Family's pandemic-born horror thriller gets weeklong run at Chatham movie theater

Paul and Jade Schuyler and their two teen sons spent the early months of pandemic lockdown making a movie about a family confined to their home for a mysterious reason.

Sounds like art imitating life, and it was in a way. But the details of the haunting story exploring reality and isolation had actually come to Paul in a dream.

And it turned out the equipment needed to turn that dream into a movie, its setting, and its four actors – who doubled as the entire film crew – were conveniently close at hand. The couple and sons Quinn and Shaw weren’t going anywhere, so why not?

“I didn't even have to read the script. I know how talented Paul is,” said Jade about the family quickly agreeing to make the movie. “And the boys were ready for anything. They're creatives themselves, but they also had the easiest role. They'd be in their room playing video games and we said ‘OK, 10 minutes before shooting’ and then they would just come out and do their part.”

The resulting full-length thriller/horror film “Red River Road” tells the story of a family confined by an unseen force to their home close to the ocean, picking up supplies in a container delivered each night to their driveway, playing games and watching movies together, but unable to venture beyond their property boundaries.

Electronic devices such as cellphones and iPads are forbidden because of a dangerous virus that apparently distorts reality when infection sets in. As the confinement changes and tension builds, the film brings into question how much of what the audience is seeing is real.

“Red River Road” found success last year at nine virtual and in-person film festivals around the world, including Provincetown International Film Festival. The latest version of the movie — including new footage taken with a drone the Schuylers won through a festival award — will have its first theater-run screenings starting Friday, when it plays two shows a night for a week at the Chatham Orpheum Theater.

Orpheum officials are excited to be able to show the Schuylers’ work, with the unusual pandemic-bred origin story — which is part of the marketing for the film — as a big draw, according to theater manager Judy Blatchford.

“A lot of us just binge-watched Netflix (during the shutdown), right? But (Paul’s) creative spark never died and he wrote a script and then he corralled his family into helping him come pull this off,” she says. “He was telling me the story about how they had to modify equipment and things like that because they didn't have all the tools. I just thought, ‘Oh my God, this is just a great story and a great outcome.’”

The run will include a Q&A at Friday’s opening night and possibly other screenings, and a custom Red River pizza by the new Pizza Shark restaurant there.

Showing “Red River Road” also fits well with the Orpheum’s mission as an independent nonprofit community theater, officials say. Showing the work of local filmmakers “is just part of what we do and it's always something that we’ve done (along with) local events and programming and fundraisers … in addition to our regular films,” said executive director Kevin McLain. “It's a great opportunity for the local audience to have a theater that regularly presents local films and it's nice to have local filmmakers.”

A family of actors, writers and moviemakers

Paul and Jade’s short film “Runner,” which can be seen on Amazon Prime Video, also played at festivals and at the Orpheum. The Schuylers are likely most familiar to locals, though, as owners for 10 years of the former Box Office Cafe in South Chatham and through acting at Cape theaters. Those include Cape Rep Theatre in Brewster (where Jade, who has more than two dozen onstage credits, starred in “Dear Jack, Dear Louise” in November), Cotuit Center for the Arts and Cape Cod Theatre Company/Harwich Junior Theatre.

Quinn and Shaw have acted in multiple plays and films, including with Cape Rep’s Young Company, and the family has previously worked on stage together.

Cape Rep is also where Jade and Paul appeared in 2018 in a sold-out run of the world premiere of Jade’s play “The Tuna Goddess,” directed by Art Devine, the only non-Schuyler to have a (distanced) scene in “Red River Road.” Jade continues to write plays and screenplays, and Paul has a background of working in a variety of music video and film jobs beyond making his own movies.

Paul said he is excited to show this latest movie at the Orpheum, where he works as a shift supervisor, not only to have a Cape audience see it but because he said the theater “has the best theater sound in the country possibly.” He worked on parts of the film at the Orpheum and said the sound heard there is most like he had intended.

That’s also important for the music, which plays a key role in building the film’s tension and atmosphere. Paul co-composed the “Red River Road” score with old friend Cindy O’Connor, a former singer and keyboardist with Pat Benatar whose composing credits for film, TV and musical theater include an Emmy Award nomination for TV’s “Once Upon a Time.”

O’Connor “actually reached out to me because she was so excited about what we were doing,” Paul says. “As I go back through this, it's hard to differentiate what she wrote, what I wrote. We worked really well together.”

A silver lining

“Red River Road” became the third project for the couple's wytshark_media company — which is dedicated to bringing more independent filmmaking to Cape Cod — after having to cancel production on a different movie: a planned film version of “Tuna Goddess.” The screenplay with a cast led by Jena Malone (“The Hunger Games: Mockingjay,” "Pride & Prejudice," "Contact") was ready to go for 2020.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic happened.

It was disappointing not to be able to film “Tuna Goddess,” which will likely have to wait until pandemic restrictions ease, Paul says, but, “to be honest, that disappointment was what pushed us to do (‘Red River Road’). Mainly just because I knew if I didn't do something I would go crazy. … So this is the silver lining that came out of that.”

Paul said he felt sorry for himself about “Tuna Goddess” for about a day, then started realizing that they might be able to shoot a movie at the house. That night, he had the dream “that’s literally the movie.” He woke up and wrote down what he could remember, what he now estimates was about two-thirds of the movie, including the main story and key plot twists.

That’s actually happened before with a script, and Paul attributes it to his parents exposing him to movies so young – including “The Towering Inferno” at age 5 and “Jaws” at age 7 – fueling a lifelong love of cinema. “So I just feel like I think in movies.”

After the initial dream, Paul estimates it took about 10 days in spring 2020 to write the script, there was a week of rehearsals, two weeks of shooting, then some additional footage later.

A horror movie or not?

While “Red River Road” has played at the Montreal Independent Film Festival and Stony Brook Film Festival in New York (where it won the Spirit of Independent Filmmaking award), the horror genre has been part of its calling card at the Portland (Oregon) Horror Film Festival, the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix, and A Night of Horror International Film Festival (in Sydney, Australia, where it won the Independent Filmmaker award).

The pandemic project isn’t just a horror movie, though, and that mix of genres is also playing into finding the right fit for the movie for distributing it and getting it on streaming services following the Orpheum run.

“Even though it is a horror movie, there’s an emotional component to it that I think I ultimately feel more proud of than the horror elements,” Paul says. Jade disagrees that it’s a horror film at all. “It’s an emotional thriller, a dramatic thriller. I know it does have horror elements in it.”

Paul’s favorite movie genre is horror, he says, because it can contain shades of so much else. “Red River Road” is emotional horror, he says, “it's exploring things that are uncomfortable to deal with or wrestle with, more than it is the boogeyman jumping out. … There’s a lot more going on, so I don’t want to scare anybody off (with the horror idea) but I think there's (also) enough to satisfy horror fans if they’re looking to get creeped out. I think we’ve found a nice middle sweet spot.”

While there are clear parallels to the COVID-19 pandemic, the reality-warping virus in “Red River Road” also could be connected to a timely reflection on how misinformation and distorted truth spread through social media and other media sources can infect some people’s version of what’s really happening in the world.

While the Schuylers say reaction to the film at festivals has been overwhelmingly positive, the subtle political commentary has raised some negative backlash online. Paul says that message was not planned when he wrote the script.

“I had no intention of it being political in any way, shape or form,” he says. “I had a dream. I wrote it down. I didn't question it. … Later, I discovered that this is in me, this whole idea of social media and these realities that we create for ourselves and the validity of them, the questioning of all that. So (a political theme) wasn't intended, but obviously it was present somewhere in me making it.”

Paul notes that making a film is a first step in a creative process, and how audiences react completes the circle. Viewers have interpreted “Red River Road” in different ways based on their own experience, from the political undertones to one woman at a screening connecting it to a family member having Alzheimer’s disease.

Playing the main character, Jade says she feels the film “is really about loss and about what we are willing to do, what kind of reality we're willing to believe to be able to stay sane or to live, or to get by. And I think the truth of the matter is that social media does that as well – what reality are you creating, what reality has it created for you or your friends to be able to sustain what you want your reality to be? So it’s pretty deep.”

While acting the role of a mother whose children are in danger, Jade said she actually had to set aside the reality of being in the middle of a pandemic filled with uncertainties of what could happen next. “I'm not sure if it was because it was too scary or whatever, but that really wasn't what I focused on,” she says. “When you're acting with your kids, it's very easy to be personal and know the pain of what it would be like to lose them. I didn't really need the thought or the fear of COVID to kind of find that character. I think just being a mom is easy enough to gather that true emotional attachment.”

What's next

With Quinn now an animation student at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, and Shaw a senior at Monomoy High School aiming for the Air Force Academy, Jade says that the family movie project also became a way to freeze a moment in time — in unprecedented times — for her family.

The boys are moving on, and so are their parents, with Jade working on a new play and hoping to get into screenplay-producing labs, and Paul contemplating the next movie. It will likely be a version of a film he did years ago but never finished, about four boys who commit a murder – with Paul planning to add updates of bullying, social media and more.

“I think there's a reason (that film) didn't work back then and I think it works better now,” he says. “I feel like the Orpheum is sort of like the mile marker for us with ‘Red River Road,’ where we can (now) start turning our attention to what we want to shoot next.”

Contact Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll at kdriscoll@capecodonline.com. Follow on Twitter: @KathiSDCCT.

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Chatham movie theater to play family's horror thriller movie