Level 33 Entertainment and Red King Cinema are bringing their award-winning independent horror film, The Shade, to theatres across North America on Friday, September 20th. Starring Chris Galust (Give Me Liberty, Mending the Line) and Tony Award-winner Laura Benanti (tick, tick… BOOM!, No Hard Feelings).
The Shade marks writer/director Tyler Chipman’s feature debut, produced by David Purdy for Red King Cinema. Co-founded by the storytelling duo in 2019, Red King is focused on developing, producing and distributing unique content for the independent film market.
The Shade began its journey as a short film, but Chipman says the aim was always to expand into feature territory: “Dave and I knew from the outset that Red King would be a feature film production company, but we also knew we needed to start small and work our way up to a production of that scope. We made the short film more as a stepping stone toward the feature since we wanted some experience working on a larger scale than we had previously.”
Conceived as an exploration of mental health, family dynamics, and generational trauma, The Shade follows twenty-year-old Ryan Beckman (Chris Galust) in the aftermath of the tragic loss of his father. Ryan lives with his mother Renee (Laura Benanti), and spends his days apprenticing at a local tattoo shop and looking after his younger brother James (Sam Duncan). The grieving college student struggles to hold his family together as an unspeakable darkness plagues his older brother Jason (Dylan McTee)—a collegiate athlete who has unexpectedly returned home mid-semester. When a mysterious entity begins stalking Ryan, he is forced to confront the dark presence before it destroys what remains of his family.
“We’ve always envisioned Red King as a vehicle for telling stories as honestly as possible, regardless of how complex the subject matter might be. We look for new ways to blur genre lines to shine a light on important topics, and we think The Shade is the perfect film to introduce our brand of cinema to the world,” says Purdy.
Making the jump from short to feature can be a nerve-racking undertaking, but Chipman shares that in this instance, it wasn't so wildly different from The Shade‘s short film shoot: “We had quite a large crew for a short film and shot for an entire week. Many of the crew members even remarked that it felt more like a feature set than a short film.
“By the time we got to the feature, we had a fairly solid handle on all the logistical insanity and large-crew dynamics you need to be able to manage to successfully traverse the production of a feature film. Artistically speaking, I work with my closest collaborators in the same way regardless of the scale of the film.”
Obviously, the amount of time that goes into shooting a feature-length production is much longer than the time spent on set for a short. In addition to scheduling around an 11-year-old actor and shooting multiple night exteriors, Chipman shares another challenge in the transition: “A single day on a film set can be long and grueling, so when you go from a handful of days to almost 30, like we did, it can be a bit daunting. Everyone there has to show up and give 100% every single day, and it’s obviously harder to sustain that energy and morale over a longer period of time, especially when you’re shooting weeks of overnights!
“The stakes are so high every time you step on set when you’re shooting an indie — time and financial resources are extraordinarily precious, the possibility of going back to reshoot things that didn’t turn out quite how you’d have liked is basically non-existent — so the length of the shoot and making sure you keep the entire crew happy and wanting to work hard over a stretch of time like that was the big difference for me.”
Asking a filmmaker to choose favorites is akin to asking a parent to choose their favorite child. The love is even across the board, but maybe just in a different way. Chipman is, of course, proud of the movie as a whole, but there is so much that goes into pulling off an independent production; there's almost always a certain segment the filmmakers themselves are particularly proud (or even surprised) they managed to get through.
“If I had to single out a scene in particular, I’d probably point to the final sequence of the film. It’s a hyper-stylized sequence in a film that’s otherwise very naturalistic, so we had to pull it off in such a way as to make the story beat land AND make sure it vibed with everything that came before it. It also relied very heavily on photo-realistic VFX in a movie in which the antagonist’s movements and makeup are otherwise wholly practical. So we threw a bunch of new ingredients into the sauce at the last possible minute, but I think we pulled it off brilliantly.”
You can check out the final sequence (and the rest of the movie) when The Shade hits theaters on September 20th. Support independent filmmakers, buy tickets to see the film in theaters!
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