{"id":470853,"date":"2026-10-19T20:34:21","date_gmt":"2026-10-19T20:34:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/470853\/"},"modified":"2026-10-19T20:34:21","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T20:34:21","slug":"you-cant-leave-horror-movie-filmed-in-dallas-fort-worth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/470853\/","title":{"rendered":"‘You Can’t Leave’ horror movie filmed in Dallas-Fort Worth"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s something quietly perverse about making a horror film in a place you know and love<\/a>. You know the roads. You recognize the tree line. You\u2019ve driven past that waterfall billboard a hundred times along Interstate 35. But then the director calls \u201caction,\u201d and suddenly none of that familiarity saves you.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the experience that greeted most of the cast of \u201cYou Can\u2019t Leave,\u201d a new supernatural horror film that opened in theaters on Friday, Oct. 16, with a trailer that has already cleared 100 million views online. Shot on a remote ranch near Argyle, with additional scenes filmed in Highland Park<\/a>, the film is as locally rooted as it gets. Most of its cast \u2014 Spencer Boldman, Cameron Inman, Paola Andino, Taylor Murphy and Thomas Bauer \u2014 grew up within a tank of gas of the woods where they\u2019d spend their nights running, screaming and seeing things that weren\u2019t there.<\/p>\n

The premise is lean and effective: Boldman plays James, a young man searching for his missing younger sister, Gabby, played by Inman. Gabby\u2019s phone\u2019s last location leads him and a group of friends into a remote forest, where they find a cabin and quickly realize the woods have no intention of letting them go. Every trail loops back on itself. Every escape attempt deposits them exactly where they started as shadowy entities hunt the group after dark.<\/p>\n

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THANK YOU!<\/p>\n

You’re all set.<\/p>\n

CLOSE\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

A not-so-familiar fear<\/p>\n

Boldman, who grew up in Plano and also serves as one of the film\u2019s executive producers, described how much the shared history between cast members shaped the shoot. He has known Inman, Andino and Murphy personally for years.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t have a younger sister,\u201d Boldman tells us. \u201cBut just as a man by nature, I feel very protective of the women in my life. When I read [the script], I just felt like I knew the depth and the dynamic that James was going through.\u201d <\/p>\n

He was most drawn to how quickly the stakes escalate \u2014 what starts as a casual missing-persons search becomes something much harder to survive. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a cool opportunity to explore how helpless somebody would feel,\u201d he says. \u201cNot knowing where their sister is and then experiencing these traumatic deaths as it starts to unfold.\u201d<\/p>\n

That sense of helplessness was sometimes less than fictional. The Argyle ranch location, it turned out, didn\u2019t feel much like the North Texas the cast had grown up in. Inman, who attended Flower Mound High School, thought she had a solid read on the region.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know exactly where all this stuff is,\u201d she says. \u201cExcept that was a little bit further. So, I was like, \u2018Whoa. I didn\u2019t know this was all out here.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

At the location itself, the feeling shifted further. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt, to me, didn\u2019t feel like home or Dallas or anything like that,\u201d she says. \u201cIt felt very spooky.\u201d <\/p>\n

Boldman noted there were no streetlights anywhere on the property. Inman added that if anyone had needed help, it would have taken a long time to arrive.<\/p>\n

For Andino, the experience had a strange split quality. She would drive to set past the gym she visits several times a week, then step out of the car and into a world that felt nothing like her daily life. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt would feel like a totally different world,\u201d she said. \u201cI might as well be in a completely different state.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"\"Thomas Bauer, Paola Andino and Spencer Boldman discover that familiar ground can still turn strange in \u201cYou Can\u2019t Leave.\u201d<\/p>\n

Provided by Guilder Cinema Group<\/p>\n

The cast\u2019s native familiarity with the Texas landscape wasn\u2019t just a logistical quirk \u2014 it shaped the way they understood the film\u2019s central fear. Bauer, who plays Will, the group\u2019s resident joker, put it simply: \u201cThe woods are scary by themselves, but you feel like there\u2019s shadows out there. Before they come after us, in a weird way, we all kind of know what they are, because we\u2019ve had that feeling in our gut.\u201d <\/p>\n

He\u2019s right. Anyone who has walked through unkempt Texas brush at night \u2014 the kind where the branches press in close, and the dark doesn\u2019t quit \u2014 knows exactly what he means.<\/p>\n

Playing their roles<\/p>\n

Murphy, who plays Sophia, James\u2019 ex-girlfriend and a complicated presence inside the group, found the film\u2019s psychological terrain just as disorienting as the physical one. Her character flips between victim and threat depending on whose nightmare is unfolding, and Murphy described the challenge of sustaining that uncertainty.<\/p>\n

\u201cStaying in the state of delirium and confusion was probably the most challenging,\u201d she says. \u201cBut also the most fun, because you never know what\u2019s up, what\u2019s down, what\u2019s real, what\u2019s not real.\u201d <\/p>\n

She drew a direct line to present-day anxieties, adding, \u201cEspecially today with AI, we\u2019re dealing with that now, where it\u2019s like, what\u2019s fake?\u201d<\/p>\n

Andino\u2019s character, Olivia, navigates a different kind of pressure. Gabby\u2019s best friend and James\u2019 new romantic interest, Olivia, spends the film managing insecurity and fear in equal measure, never fully accepted by the older group, so she\u2019s never sure where she stands. But Andino was firm about how she wanted to play the role.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s not this damsel in distress,\u201d she says. \u201cShe does really need James, but she\u2019ll also tell him how it is and stands up for herself, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Inman\u2019s role as Gabby is structurally unusual: she disappears early in the film, leaving the entire story to orbit her absence. She was determined to make those opening minutes count.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to really imprint and burn myself into people\u2019s brains,\u201d she says. <\/p>\n

She also let slip a small detail for attentive viewers \u2014 some of the whispers woven through the film are her own voice, recorded in post-production.<\/p>\n

What holds the whole project together is the web of connections running through it. Andino and Murphy trained at the same D-FW acting studio. Bauer described the mood on set as something that probably shouldn\u2019t exist in a horror production. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt made art feel like home,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

With families stopping by and a cast that had known each other for years, the warmth became almost a problem. <\/p>\n

\u201cToo much goodness in a horror movie\u2026 it shouldn\u2019t be allowed, but we got away with it,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Boldman, meanwhile, carries a producing credit on a film that brought a real production to Denton County and Highland Park<\/a> \u2014 a point worth making in a region that doesn\u2019t always get to see itself on screen in this way.<\/p>\n

If the cast is to be believed, you\u2019ll recognize the landscape. You just won\u2019t feel safe in it anymore.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou Can\u2019t Leave\u201d is now playing in select theaters<\/a> in the area. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s something quietly perverse about making a horror film in a place you know and love. You know…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":470854,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[64,5440,116,118,117,987],"class_list":["post-470853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fort-worth","tag-events","tag-first-look","tag-fort-worth","tag-fort-worth-headlines","tag-fort-worth-news","tag-halloween"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=470853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470853\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/470854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=470853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=470853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=470853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}