Social Media is definitely a social ill. It’s a pervasive communal malady, afflicting anyone who spends ample time on Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Instagram, and all their corrupting ilk. Yet, as we learn in Todd Braley’s latest film Shadows of the Night, all that pales in comparison to the twisted horrors waiting in the Dark Web. Jamie (Lilli Davis) is a run-of-the-mill middle schooler. She goofs off, daydreams in class, and generally just hangs with her best friend Jackie (Alyssa Ramirez). Jamie also has great aptitude for coding and programming. To that end, Jamie has taken up hacking to earn some extra cash. On one such hack job, inflating her classmates’ grades, her teacher Ellen Hall (Kiah Freedman) catches her code, which was sloppily left behind. She suspends Jamie, and Jamie must endure the unspeakable nightmare of completing her homework on the parental laptop, which is so much weaker and slower than her desktop.
When she regains access to her computer, Jamie trawls the dark web for a site called Tubeville. Tubeville is a repository of snuff footage. One particularly traumatic video contains footage of a Father Benchley (sinister portrayal by Peter Goldthwaite) committing an exorcism on a young lady who cries out Jamie’s name. Such an event would shock a child to their very core, and Shadows of the Night allows Jamie the space to feel absolutely terrorized by the shock she was referenced in a video from the ’70s.
A man stands alone in silhouette at a sunlit window, drink in hand, in Shadows of the Night.
“One particularly traumatic video contains footage of a Father Benchley…committing an exorcism on a young lady who cries out Jamie’s name.”
The twists and turns Shadows of the Night takes are truly mental, dear reader. This film takes us from the quiet suburban home of Jamie Campbell’s family to the ultimate destination of an abandoned mental hospital. How this transpires is so integral to the demented and devious plotting of the family Braley who wrote together Shadows of the Night. I will not spoil that, dear reader. It’s worth experiencing. And if it makes it to release in a movie theater, definitely there. Horror is an optimistic genre. It takes that which unnerves us and demonstrates how we might overcome it. I’m not going to acknowledge whether Jamie and her pals successfully commit to overcoming it, but I will say Shadows of the Night presented the conflict in a most delightfully unexpected manner.
Shadows of the Night is a good old-fashioned, scare-your-pants-off kind of film. Lots of rough issues are covered in Shadows of the Night. Including child psychiatry, the complex and unethical relationship between the therapists and the police, and the role of the Catholic Church. We all remember the child abuse and molestation the Catholic Church and its priests have committed through the ages. Here, in Shadows of the Night, the abusive nature of exorcisms will become a plot point.
Ultimately, Shadows of the Night is a damn fine cousin to The Exorcist. Much like that Friedkin classic, an exorcism will take place somewhere in the film. It’s worth paying attention to note how many different versions of an exorcism are portrayed in Shadows of the Night. Some far less formal than others.
I encourage anyone who likes possession horror to bear witness to Shadows of the Night. This is an amazing Halloween screening selection. It will definitely keep you awake at night, contemplating the terror lurking in the shadows.
"…It will definitely keep you awake at night..."
