Editorials
[Special Report] A Sneak Peek At Our Trip To Southampton For ‘Dark Was The Night’!
With principal photography set to wrap any day now on the production from Caliber Media Company, Sundial Pictures and Preferred Content, I can tell you that I recently flew to Southampton to spend some time on the set of Dark Was The Night.
Directed by Jack Heller (Enter Nowhere), the upcoming creature feature’s script, from Tyler Hisel, appeared on the 2009 Black List of best un-produced scripts under the title “The Trees”. The film stars Lukas Haas (Brick, Inception), Kevin Durand (“Lost” Real Steel), Heath Freeman (Skate Land), Sabina Gadecki (Freaky Deaky, “House Of Lies”), Bianca Kajlich (Halloween: Resurrection, “Rules Of Engagement”) and Nick Damici (Stake Land, Premium Rush).
“‘Dark Was the Night’ centers on the isolated town of Maiden Woods, where a nearby logging company has disrupted the balance of the life in the woods. From the frozen forest, an evil will emerge and threaten the local citizens; their only hope being the local Sheriff and his trusted Deputy.”
Hit the jump for the exclusive preview. And check back later for my more extensive set report! 
My flight from LAX into JFK arrives a little after 5PM. Aside from a muffin in the morning, I haven’t eaten all day. I know I’m staying in Southampton, but I figure it’s only a few minutes away from the airport and I’ll be able to eat soon. My stupid reasoning behind this? New Yorkers don’t typically have cars, but they do typically seem to “head out to the Hamptons.” Piece of cake, right?
I was wrong. It’s 40 degrees and raining and I have failed to pack properly so I’m drenched and freezing by the time I get to the car. And the car ride takes a little over three hours. The Hamptons are out there. By the time I arrive at the hotel I feel like I’m shutting down. I take a quick shower and head downstairs where I’m greeted by one of the film’s producers, Dallas Sonnier. The film’s schedule isn’t scarce on night shoots, appropriate given the title. It’s about 10PM at this point and we head to the restaurant where the cast and crew are having “lunch” (quotes refer to the hour of the meal, not the quality of the food – which was actually very good).
As I eat I find myself slowly coming back to life. Everything has been confusing for hours but now I find myself, fully aware, on a film set. And one that turns out to be a really cool film set at that. Shooting a movie is an intense, arduous process that tends to bring people together – but seldom have I seen a cast & crew as naturally familial as this one. They seem to have bonded over a genuine fondness over each other and the material.
We head back over to the church where production is set up. It’s a sprawling location with an exterior that looks appropriately gothic at night (hence the picture you’re seeing in this teaser piece). Inside, it serves as a production office, craft services, dressing room and indeed the set itself. It was actually a very cozy place to spend the next few nights.
But the details of those nights are off limits at the moment. Right now I’m only going to tell you that on set there was a lot of chatter about Tyler Hisel’s Black List screenplay for the film. It had actually been set up at a major studio for some time since it first hit the market in 2009. Both Sonnier and director Jack Heller tracked the project during its development period and were quick to snatch up the rights the moment they became available. A script that had been lost to an entity who didn’t know what to do with it had suddenly found a loving home.
It’s certainly one of the key reasons why everyone’s here. As Sabina Gadecki, who plays Clair, puts it, “It’s a horror film but it’s so much more. It could also be a Sundance drama. You really relate to the characters. ”
When I speak with Hisel about the project’s inception he reveals, “It’s kind of based on a true story. In the 1850‘s this town called Topsham England, this sleepy little town in the middle of the country, woke up to freshly fallen snow. And there were biped footprints stretching through the town. And people freaked out. You can look up the news articles.* So part of the idea of this was, “what would it be like if this happened in rural America today? What would people think? Would they think it was the devil?” That for me was kind of the genesis of it. And then we drew from all sorts of folklore, from all these different sources, to create this monster I don’t think we’ve really seen in American cinema yet.”
*He said I could look up the news articles, so I did. Below is a clipping from the late February 1855 detailing the phenomenon known as “the Devil’s Footprints”.
I talk with Kevin Durand (Sheriff Paul Shields) about his character, “It was all on the page in the script. It was so well executed. When you have the privilege of being a part of it, it’s exciting. You have a visceral reaction to it.”
Lukas Haas (Deputy Donny Saunders) echoes the sentiment, “It’s a cool character for me to play. He’s got a history, he got into some trouble and he’s decided to escape. And he escaped to this little town to try and start a new life. He’s basically just searching. He’s in the process of learning what he wants to be.”
And when I’m finally able to find Jack Heller in a rare moment away from the monitors? “This has a real strong family drama to it that motivates the plot, as opposed to the plot motivating the characters. With this film, I found something that I could tell as a complete story. It definitely has a strong genre element, but I almost think this film could survive if their wasn’t a creature in it.”
That’s about all I can say today. Stay tuned in the coming months for a much more in-depth report detailing my two nights spent on set. I’ve got full interviews with Lukas Haas, Kevin Durand, Heath Freeman, Tyler Hisel, Sabina Gadecki, Bianca Kajlich, Jack Heller and Nick Damici. I saw Heller orchestrate some very cool shots with their two camera set up. I saw multiple scenes evolve on the spot. I heard Lukas Haas play piano in the break room. I watched the film’s stars blow off steam in the hotel room adjacent to mine. I was a “scared townsfolk” background performer. I talked to the man in the creature suit and saw digital mockups of the design. And yes – in the name of glorious practical effects – I saw the creature suit in use.
But, for right now, the only creature I’m allowed to show you is the one I found outside my hotel room.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
4 New Horror Movies Releasing This Week Including ‘Late Night with the Devil’ at Home
‘Ready or Not’: Radio Silence Filmmakers Tease the “Absolute Banger” of a Sequel That’s Taking Shape
‘Sting’ Review – Throwback Creature Feature Entertains With an Impressive Practical Monster
“We Built Every Creature” – ‘Alien: Romulus’ Goes Heavy on the Old School Practical Effects!
‘Terrifier 3’: Filming Has Wrapped on Damien Leone’s Christmas Slasher Sequel!
You must be logged in to post a comment.