2024 was truly a great year for horror films, offering up some of the best the genre has had to offer in years. There were supernatural crime thrillers like Longlegs, body horror epics like The Substance, and coming-of-age, poetic indie films like I Saw the TV Glow. This is always fantastic, however, due to the over-saturation of horror in the media, many great movies went under the radar completely. This is true for Tyler Chipman's independent, feature debut, The Shade.
The Shade follows Ryan Beckman (Chris Galust), a college student grieving the suicide of his father, Randy. As he already struggles to juggle classes, a tattoo apprenticeship, taking care of his younger Brother (Sam Duncan), and a relationship with his girlfriend (Mariel Malino), his older brother Jason (Dylan McTee), suddenly kills himself as well after returning home. Later, a dark supernatural entity that has been stalking Jason since their Dad's death latches onto Ryan and threatens to destroy his carefully balanced life, possibly trying to drive him to the same fate as his father. The movie is an intellectual metaphor for grief and the cycle of familiar trauma, the creature working as a literal, physical stand-in for the feelings Ryan is going through. Both narratively and thematically, the supernatural entity in The Shade serves a much more poetic purpose than just scaring the audience.
The Deeper Layers of 'The Shade' and Its Monster
Image via Red King Cinema
The Shade is very clearly going for something deeper than just eliciting scares from the audience. It is a deeper story of grief, trauma, and how mental illness latches onto people through generational cycles. The creature, or demonic entity, perfectly encapsulates this as a metaphor. One of the ways presented that helps define this allegory is how the creature attacks people. Besides a few almost/suggested instances, the entity never physically assaults or harms anyone directly. Instead, it stalks people in the darkest corners of their minds until they end their own lives. The cold open even shows how Ryan was present when Randy shot himself. The monster remains hidden in the shadows, and its full being is not shown to the characters or audience in clear light until the end of the film. Instead, the entity stalks its prey from behind the scenes, slowly ruining its victims' perceptions of reality, tearing apart their lives and mental and emotional health. This damage builds until said victims are weakened to the point of ending their own lives.
The creature operates in the same ways as trauma, grief, and mental health deterioration. When Randy kills himself, his demons are passed onto his children. His own trauma, and his mental health concerns, as well as the grief from his absence all fall to Ryan, Jason, and James. The movie can be read as more than simply a horror film, with Ryan thrown into terrible anxiety and depression after Randy's death. In the context of this being a supernatural horror film, though, these very real emotions of pain and suffering are represented by this terrifying demon.
The Nightmare Fuel of the Creature Itself
Image via Red King Cinema
While elevated with a complicated metaphor, The Shade still functions beautifully as a supernatural creature feature on its own. The creature, once fully revealed, is absolute nightmare fuel. With a horrific, almost Jester-like appearance, the look of The Shade's entity is sure to cause a couple of sleepless nights.
The reason the metaphors in the film can work as well as they do is because the monster standing in for concepts is as terrifying as it is. Although the creature remains largely hidden throughout the movie's slow burn, the audience is treated to small glimpses of it. The monster crawls on all fours, moving quickly and almost spider-like in the shadows. It creates a serious sense of a lack of safety. The creature could be on-screen at any time, at any point, given its sneaky, shadowy nature.
The thing is also a physically unpleasant being. It has a wide, sharp-toothed grin, long hair, and pale, smooth skin. It feels like a thing of folklore, yet is given relatively little lore to back it up. This actually adds both to the deeper subtexts, as well as the genuine terror of the film. In a lesser horror film, the scares might be bogged down by overly-explained lore that breaks the classic horror movie rule of "show-not-tell." However, the creature solely exists as an unexplained nightmare being that feeds on grief, pain, and suffering.The Shade is worth a watch for any horror fan, the film working both as a monstrous supernatural nightmare, and an intelligent allegory for grief and generational trauma.
Image via Red King Films
Image via Red King Cinema
Image via Red King Cinema
English (US) ·