inside Shadows

London based director releases one of the lowest costing feature films ever

Tiring of so called “torture porn” horror and resisting the found footage format of most low budget films, British filmmaker Chris Silver has created inside Shadows, which strives to take the genre back to its traditional roots of the ghost story. Two and a half years in the making, Chris Silver’s debut feature film was produced with just a few hundred pounds as everything else was donated, begged for or borrowed, making it perhaps one of the lowest budget feature films of all time.

“One of the main points of inside Shadows was to create a convincing, original film out of nothing – or rather whatever we had available to us,” Chris explains. “That is: to not let excuses get in our way, nor depend on money when there was none or dream of equipment which we couldn’t gain access to. Instead we were to pull together our resources, experiment and see what happened.”

“With inside Shadows,” Chris continues, “the cast and crew worked relentlessly hard for well over two years. They did so without complaint or pay and with absolutely no guarantee of any pay off, financial or otherwise. The reason they did it is because they love filmmaking and wanted to tell a story that would entertain, unsettle and challenge the audience.”

It seems to have worked. Now available to rent or buy through Vimeo On Demand, inside Shadows is already in the top 3 most rated and reviewed films in their horror category, as well as in the top 10 of the drama section – despite only being released a fortnight ago. No mean feat for an unknown director with a cast of new faces.

“From audience feedback it seems the major appeal is the substance of the film,” Chris continues. “As a fan of the genre myself I was getting wearisome of the same old formats being dished out by the studios, then being told it was the ‘major horror movie of the year.’ Surely it’s not for studios to declare this, but for audiences to do so over time, if the film stays with them? And I would say it’s been a few years since we had a real horror classic with some longevity to it because a good film, particularly a horror film because there’s so many of them, needs to do more than just tick the same stale boxes. It has to be about something or at least try to say something to the audience. Whether we achieved this or not is up to the viewers to decide, but at least we tried.”

Fans of inside Shadows appear to have noticed. They have declared it “part drama, part ghost story, part poetry”, with one reviewer citing that “inside Shadows is so much more [than] a horror film” and another stating “[it]unnervingly depicts the dark side of both the living and the dead…a fantastic debut! A strange and at times beautiful thriller.”

Chris concludes by saying that: “From my experience there are those who are in love with the idea of filmmaking – the glamour and excitement, lavish equipment, the aura associated with the whole scene – and then there are those who quite simply have a genuine love for making films: story tellers who get on and do the job. I’m proud to say, with this project, my team fell into the latter. Our lead actress Sofia [Hagen] recently told one viewer: ‘due to a lack of budget and time we needed to resort to passion.’ I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

inside Shadows is now available to rent or buy at www.insideshadows.com