A horror film directed by a Clifton native filmmaker and shot in the Kankakee area will come to the big screen next month.
“When the Night Falls,” the debut feature film of 2018 Clifton Central High School graduate Andrew Lamping, will be screened at 5 p.m. Nov. 7 and 5 p.m. Nov. 14 at the Mar Theatre in Wilmington.
The film was shot across Kankakee, Clifton, Chebanse, Limestone and Wilmington in March 2024.
The film has been acquired by the Allen Media Group and is slated for national streaming and DVD release on Jan. 22.
Specifics are still being determined for the release.
But anyone who wants to watch it sooner can catch it at the historic theater in Wilmington next month.
“I just really hope that people see that we did right by the community,” Lamping said.
“We showed everything in a good light, and the fact that people can see their hometown and places they grew up in, hopefully on a big streaming service soon, is exciting.”
A private premiere for those involved in the production was held at the Wilmington theater last year.
The upcoming screenings will give the greater community a chance to see it.
When choosing to film in the Kankakee area, Lamping said he knew a lot of business owners in the community would welcome the production with open arms.
“We could sit around for another 10 years waiting for someone to eventually give us permission to make a movie for a script we wrote, or we could just write one based in Clifton,” he said.
Many in the cast and crew were born and raised in Kankakee County.
It was a rarity for them to not have to travel to Chicago to be involved in a film production, Lamping noted.
Production cost around $20,000, he added.
“When we show people the movie, they think we raised hundreds of thousands to make it just based off the quality and ability we had to be resourceful,” Lamping said.
Starring Anthony Louis (“The Bear”) and Austin Parsons (“97 Minutes”), the film follows a determined small-town sheriff in a race against time to find two missing boys. Unknown to him, a young woman has secretly taken in one of the boys, desperate to shield him from a horrific curse that transforms him after dark.
Directed by Lamping, founder of Lamping Media, the film is produced by Blain Smith. The director of photography is Kal Kociss.
Smith, a Bourbonnais-based filmmaker and 2005 graduate of Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School, said the production was a highly collaborative effort with “lots of love” put into it.
The goal, Smith said, is to inspire more filmmakers to create things in Kankakee.
“It was a lot of people from the surrounding area coming together,” Smith said. “I think we did something cool in Kankakee, and we’re trying to do more and more of this, just to bring film production to the area.”