When we first saw He Never Left at the Utah International Film Festival, we saw the finished movie.
We saw Colin Cunningham as Gabriel, a fugitive hiding out in an old motel with his girlfriend Carly, played by Jessica Staples. We saw the mysterious Pale Face. We saw the performances, cinematography, editing, sound and everything else that had finally come together on screen.
What we didn’t see were all the conversations, compromises, location scouts, crowdfunding videos and questionable ideas that had to happen before anyone could watch the finished movie.
Thankfully, the filmmakers kept the cameras rolling
The Legend of Pale Face: The Making of He Never Left gives us a look at what happened behind the scenes while director James Morris, producer Michael Ballif and their team were trying to turn a script into an independent feature.
The cast & Crew is stacked with Morris as the film’s director, writer and producer, with Michael Ballif serving as producer, cinematographer and editor. Morris, Ballif and lead actor Colin Cunningham share story credit. Cunningham plays Gabriel, Jessica Staples plays Carly, James Morris plays Tim, David E. McMahon plays Bryce and William McAllister plays Pale Face.
Morris explains in the documentary that the original version leaned much more heavily into being a crime thriller. At the time, he wasn’t even sure whether it belonged under the Witching Season banner. He simply wanted to start writing again.
That’s probably something a lot of filmmakers can relate to. Sometimes you don’t know exactly what a movie is when you start writing it. You just know you need to make something.
Michael Ballif saw something in the concept but also recognized that it felt different from previous Witching Season projects. The pair began exploring how they could preserve the crime and thriller elements while bringing some of the horror identity audiences associated with their work into the story.
“How about we add a masked killer?”
Morris says that once the idea was introduced, the missing pieces of the story began falling into place. Eventually that masked killer became Pale Face.
Morris had previously met Colin Cunningham at Horrorfest in St George, UT while Morris was participating in an acting panel with Cunningham and Ted Raimi.
Morris recalls Cunningham responding enthusiastically to the idea behind the new film. Suddenly there was another reason to stop talking about making the movie and actually make it. Cunningham later became much more than the film’s lead actor. He received a story credit alongside Morris and Ballif and became Gabriel, the fugitive at the center of the film.
In the documentary, Cunningham remembers being introduced to the project and then watching They Live Inside Us. His reaction is funny because he admits he kept waiting for the moment where the low-budget production would reveal itself.
It didn’t.
“It sounded like a movie. It looked like a movie,” Cunningham says in the documentary while describing his reaction to the earlier film.
The next hurdle was location. Where are you actually going to shoot this thing?
Much of He Never Left takes place inside a roadside motel. The location couldn’t just provide an establishing shot. The production needed hallways, rooms, exterior access and enough control to actually make a movie there. The filmmakers found that at the Skyline Motel.
One of the team members already knew the location from trips through the area and immediately thought of it when they began discussing where the movie could be filmed. The script depended on characters moving between motel rooms, which made finding the right physical layout particularly important. Then the motel’s owner, Joyce offered to work with them to get the movie made! The stars have aligned!
The filmmakers credit her with providing an affordable rate that allowed the production to take over the entire motel for a week and giving them the freedom they needed to shoot.
“The movie would not exist” without the location and Joyce’s support, the documentary explains.
Sometimes the thing standing between your screenplay and an actual movie isn’t a massive studio deal. Sometimes it’s finding one person willing to say, “Yeah, you can shoot here.” The team still had to figure out how to make the location work on camera.
A large portion of the story takes place at night, so shooting everything during actual nighttime hours would have made an already difficult production schedule even harder. Instead, the filmmakers blacked out windows and experimented with lighting so they could shoot some scenes during the day while creating the appearance of nighttime.
The same thinking carried over into financing the movie.
The team had successfully crowdfunded previous projects, but they didn’t want to sit in front of a camera and ask people for money again.
In the fall of 2021, the filmmakers shot the opening sequence of He Never Left as part of their crowdfunding campaign. The idea was rather than describing the movie they hoped to make, they could show potential supporters what that movie could actually look like.
The documentary is refreshingly open about how uncomfortable crowdfunding can feel. Asking people to help finance your movie isn’t easy. But the team also credits its existing audience with helping make the production possible.
That opening sequence also introduced Pale Face and brought Hailey Nebeker back to work with the filmmakers. And eventually all those little decisions became a feature film. He Never Left went on to find distribution through Epic Pictures and Dread. It reached audiences beyond Utah and accumulated festival recognition along the way.
It also came through the Utah International Film Festival.
At the 2024 UIFF awards, He Never Left won Best Narrative Feature. James Morris received Best Director, and David E. McMahon received Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Bryce. Colin Cunningham and Jessica Staples were also among the film’s acting nominees.
Watching The Legend of Pale Face makes the finished movie more interesting because you can see how many small things had to go right to make the film happen.
That’s what makes The Legend of Pale Face: The Making of He Never Left worth watching. It’s not only a behind-the-scenes look at a horror movie. It’s a reminder of what independent filmmaking actually looks like while you’re in the middle of it.