The new micro-budget indie film Shooting stars is billed as folk horror, and the premise makes it clear why: it’s a story about three brothers who journey through the desert to dig up the corpse of a witch, and ultimately unleash something terrifying. But the film – produced, directed, written, edited and shot by Richard Karpala and Gabriel Bienczycki – taps into a very different kind of creepiness than you might expect from that description.
Shooting stars feels more like a UFO or alien abduction story. The film isn’t about the eeriness of the dark forest, the muddy hamlet, or the haunted mansion: instead, it taps into a wide-eyed fear of the open sky at night. Watching it, I was often reminded of another low-budget production from a few years ago, Andrew Patterson’s excellent 1950s-style UFO throwback. The vastness of the night. That’s a much better made movie than this one, but Karpala and Bienczycki have found such a unique blend of genre flavors in Shooting stars – witchy folklore with starlit “they came from above” terror – worth checking out.
It’s such a strange world that the filmmakers have created, but at first it doesn’t seem that way. Shooting stars is set in the more arid and remote areas of Southern California, somewhere in the Inland Empire, where poor, vaguely countercultural people live in old Airstream trailers and thin-walled bungalows. It’s a recognizable reality, except that in this version of it it’s a fact that hungry witches descend from the sky at every fall “harvest” and take people with them. It is so ingrained in the rhythm of life that the government broadcasts euphemistic ‘weather warnings’ about witch attacks on radio and TV and advises people to stay indoors. Little is said about the nature or culture of witches, and they are rarely seen in person, but they are said to resemble shooting stars when they approach.
It’s the first night of the harvest and three brothers (Shaun Duke Jr., Rene Leech and Andrew Gabriel) are sitting outside their house, watching falling witches and performing some sort of folkloric ritual – they call it a ‘fairy ring’ – so casually as if they were barbecuing burgers or passing around a joint. The eldest, Mike (Duke Jr.), says his friend Rob (Greg Poppa) not only saw a witch, but shot one with a shotgun and buried her near Joshua Tree. The brothers get into the spirit of the spooky season and challenge each other to find Rob and get him to show them the witch’s body.
Doesn’t sound like a good idea, right? Of course, that turns out not to be the case, and despite Rob’s rules about the corpse – don’t take photos, don’t touch it, don’t take anything with you, and above all don’t look at it for more than five minutes – things go wrong, and the brothers have to deal with the consequences.
It’s a bare-bones plot, and honestly, it barely holds up Shooting starseven though the film is only 80 minutes long. The action is sparse, the ending is blunt and there’s a lot of expository talk, not all of it artfully written or delivered naturally by the cast. A long, ominous rant from the brothers’ mother (Diane Worman) seems lifted from another, much more theatrical film. Karpala and Bienczycki regularly attend a radio station where a late-night DJ (J. Aaron Boykin) and his assistant (Samantha Turret) collect listeners’ stories about the harvest; it works as a means to expand the scope of the world-building, but adds nothing to the slim story.
And yet Shooting stars does cast a spell. Working with (and, when it comes to the film’s scariest moments, utilizing) the most limited resources, Karpala and Bienczycki carefully paint a picture of a world on its last legs. The harvest comes earlier every year, the witches become hungrier and more and more people disappear. The characters are terrified when the situation demands it, but they are also intimately familiar with this annual horror, casually exchanging survival tips and bits of lore, or looking up rituals not in rarefied books but in well-worn paperbacks. The witches are unknowably mysterious, but also terrifyingly mundane.
Shooting stars describes an apocalypse that arrives not in a giant fireball, but in inches, claiming a few more lives and eroding a little more hope every year. It could work as an analogy for our degrading climate or social institutions. Or it could just be a particularly memorable and unusual backdrop for a creepy video.
Shooting stars is now available in select theaters and available for digital purchase or rental Amazon And Apple TV.