Moon Knight Cinematographer Gregory Middleton Discusses Mirrors, Darkness, And The Desert [Interview]

You’ve worked on both horror and superhero shows and movies. You did the cinematography for one of my favorite movies of all time, “Slither.”

I was about to say, was it “Slither”? I was guessing it was “Slither.”

You also worked on the “Watchmen” series and “Smallville.” How did you use the camera to help create this show’s unique mix of caped fantasy and real horror?

Oh, that’s an interesting combination. Well, the biggest thing was I used darkness in the first episode, like lots of black. I mean, when the elevator opens and on the third floor it’s him and just blackness, right? That’s a great way to show him isolated, and it makes you terrified. So there’s a lot of ways to honor or to express the fear of the unknown with the darkness and what you don’t see was a big factor. Then the thing about Moon Knight is he’s an oddball character because he’s… Like in episode 3 when he’s beating up people in the horse arena, he’s a bit like Frankenstein’s monster. It terrifies Steven seeing Mark doing these awful things. So there was this element of how much do we see him? Then we made a deliberate choice.

I think it was Mohamed’s basic thing was, “Well, we want to see this.” Well, originally, the concept was quite different. He’d be more hidden, he’d be this boogeyman, but it was actually better for Steven to really see it. So it was better to have a scene where it was more lighting and he could see because that’s really what Steven wants to see. So a lot of the filmmaking is trying to find the right point of view of the scene for the audience and also for the characters and to do that way, if that makes sense. So that’s two examples of those things.