Director lives for thrills, chills
Posted By Susan Doolan
Posted 2 years ago
A local filmmaker's horrifying vision will creep out of the darkness tonight in Barrie.
Richard Boddington will unleash his thriller, Dark Reprieve, at the Imperial 8 downtown.
The film, which has already captured the interest of the international film industry, is a dream come true for Boddington.
"The Holy Grail of filmmaking is a full-length feature released into the theatres. That's what everyone aspires to," said Boddington, who has been making films almost as along as he's enjoyed being scared silly by horror movies.
"Already it's opened many doors."
It's a scary genre, but sometimes reality is even scarier as Boddington found last year when he began filming Dark Reprieve in the historic Barrie Jail.
Reputed to be haunted, the abandoned heritage site on Mulcaster Street had some of his crew too creeped out to even enter the basement to shoot scenes, and at least two people reported seeing some kind of otherworldly apparition.
"That prison is a terrifying place - I was freaked out the first time I went in," he said, adding that he knew of its reputation and capitalized on it by shooting the basement scene with flashlights.
"There's no film images of ghosts, darn it, but two crew members had an encounter. Sadly not to me - I was really hoping."
Boddington has enjoyed the horror genre from the time he was nine years old and his parents would sneak him into drive-in movies under the cover of a blanket.
He started making films at age 12, graduated from four years of film school in the U.S. and today makes his living in the industry.
By day, he is a director of photography and film editor who directs commercials. He also runs one of Canada's biggest stock footage companies for moving film.
His shot of the U.S. White House can be seen in the movie Tail to the Chief.
Over the years, he has also worked as a producer at CBC for years, as well as couple of other television stations.
Five years ago, he moved to Horseshoe Valley to be closer to Barrie for his wife, who was working as a teacher at Barrie Central Collegiate
The Barrie Film Festival is sponsoring the two screenings of Dark Reprieve this weekend, which will be followed by a question-and-answer session with Boddington.
Two screenings of Dark Reprieve will be shown at Imperial 8, 55 Dunlop St. W., tonight at 7 p.m. and at 9 p.m. The 80-minute movie is rated 14A.
