As charismatic conman Sawyer in Lost, Josh Holloway has established a loyal fanbase. But will they follow him into the woods for his new supernatural thriller, Whisper? David Grove reports from the set of the movie.

Josh Holloway runs through an icy clearing with an axe in his hand. There’s blood in the snow, and two bitten-off fingers. On a frozen lake, he looks down and sees the face of a dying friend under the ice. He is a long way from Hawaii, where, as James 'Sawyer' Ford, he is one of the stars of Lost.

Holloway is on the Vancouver set of Whisper (aka Hellion), his first feature film since Lost began in 2004. The frozen lake is actually on the edge of an Olympic-sized swimming pool at the University of British Columbia. Students loiter in the background as Holloway swings the axe down over and over again. After a few takes, he retires to a nearby tent, while stuntmen dive under the water to prepare the ice for more filming.

The actor seems relaxed, despite the pressure of moving from television to films. “Do I feel pressure? Hell, yes. I’m on a great television show, and there’s lots of actors who try to make the jump to feature films and fail, so there’s lots of pressure.

"When we were finishing up the first season of Lost, I knew there was a good chance that I would do a film during my hiatus. I was offered lots of scripts and I chose this one because I liked this character the best. I hope the film works so I can do more in the future, but my main focus is always on Lost."

Going straight

In Whisper, Holloway plays Max Truemont, an ex-convict who wants to go straight. But circumstances conspire to lead Max and his wife Roxanne (Sarah Wayne Callies) towards hellish destruction. Unable to get a bank loan, Max teams up with a couple of crooks to kidnap the eight-year-old son of one of the richest women in New England. But no one seems to want him back, and the situation turns deadly when the angelic-looking boy turns out to be pure evil.

“Our concept for the film is Ransom meets The Omen," beams producer Damon Lee. "The kid is the devil. The Omen had Damien as the anti-Christ, but our kid, David (Blake Woodruff), is the devil himself. The thing that made The Omen so scary is that it was so believable and grounded in reality. Gregory Peck is trying to find out who his son is, and even at the end of the film he has a hard time believing that the kid is evil.

"David attacks by whispering at people and getting in their heads. He drives people so crazy that they start killing each other or committing suicide. But how do you kill a child, even if you suspect he’s the Devil?”

"Max would never ever hurt a child'" says Holloway. "Even when he realises that David is evil he still can’t bring himself to kill the boy. Roxanne sort of becomes David's surrogate mother. Things escalate until Max almost feels like he has to kill his own wife.”

Cabin fever

Most of the action in Whisper takes place in and around the massive cabin that serves as Max’s hideout. The icy exteriors were filmed in British Columbia and the Yukon, with the cabin interiors located inside nearby MJA Studios. The cabin is full of dead animal heads and religious iconography. There’s a grand hall that contains a church podium and an altar, and a mysterious attic (about which the less said the better).

David’s room in the cabin is filled with drawings of the film's other characters in various stages of death - drawings that presage those characters' actual fates. The eerie tableau looks like an homage to Damien: Omen II, where the different faces of the anti-Christ were painted on a stone wall. And, just like Damien in the Omen films, young David seems determined to rule the world, one victim at a time.

But 10-year-old Blake Woodruff doesn’t seem at all traumatised playing the devil incarnate. In fact, the Cheaper by the Dozen star seems to be loving it. “David has the ability to control people by whispering at them,” says Woodruff. “You hear him in your head and he drives you crazy. He knows things that no eight-year-old kid could ever know, and he can control animals and make them attack.

"David doesn’t actually have to do anything to kill people. The characters either kill each other, or kill themselves. By the time they realise David is evil, it’s too late. As an actor, I just try to play David as a normal kid, because I think the nicer you are, the scarier you can be.”

Award winning

Whisper is directed by Stewart Hendler, who joined the project late during pre-production after another director left the project. The 20-something Hendler is an award-winning short film director making his feature debut, but the crew is not short on experience, thanks to the presence of veteran cinematographer Dean Cundey.

Cundey is best known for his classic collaborations with John Carpenter and has definite ideas on how to make a successful chiller. “All of today’s supernatural horror films seem to be influenced by the Japanese horror films," he says. "Those films made great use of HD technology, which is really the new evolution in genre film-making.

“The challenge for me shooting this film is that the story is set in the snow with lots of trees, so I decided to shoot with a black and white palate to establish a cold and claustrophobic feel. You look at a film like A Simple Plan and you almost think of it as being a black and white film, because of the snow and the dark subject matter and the stark setting.

”This film is like that, too. It’s a small-big story that takes place in a remote setting, with characters who are isolated, but which contains a character who’s the devil.”

Josh homme

So, will Whisper be the film that launches Josh Holloway’s film career? Producer Damon Lee, for one, is convinced that Holloway will become a major star on the big screen. “I think of Josh as a cross between Clint Eastwood and Paul Newman,” he says. “There are so few movie stars left in the world today who have that manly presence about them."

For Holloway, the pressure of making his feature debut is made easier by the fact that he can always return to his television family on Lost. “I’m a 10-year overnight success story," he says. "So I don’t take the whole fame thing real seriously.

“Seems like yesterday I was doing a show when my wife called and told me that she had the script for Lost. Of course, the biggest surprise when I read that first script was how much dialogue I had - pages of monologues - I couldn’t believe it. I was preparing to be a real estate agent.

"I look forward to being on Lost for as long as Sawyer survives, as well as doing more films in the future, if the scripts are good. But what I’d really like to do most of all is to get an RV and take a trip to Alaska with my wife. It’s just hard to find the time.” Best stay out of the snow...