Shadow People

[DoktorH]

Shadow People movie trailer 2012 - YouTube

I was surprised by how good this was. it's non-explicitly Lovecraftian. Late night talk radio host gets caught up investigating a string of local mysterious deaths - people dying in their sleep with no obvious illness or cause of death. There's some research left behind by a late professor, hints of some old evil spirit accidentally summoned by scientific research, that sort of thing.

I know it is available on Netflix as a disc rental and would not be surprised if it is elsewhere as well.

[matt cardin]

This is the first I've heard of this film. Now I'm really keen to seen it. Aside from the obvious interest of the subject, the lead actor, Dallas Roberts, is somebody whose work I've enjoyed elsewhere (especially in The Good Wife and last year's shockingly, unexpectedly excellent The Grey).

From the interviews that he and the film's writer/director, Matthew Arnold, have given, it sounds like they and the production as a whole were authentically informed by an interest in and awareness of the deep background of the shadow people phenomenon. E.g., here's Roberts talking to Fangoria:

Quote

FANG: How about all the true cases regarding the Shadow People—how much of that were you given, and did you want to read it all before you took on the part? ROBERTS: Yeah, that I welcomed a lot of. That mythology and those shared stories have existed for eons across cultural boundaries, the same way the story of the creator—of God, Jesus, Yahweh, Allah or Buddha—is present in every culture. That story seems to be pervasive, which I found fascinating. It really drew me in, and it did start to get under my skin—no pun intended. I had no reference for it before I began work on the film, but when I realized we were dealing with something that has existed since long before film itself existed—these stories and experiences—I found that riveting, and frightening at times.

Here he is talking to Dread Central (and obviously working from the same predefined set of talking points, but with some different emphases):

Quote

What's sort of funny is that once I decided to go forward with the role of [the film's protagonist] Charlie, I decided to do some research about the mythology of the shadow people and it really gets under your skin: the notion that this is something that has existed throughout different cultures and during different time periods and cannot be defined by Western medicine really raises a lot of questions.

And here's writer/director Arnold talking about his inspiration and research for the film:

Quote

The story came to me from my own personal experience. I woke up one night, and my body was totally paralyzed. I felt like my body was asleep, but I was awake, and could see a shadowy person standing over me. I finally yelled and willed my body to get up, and the figure shot through the wall. What the hell just happened? It was an utterly terrifying experience to be paralyzed and have something in the room with you. I began to research it and didn’t know how to find out what it was because there isn’t a lot of discussion about this. If you see a ghost, you can tell everyone what it was, but if you see this thing, you don’t know what to say. The more I researched it, the more common I found it to be. Almost every culture has a name for this and our roots have explanations for this. If you look at the old English word “nightmare,” a “mare” is an evil spirit that comes in the night to suffocate you. If you look at the etymology of the word, it refers to a spirit that holds you down, but now it means a totally different thing. I learned about an epidemic in the late 70′s where the CDC was sent in and it was officially referred to as “sudden unexplained nocturnal death syndrome.” Other little pockets of this have popped up in places all around the world, and it’s funny how the stories are right among us, but no one is really talking about them. It was surprising to me that we don’t have a lot of movies about them.

Okay, I'm definitely in. Thanks, DoktorH.