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 something to say, not just things to scare people. “It is unbelievably different,” he says. Filming finally wrapped earlier this year, but the work was hardly finished.
Darton dove into post-production and is now heavily promoting the finished product as he prepares to premiere it at Buffalo’s Amazing Fantasy Fest Sept. 19, followed by a St. Catharines screening at the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre Film House Oct.
15. Co-directed by Darton and Sebastien Godin, the film follows a group of townsfolk reeling from a string of killings that are being ignored by police. The cast includes local singer/songwriter Ryan Lunn, Zeus Fleming, Ali Chappell and Brett Halsey, along with local radio icon Tim Denis, now retired from 610 CKTB.
Despite its modest budget, Darton says it ended up feeling like a “big film,” with a cast of nearly 30 shooting in 22 filming locations throughout Niagara. Among the pitfalls of indie moviemaking? You want every precious dollar to go on the movie screen, but it’s instead spent on hotel rooms and small stuff like coffee. “I was talking to somebody about it a little while ago and I said, ‘Do you realize how much I spent on coffee?’ I go to Tim Hortons for those little keg things a couple times a day, throw in some doughnuts and stuff, and all of a sudden it’s a hundred bucks a day.
All of a sudden after 10 days it’s like, ‘How did I just spend $1,000 on coffee and doughnuts?’ ” Other times, he was stunned by Niagara’s generosity. When he asked the late Rick Rose if he could shoot some scenes at his downtown radio space 4680Q, he simply handed over the keys to the building, no questions asked. The finished product came in at a budget under $30,000.
But what it means to Darton? Priceless. “I’ve wanted to make a horror film ..
. I’ll say my entire life but probably since I was 18 years old,” he says. “It was three years in the making, but really, I’m 58.
Really, it’s 40 years in the making. “It’s cathartic, I guess, to say the least. But also, the wheels are turning constantly to try and take another kick at the can and do it a little differently.
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