and you may choose two. Nicholas Pineda, making his first feature, Infirmary, could afford one. He chose the building. Everything else in this production, the form, the cast size, the story, even the title, is downstream of that single pick, and the result, a found-footage night shift in a psych ward shot entirely inside a real abandoned hospital in Los Angeles, premiered at FrightFest in the UK and is now streaming on Shudder. I have not read a cleaner demonstration of the one-rule constraint this year, so let me walk it in the order the decisions were actually made, because the order is the lesson.
The camera came before the story
Pineda’s first decision was not a premise but a lens. During the pandemic he was watching real police body-cam footage on YouTube, and he noticed what any of us who have suffered through the format’s third decade have noticed: nobody had made a found-footage film through a body cam. The attraction was not novelty for its own sake but a structural repair. The found-footage genre’s chronic wound, he says, is justification, the constant strain of explaining why a character is still recording while being chased, or the fallback into mockumentary. Strap the camera to a security guard’s chest and the question dies: the recording is his job. Voilà, the form’s oldest excuse removed by casting the right profession.
From the camera, the building blocks followed like dominoes, and he lists them with a producer’s candor. Body cam; one location, because of money; a very limited cast. So, who wears body cameras in one building at night? Security guards. One must be the rookie, young and green; one the overbearing supervisor; and a third body, the office administrator, because a building needs someone who belongs to it. The story was originally set in an abandoned office. Then they found the hospital, and the story was re-crafted around it, which is the correct direction of travel for a micro-budget: the location is the senior partner, and the script adapts to the place that will actually let you in. The hospital’s own guards became collaborators without knowing it, telling stories on the location tours that the production wrote down and folded in. Katy Krauland wrote the screenplay from that material, with Pineda on story.
A year of asking, then a night shift that never ended
Here is the number that matters most in this production, and it is not a dollar figure. It took roughly a year to convince the hospital’s owners to let the film shoot there. A year of asking, for a building that then hosted every scene of the picture, nothing cheated in a studio, nothing shot off-site, and which was, in the director’s words, as disgusting and frightening as it looks on screen. When you have spent a year on one door, you shoot the whole film behind it, and that is exactly the economy at work: the permission was the budget, and the budget was spent on access rather than on sets.
The building returned the investment with interest and with conditions. There were break-ins during the shoot, so the film’s premise, intruders in a locked hospital at night, happened to the production making it; tant pis for the line between documentary and fiction in that genre. And the guards had a standing instruction for the crew: a pitch-black section of the basement where no lights worked and which they described as deeply haunted was to be avoided at all costs. Mon Dieu, the crew obliged. Log this under crew conditions rather than ghost stories, because that is how a set-facing reader should take it: a unit of three actors and a skeleton crew working nights in a derelict hospital with security incidents and no-go zones is a working-conditions profile, and the fact that it doubled as atmosphere does not make it less of one.
The craft response to all this was to put the money where found footage usually has none. Pineda speaks of adding cinematic layers through sound design and score, through cinematography and lighting, to keep the body-cam frame from reading as cheap. I will not pretend to the sound bench’s expertise, but I will note the logic from the director’s chair: when the image is locked to a guard’s chest, the ear is the only free camera you have, and a filmmaker who understands that will spend on it. He also imposed something rarer than any gear choice, an embargo on watching any found-footage films for the length of the production, so as not to borrow reflexes, while admitting that Rec bled through anyway. The interviewer at Borrowing Tape proposes the two as a double bill, and I would not argue.
The takeaway, which he gives you himself
Asked for his biggest lesson, Pineda does not talk about the camera or the ghosts. He talks about post. Give yourself time to edit; allow yourself pickups and new scenes if the cut asks for them; do not treat the first shoot’s material as a cage. He credits the lesson partly to studying how Paranormal Activity was made, and it is the most transferable sentence in the interview, because the micro-budget reflex runs the other way: we got it once, we must make it work. A production that has already spent a year securing a building has, perversely, the strongest case for budgeting a second week inside it, after the first cut, when it finally knows what the film is.
So the sequence, for anyone prepping a contained genre debut: choose the form that solves your genre’s structural problem, not just the one you can afford; let the location you can actually get rewrite the script you wrote for the one you cannot; collect the building’s own testimony and put it on the page; spend the little you have on sound, because the picture is already decided; and hold back time and money for pickups, because the edit will ask. One real hospital, three actors, a year at the door, and a camera that never has to explain itself.
To the location managers and producers in the room: what is the longest you have ever courted a single building, and did you shoot the whole film inside it once you got the keys? The comments are open.
Some of my notes for this one come from the Borrowing Tape podcast transcript with Nicholas Pineda and his AMA in r/foundfootage.