Shadow Hours

Michael Halloway is a recovering addict. He has a real job as a night clerk in a gas station, and more importantly, he is married to the woman who has supported him through his trek to sobriety and is now about to give birth to their child. In short, he is on the road to the straight and narrow.

But at his post in the glass-enclosed booth in the netherworld of Los Angeles, he is surrounded by creatures of night: junkies, bums, prostitutes, drunks, and scavengers who regularly test his patience with the monotony of the long night's routine and annoyances. And then one evening, he meets the elegant and enigmatic Stuart Chappell, a writer doing research in the dens of iniquity of Los Angeles nightlife. He is quickly seduced into accompanying Chappell on his nocturnal forays, which opens up a universe of unmarked doors to a full spectrum of Dionysian pleasures and debauchery.

Writer/director Issac Eaton spins a masterful neo-Faustian tale of a young man caught up in a web of seductive evil. With evocative cinematography and splendidly tight editing, Shadow Horrors offers a tour of a Los Angeles that you've never experienced (and which I'm not going to give away). It's an image of the city you may feel is more like New York or Bangkok. Intriguingly written and artfully composed, Shadow Hours is a modern morality fable with an otherworldly time and quality, reminiscent of the work of David Lynch, Michael Mann, or Martin Scorsese, the kind of film that transforms genre into gems.