The Lone Star State is becoming an increasingly popular backdrop for horror movies. Little Spark Films has been putting North Texas front and center in a string of projects, and now, executive producer and actor Spencer Boldman is adding his own flare with the recently released “You Can’t Leave.”
During an interview with The Post, Boldman explained the premise of the movie, which filmed in Argyle and Highland Park. “It’s about a group of friends who go searching for a missing girl and they get trapped in this supernatural forest and they aren’t allowed to leave — it’s a mind-bending, supernatural, psychological thriller,” Boldman said.
The film officially opened on Friday, October 16 and features a cast of actors who, like Boldman, grew up in Texas. The executive producer spent much of his life in Plano, and Cameron Inman, Taylor Murphy, Paola Andino, and Thomas Bauer were all similarly raised near the areas where “You Can’t Leave” was filmed.
It was this shared experience that led to the overall camaraderie of the group—they were able to bond more quickly and thoroughly because of their Texan backgrounds.
That friendship was particularly helpful during periods where the actors were shooting at a remote ranch in Argyle that was so unsettling, it felt like they really had been transported into an entirely different world. Inman told the Dallas Observer, “It, to me, didn’t feel like home or Dallas or anything like that. It felt very spooky.”
Andino agreed. She said that even though she drove past familiar landmarks every week, like the gym she frequents, she still felt like she had stepped into another dimension when she was on those scary sets. “It would feel like a totally different world. I might as well be in a completely different state,” Andino recalled.
Boldman said those feelings were heightened by the fact that there weren’t any streetlights in the surrounding area, lending a layer of darkness and uncertainty to the Texas landscape.
Filming in their home state helped the ‘You Can’t Leave’ cast access complicated emotions
Despite the fact that the actors in “You Can’t Leave” were creeped out during the film’s production, they all agreed that having an existing familiarity with the Texas woods helped them better understand the fear their characters experience. Thomas Bauer told the Dallas Observer, “The woods are scary by themselves, but you feel like there’s shadows out there. Before they come after us, in a weird way, we all kind of know what they are, because we’ve had that feeling in our gut.”
He added, “It made art feel like home,” which is one of the primary driving forces behind the increase in productions based in Texas. Spencer Boldman knows that better than most, as he was also involved in producing another thriller, “The Gates,” that filmed in the state. “The Gates” shot on location in Highland Park and Denton County, further cementing the area as a bonafide La La Land competitor.
The director of that movie, John Burr, said it was important to him to film around North Texas because, “I spent all of my formative years in Dallas. In order to tell stories for a living, you have to live life. And I definitely lived life in Dallas.”
Burr added, “I took with me a desire to explore and sort of share what it really meant to live in this area and bring it onto a stage so that the rest of the world wouldn’t have these preconceived notions of what it meant to be from Dallas or from rural or suburban Texas.”
This article first appeared on Good Info News Wire and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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