Everything’s better with vampires. The talent behind NIGHT PATROL shares what movies they would like to see turned into a vampire flick.
Now streaming on Shudder.
Night Patrol is officially in theaters next week. One of the coolest experiences of my life.
Here’s some various lore:
• Producer Josh Goldbloom (the greatest dude of all time) and director Ryan Prows (the other greatest dude of all time) originally reached out via the HardLore email with their idea to help arrange an original soundtrack for the movie.
They sent us the script, and upon reading the name of Freddie Gibbs’ character “BORNELIUS” I was fully on board.
The goal was a Judgement Night homage, with original songs by hardcore bands and rappers together. I loved the idea and was fully in, but once I explained the budget of what it would cost just to engineer something with different bands from around the world alone, it was quietly dropped once production neared. Zulu recorded a song for it, Twitching Tongues wrote a concept for one, Criminal Instinct was confirmed to be on board, as were a few others. The original composer (who was going to produce all of the hip hop portions of the soundtrack) also left the project which I think aided in ultimately having to abandon the idea. They still wanted to have me source a few needle drops, which I did, but won’t spoil.
• …They also had a small role that needed to be cast in the actual Night Patrol itself, a character named (only in the script) Chad WHITE. Partner to Tommy HOOD. Haaaa! Assuming you haven’t seen the trailer or the movie, the Night Patrol are the big bad dirty LAPD cops (described as a unique special forces type squad not unlike the team from Predator) that only come out at night ***wink wink*** and only 4-5 of them had names in the script. Crazy! Immediately said yes. I did musical theatre and shit all throughout my childhood/early years and wanted to act long before I ever touched an instrument, but I had an awfully abusive middle school acting teacher (Ms. Stanley) who drained that goal out of me. I told Ryan my lifelong dream has been to play a corpse in a movie or TV show (always seemed so fun go get to lay there for an entire shoot), but I can’t say whether or not that became real.
I still had partially bleached hair and a short mullet at the time, which they asked that I kept. The only way to I thought to rationalize that in the context of the movie was to make my character a silly little fucker, like Alex Winter in the Lost Boys. Smiling, laughing and quipping through it all, but I’ll also kill you.
CM Punk was cast later in this process and that would end up in having a very warm, familiar presence on set that I don’t think I would have been as immediately comfortable without. In our first scene together, we were in a squad car for 2-3 hours and played Battleship head to head on my phone. I did not sink a single one of his ships. I swear to god. Not even a hit. I still think he cheated. He would end up improvising a ton of stuff that made it to the Final Cut. Wrestling brain turned on and he developed all these alternate methods and phrasings to get the information across in a way that only someone with that level of live TV experience could. Real pro shit.
• The table read was the first experience along those lines I had ever had. That may have been even more surreal than the shoot days. Just surrounded by talented people reading this script and laughing. The film is as much dark comedy as it is horror, and hearing the gang dialogue change in real time on the fly by all of those legends was unbelievable. Everyone at the table read was very kind. One person suggested I try ozempic. Showbiz baby.
The entire principal photography for the movie was done in 16 days. That’s insane. All of my days (5) were entirely on location in the San Fernando Valley (which IS in LA, Ryan…) about 8 minutes from where I live. I don’t think it gets any better than that. All of my shoot days began between 6-8 PM, and I generally went home around 4:00-5:00 AM. 5 days of that wrecked my sleep schedule for months (I am a huge baby).
#Exclusive 😭 Freddie Gibbs and CM Punk didn't hold back on their stunts filming their vampire film "Night Patrol" as the "Alfredo" rapper accidentally made the WWE legend spill blood! https://t.co/NPMUwMyCuL