Horror With A Twist: Cross Shadow Productions by Charles White
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In 2007, Cross Shadow Productions was formed. This came out of a light bulb moment that co-founders Tiaan Kruger and Matt Mitchell had as they sat chatting. “We were talking one night and Tiaan said there needs to be more Christian thrillers,” Matt recalled. “If there was only somebody who would do these.” Then Matt remembered a childhood story that he had been told many years prior in Huntsville, Alabama. Going to his computer, Matt found that story and a few others that he had saved from his childhood and shared these with Tiaan. Tiaan was so excited by the story that he wanted to start filming the next day. “Tiaan called me at 12 or 1 am and said that he had a camera and we should get some people from church and get in the parking lot and act out some of these scenes and see how they look on film,” Matt said, smiling. It was then that they both realized that they had found a calling. However, their journey wasn’t without challenges. Neither were experienced with film production, cinematic direction or screen writing, but the pair weren’t deterred. They didn’t let their inexperience stand in their way. “Don’t let the facts get in the way,” Matt stated. “God used the semi-strengths of Tiaan and I and our wives filled in some gaps that we didn’t know that we needed filled.”
From the start, they knew that they needed a name that reflected their vision. They wanted folks to know that their films were grounded in their faith in Jesus Christ, in contrast to the stereotypes that surrounded most other horror films. They settled on the name, Cross Shadow Productions. “Everything that we wanted to do has gotta have a heart,” Matt shared. “It’s got to have some spiritual reason otherwise it is just going to be a nice clean thriller, which is cool, but let’s call that what it is and market that way. We wanted to have a deeper reason to do all of this.” Their first film almost didn’t happen. They soon found that a 3-page childhood story was not nearly enough material to bring to the big screen. “I talked to a few friends in Wilmington [NC] who had done some small stuff and basically they said that a page equals a minute of film, so we said we have to do more,” Matt recounted. “We got together and said everyone think of some really cool things that we can tie together to make these characters have life. We built a front end and a back end to the story and the basic story that I heard is really the last ten minutes of the movie. By the time we were done, we had a 65-page script. We wanted about 75 minutes of film, so we added a bonus scene. That has kinda become our trademark. Once the movie is over, it isn’t really over.” Matt explains their lack of a need for gratuitous violence by harkening back to the classic horror films and radio dramas of long ago. These productions used imagination, not special effects or graphic displays to frighten their audiences. This allows Cross Shadow Productions to present something that is both clean and scary at the same time. As Matt puts it, “what you conceive in your mind is so much scarier that what I can show you on the screen.”
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