Jordan Massey
The red carpet premiere of It Wants Nightmares was held on the evening of Friday, October 17 at the National Infantry Museum’s IMAX Theater by Last Caress Productions. “Almost 90% of our cast and crew are local from the Chattahoochee Valley area,” said Co-Writer, Director and Producer Paul Rowe. “The rest of them come from Atlanta and a little bit up north from Tennessee […], but that’s our focus.”
Rowe described the film as a suspense genre, stating that it centers around a young woman named Adelaide who is “compelled” to find this computer from the early 1980s. “It is clad in metal, it’s a very ominous looking thing to begin with,” he added. “It wants her to record stories for certain reasons…So you gotta come and watch the film to find out why.”
Paul Rowe is one of four local writers involved in this production–among Andy Carpenter, Shavonne R. Johnson, and Andrew Gray. It took the team about eight months to complete the project from development all the way to wrapping, with Rowe adding that post-production took a total of about six months.
All of the locations in the film were shot in east Alabama, Columbus, or the Chattahooche Valley, including prominent locations such as the Chattahoochee RiverWalk and the Columbus “Rainbow Tunnel”. The film also received the top prize for the inaugural Columbus Film Fund Local Filmmakers Grant, and Rowe stated the team was “over the moon with it.”
“We’re so happy that the film office here you know, brought that out and supported local filmmaking,” he added. “It elevated us to a level to which we wouldn’t have been able to achieve otherwise.”
The film debuting during the month of Halloween was “just perfect timing,” in Rowe’s words. He stated that although they didn’t initially plan to hold the private screening event during October, things just so happened to work out that way.
“We’re glad to do it, especially at the National Infantry Museum,” he added. “They have a great events team, they just make it so easy for us–and it’s an IMAX screen, you can’t beat that.”
Rowe added that before the grant opportunity came along, Last Caress Productions had already begun the screenwriting process for It Wants Nightmares. He stated that their team found that it takes about eight years to actually break into the industry, but they wanted to begin seeing their projects on the big screen.
“So we’ve started making our own movies: we started with short films, commercials, music videos, etc. and just got really good at that level,” said Rowe. “Then from there, it was a natural progression to wanna do our feature films and so one way or another, we were gonna get it done. Whether that was gonna be on an iPhone, on a RED, or an ARRI, it didn’t really matter.”
Post-production for the film was taken care of by Moonshine Post-Production and W² Media (W Squared Media), both companies based out of Atlanta. Rowe stated that both organizations have been instrumental in helping out and sponsoring other events in the past as well.
According to Rowe, Last Caress Productions already has a good amount of local talent secured for their second feature film Southern Scares, including the cast and crew. He stated that the cast includes Dee Wallace, an American actress featured in films such as Cujo, E.T., and The Howling.
Rowe stated that through working on different local commercials, music videos and short films, their teams have been able to build a strong reputation from the ground up, making it very easy for them to secure local talent. “We’re very collaborative, we’re respectful, I mean we like a really good vibe on set,” he added.
Anybody that’s based in Columbus and wants to get involved with a local production in the future can reach out to Last Caress Productions on social media, such as Facebook and Instagram, or on their website at LastCaressProductions.com.
