Masha Ko had many jobs in the Los Angeles film industry—reality TV story PA, producer, production designer, music video casting director—before she decided to get a master’s degree at USC. But she didn’t study film, obtaining instead a M.S. in applied psychology, a program “where you study consumer and organizational psychology, which you can then apply to any discipline.”

The discipline Ko chose was, naturally, film, and as part of her course work she did “a big study on horror film consumers from a psychological lens. I feel like I truly got a deep insight into what fear is. When you go to see a movie, you have a certain expectation in terms of the kind of feelings you want that movie to give you. So, in order to subvert such expectations, with surprise being a key element of fear, it’s important to deeply understand what those expectations are.”

A precise definition of theme, a deep understanding of the horror genre and, yes, a mastery of the ways in which to scare an audience characterize Ko’s 2024 short The Looming, winner of a Special Jury Award for Best Directing at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Joseph Lopez plays Chester, an elderly man haunted by a deathly presence in his shadowy home. With his fear growing, he reaches out to different people, who while trying their best to relate, do not fully comprehend the journey he is on, and the film unexpectedly becomes a heartbreaking drama of aging. “All these existential questions kind of sneak up on us,” Ko says about the physical and mental infirmities that come with growing older. “And they sneak up on everybody—not just the person who is aging, but the family around them who don’t know how to deal with them. I think the worst thing we can do is to take for granted these moments that we have with people who are reaching the end of their lives.”

Born in Moscow, Ko moved to the United States with her actress mother when she was 14. Attending University of San Francisco as an undergraduate, she said she thought she might want to act too, even taking roles in college plays, “but I realized that I wanted to make things that were directly my own, and to tell stories of forgotten people: people whose experiences are not traditionally seen as ‘beautiful,’ but which need to be celebrated through art.” She graduated with a degree in philosophy and English literature and then, amidst the film industry work and inspired by Japanese butoh dance, created “social art experiments” as part of the performance duo KoHoMa. Her 2022 short, Bona to Vada—shot underwater with a 20-person crew—drew from her experimental work, while The Looming was inspired by the devastating experience of watching her grandfather decline for years and then pass away alone during the pandemic. Another inspiration was a “very chaotic and raw” experimental dance performance by the Akram Khan Company, Outwitting the Devil, in which five dancers surround a confused older man on stage.

The hardest technical aspect of the short was losing a key crew member during the shoot and having to rework the entire material on set. “It was very tough, but also beautiful in how we all came together and wrote a new movie on set, under the immense pressure of time. The DP had to think of new shots on the spot, the lighting people had to figure out whole new lights, the production designer had to dress a new room, and the actor had to improvise multiple scenes as I was behind camera talking to him, also improvising. We walked out of the set not knowing if we had a movie, and we only figured out in post-production that we got saved by one accidental shot that allowed us to do a cut that made the new narrative possible. Also, I don’t know what we would have done without the genius of Andrey Nikolaev who, by his own initiative, constructed an entire scene via game engine technology. The power of collaboration truly is limitless.”

The biggest creative challenge, she says, “was balancing contradictory emotions, like fear and sadness,” within a horror drama that’s genuinely scary. Committed to horror as a serious genre, Ko gets “disappointed when seeing horror films that aren’t scary or deep.” One preparation was analyzing Gore Verbinski’s The Ring with Bordwellian precision, studying its accordion rhythms of tension and release down to the second. “You walk out of that movie feeling like you just had the most horrific experience, but there’s only a couple jump scares,” she says.

Following her Sundance success, Ko is at work on a feature expansion of The Looming that’s set up at A24 with Square Peg’s Ari Aster and Lars Knudsen among the producers. But about that project, and how it may or may not correspond to the short, Ko just says, enigmatically, “I would just say it will be a very surprising new work, which is very exciting to me.”—Scott Macaulay/Image: Alexx Henry