As a director, Christopher Darton had to be honest with himself. After 14 days of filming, his low-budget vampire movie “The Damnation” just wasn’t working. So, the Welland director “put the brakes on the project” in October 2021 and had to give himself an honest appraisal.
“There was something good there, but it didn’t work,” he says. “We needed to figure it out. As it stood, it was kind of a mess.
” It was Darton’s first feature-length film after several years of short documentaries, including 2020’s “At the Brink: A Personal Look at Suicides Over Niagara Falls.” It was going over budget. COVID-19 loomed over everything.
And what he was filming wasn’t clicking. His 40-year dream of making a horror film was falling apart. “It turned into my ‘Apocalypse Now,’ somehow,” he says with a laugh.
“I never wanted it to be that way. When you set sail, you never intend it to turn into ‘Gilligan’s Island.’ ” Where other filmmakers might toss everything and start over, Darton let the footage gestate for a year and a half.
That’s when his son Tobi took a minor idea for a reshoot and shot it with some cast members. “I saw it and it really gave me the fuel to say, ‘OK. I think I know what we can do here.
’ ” “ The Damnation ” suddenly went from being a standard vampire movie to an “Indigenous small-town horror film.” New characters were brought in. A new plot hammered out.
Along the way, Darton realized he had a movie with som.