When an unarmed child is murdered by the police, a caped avenger answers the prayers of a grieving mother.
A WORD FROM CHRIS R. NOTARILE
2020 has not been my year. I don’t it’s been anyone’s year actually. For me, my entire slate of films were taken out back and shot. For five looooong months, I was unable to make anything. It sucked. But I could only take being forced not to do what I love for so long. So began planning. And I want to make this extremely clear- MASKS ARE IMPERATIVE TO OUR SAFETY! SO IS SOCIAL DISTANCING; and I took all of that into consideration when I began prepping for this project. I made sure I kept my mask on the entire 5 hour shoot, and only took it off to hydrate in private. I also made sure all my actors took equal and safe precautions before we all gathered to film. And thankfully, since I am a one man crew, I was able to limit the amount of people on set to just myself and my 4 actors.
The idea for this story, if you couldn’t already tell, came out of my extreme dissatisfaction with how our police force have been poorly handling countless situations, and more often than not- straight up abusing their power. It is as disgusting as it is terrifying. Thankfully, we’re talking about it now, more than ever, but I don’t feel it has been portrayed or addressed enough in film. So I decided to put my thoughts out there and make something I think we can all understand.
If you’re not familiar with the Eradicator, I highly recommend you Google him. He’s a hell of a character. But to save you some time, imagine if the Terminator possessed the body of Superman and had the moral compass of Judge Dredd…. That’s the Eradicator in a nutshell. I’ve always viewed him as a prime candidate for a horror movie, and that was exactly what I wanted to do with this project. I wanted to make a Superman horror movie that expressed my views and frustrations with our police force. And I think I’ve done that.
One of the initial challenges with this short was creating the Superman memorial statue for the opening scene. I felt it was really important to have that in the movie, especially to justify the confrontation between the Eradicator and the mother. Thankfully, I have a little bit of skills when it comes to sculpting, so I was able to make the Superman statue myself. It stands about 14 inches tall. I then filmed it on a green screen and inserted it into a background shot I took while filming on location in Los Angeles. The end result looks pretty convincing. My only complaint is the quality of the statue’s sculpt. The clay I was working with was not as good as I had hoped it would be, and thus I was not able to create as smooth a sculpt as I had hoped for.
