Posted in: Movies, Podcasts | Tagged: Castle Talk Podcast, The Shed
Castle Talk: Frank Sabatella on The Shed: Suspense, Bullying, and Monsters
This week, Castle Talk podcast chatted with Frank Sabatella, writer and director of the new film The Shed.
The Shed tells the story of a bullied young man Stan (Ja Hay Warren) and his best friend Dommer (Cody Kostro) discover a murderous vampire living in Stan's shed. Seeing the bloodshed and destruction the monster is capable of, Stan knows he has to find a way to destroy it – but Dommer has a much more sinister plan in mind. It's directed by Frank Sabatella and also stars Sofia Happonen (Woman of a Certain Age), Frank Whaley (Pulp Fiction), Siobhan Fallon Hogan (Men in Black) and Timothy Bottoms (The Last Picture Show).
Frank Sabatella says in our chat that he adapted The Shed from a short story with the bare bones intact: a teenager finds a monster in his shed. But the director says he had to turn to common structure to turn the story into a feature. Stories can take near any form, but modern films tend to have about a half-hour setup (Act 1), a long series of worsening events (Act 2) and an exciting finale (Act 3.) That means new characters, and then finding out how those characters can propel the suspense forward. It also means digging into the story to mine it for subtext—in the case of The Shed, two bullied kids are suddenly granted a dangerous weapon, but what they choose to do with, and how each resists the temptation to use it for vengeance, tells us a lot about the decisions young people make.
We also talked about how to build suspense in a story, the challenges of pitching a story with a blood-sucking creature in it, and whether it's possible to escape the recognition of famous tropes—such, as in the case of The Shed, Ferris Bueller's race home, here in a deadly-serious race with a police vehicle.
THE SHED comes to theaters and VOD and Digital HD on Nov. 15, 2019.
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Twitter: jasondhenderson.
The Team: Hosted by Jason Henderson, editor of the Castle of Horror Anthology and Young Captain Nemo, and creator of the HarperTeen novel series Alex Van Helsing.