The last place you’d expect to find Kristoffer Polaha is in a horror film.
The actor built his career on Hallmark rom-coms and wholesome family fare. He’s been vocal about his philosophy that what we watch affects our souls the same way food affects our bodies. He’s gone on record saying he’d never do horror. Even his wife was shocked when he told her his directorial debut was for a horror movie.
But the film makes more sense than it initially appears. Mimics is a campy indie about demonic possession and the cost of fame, yes—but it’s also a movie with an uplifting faith element woven through its DNA. Not preachy, not obvious, but present in a way that asks what happens when you’re willing to sign over anything (in this instance, your soul) for success. It’s the kind of hybrid that laughs before it terrifies, exploring the supernatural not as cheap thrills but as a framework for examining sacrifice and agency.
The project began in 2020 when copywriter Mark Oakley reached out to Polaha on Facebook with an absurd pitch: someone desperate for fame who doesn’t care about the cost, dark forces that want agency over your life, a deal with consequences. Polaha was skeptical about doing a horror film from the get-go.
“I don’t like horror films in general,” Polaha admitted. “Especially after Sept. 11, 2001, I feel like they’ve become cruel. There was something tongue-in-cheek about pre-Sept. 11 horror, something relatively safer. Then it got really, really dark.”
Yet something about this story hooked him. Oakley wasn’t a screenwriter—he was a copywriter with an idea. The two spent three years developing the script, exploring what happens when someone wants fame badly enough to surrender agency over their own life. Polaha, who has a background as a Christian storyteller, kept pushing for the film to show both sides: if you’re going to depict darkness, you need to show light.
“If I’m gonna show the malady, I wanted to show the remedy too,” Polaha said.
The collaboration was generous. Oakley let Polaha contribute significantly to the faith elements, particularly a riverside scene that became central to the film’s spiritual thread. But they also wanted to make something for mainstream audiences, not just the faith crowd.
What makes Mimics unusual is how it handles its Christian element—woven through rather than plastered on top.
“I didn’t want to make a ‘faith film,'” Polaha emphasizes. “I wanted to make a movie, something that could stand alongside Chucky and anything else.”
It’s strategic: explicitly Christian content preaches to people who already believe. Everyone else gets missed. And this film wants to talk to everyone.
The reasoning extends to genre choice. Horror, Polaha argued, is actually perfect for exploring Christian cosmology—specifically the parts about spiritual warfare that most faith films ignore.
“When I look at the life of Jesus, He did two things: He healed people and He cast out demons,” Polaha said.
The horror genre seemed like a natural fit for that particular theological thread, the part of Christianity that acknowledges dark forces and the authority to resist them.
But it’s not a perspective that fits comfortably in most Christian cinema, which tends toward inspirational or romantic narratives. To pull this off, Polaha looked to filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino who work in darkness and violence while still crafting compelling stories. He wanted Mimics to function in that space—a horror film that could sit on a shelf next to genre classics but that also explored spiritual territory in a way that felt authentic rather than tacked on.
“I love the idea of very subtly talking about faith in regular movies,” Polaha says. “Where you can show what it’s like outside of that relationship, but you can show what it’s like inside that relationship.”
Mimics operates on this invitational principle. Christianity is a story people choose to believe, and approaching it with absolute certainty turns people off. But sharing it while acknowledging its strangeness creates space for dialogue.
“If you come at it from an angle where it’s 100 percent true and you’re 100 percent wrong if you don’t believe in it, you’re going to turn people off,” Polaha said. “Whereas if there’s a way to talk about your faith story invitationally, by saying, ‘I believe in this wild thing where God came down on earth as a person and died and then resurrected—it’s bizarre—but I wanna share that with you through the joy that I feel.'”
Mimics is in theaters nationwide now.
