Presence may not be your typical horror movie, but that doesn't mean it won't leave you a bit shaken up.

Over Zoom I spoke to Koepp about writing within the confines of the film’s single point-of-view, the value of what’s left out of a story, dreams and screenwriting, and his thoughts on the business of screenwriting today. Presence opens January 24, 2025 from NEON.

Sundance, Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp return with Presence, a formally fascinating take on the ghost story.

Koepp's writing is thorny and cuts deceptively deep, like a scrape that looks like a surface wound until it won’t stop bleeding.

Steven Soderbergh often applies his brainy, process-based approach to new genres; with Presence, he tries his hand at ghost-story horror.

The entire film is shot entirely from the ghost's point of view, the audience haunting a family that has recently moved into a New Jersey home, not realizing that something was already living there. Critic Sean Burns says it's a great gimmick,

The inventive director embraced POV filmmaking on “Presence,” his haunted-house film shot from the spirit’s perspective.

Steven Soderbergh's Presence, starring Lucy Liu, Julia Fox, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Eddy Maday and West Mulholland, is uniquely memorable.

In Presence, cinema’s most shape-shifting director unveils his latest trick: a ghost story told from the spectre’s perspective

The writer teams with Steven Soderbergh on this haunting story with a twist: The entire film is shot from the point-of-view of the ghost.

Lucy Liu stars in the director’s clever haunted-house mystery that adopts the perspective of the specter.