Days of Sodom: A Crow Fan Film is Live

 

A film I co-wrote and co-produced with Cody Faulk is finally live on Youtube. This is our take on the Crow franchise, a film that has been more than five years in the making. It premiered last night and so far the fan reviews have been extremely positive. This is an excerpt from what is probably my favorite review:

As someone who’s lived with The Crow for decades someone who has the Crow tattooed on his right hand because the mythology, the tragedy, the poetry of it all actually means something... So when I say this fan film carries the soul of the original, I mean it. You can feel the work. You can feel the commitment. You can feel the respect... This film didn’t try to be bigger. It tried to be honest. And it succeeded.

That is enormously meaningful for those of us who put years and thousands of dollars in personal funds into this project. This movie almost didn't get made quite a few times. We struggled with finances, casting changes, creative tensions, genre-shifting, scene cuts and rewrites, location and technical difficulties, among other things. But after five years of development and about two and a half years of shooting, we finally got it out the door. Quite a few fans have said so far they think its the best Crow film after the original and that's extremely humbling.

We certainly learned a lot about film-making, and for me especially, it has been eye opening. First, because I have developed an enormous respect for what professional film-makers are able to accomplish in both a creative and technical sense. Second, because I've learned how micro-budget indie films can make a project feel more professional and expensive than it is. This is especially true in the horror genre, which is more forgiving than most others in that it enables you a lot of leeway to deploy visual creativity to make the film more attention-grabbing--dramatic lighting, atmosphere, suspense, creative prop placement and camera work--that can really lift a scene. Cody really excels at these visual cues, and atmospherically this film owes a debt to films like Seven and The Batman, and perhaps even more to Suspiria. I'm honored the fans seem to like it so far and I hope that someday it inspires some indie film-maker out there to take big chances and pursue a vision--even beyond what they think is possible. You really can make something that fans will love without millions of dollars.  

In our case, this project began with a phone call back in January 2021. When Cody first pitched this idea to me, we went back to the source material-- primarily the comic by James O'Barr and the first couple of films--to get a sense for the emotional grounding of the Crow story. We knew that this idea would be made or broken on emotional sincerity, not on action, big names, camera tricks or anything else. The comic, even more than the early films, makes it clear that The Crow is a meditation on struggling with grief. And so we set out to write a story about grief that was as honest and vulnerable as we possibly could. 

Grief is messy. Many of us will struggle to fit our grief into a narrative that makes it bearable, lash out against the world in harmful ways, block out the darkest parts completely, or repeat cycles of self-destruction. There's no "correct" grief, but it can be expressed constructively or destructively, in ways that strengthen or weaken us and I've always loved how James O'Barr's The Crow navigates those waters so artfully. 

The Crow, in some dark ways, is also a meditation on justice. In our film in particular, justice is a major theme. Our Crow begins his journey as a police detective who dies trying to do the right thing. He comes back from the dead against his own will, forced to face the reality of a horrifying loss he had hoped death would spare him. He also has to grapple with the paradox that it wasn't his own moral failing, but his courage that cost him everything. In "setting the wrong things right," he has to set aside the moral compass that had guided him in life; once anchored by a love through which he defined himself, in death that love has combusted into a raging inferno of despair, driving his will to destroy the lives of others. To pursue justice from beyond the grave, he must become death itself, a choice that can have unforeseeable consequences.  

To me, as co-writer, Days of Sodom is about taking grief head-on, refusing its power to take from us, to make us lesser. Its a love note to the source material, and I think a cautionary reminder that somewhere within the inferno of despair, we have to reach beyond the flames and find love.

 --JF