A Film About 'Shadow People'

It started with a caller telling radio host Art Bell, "I see shadow people."
 
This was back in 2001, and as Bell explained a few weeks later at the top of his discussion of the topic, the call triggered an "avalanche" of more than 4,500 emails from listeners. On the April 12th, 2001 Coast to Coast episode, Bell welcomed as a telephone guest Native American elder Thunder Strikes, a.k.a. Harley "Swift Deer" Reagan.



Later this week, in Grimsby, Ontario, an indie horror thriller inspired by the same topic will premiere locally. The Man in the Shadows was written, produced and co-stars area native Adam Tomlinson, who recently explained to local newspaper Niagara This Week that in his case, it started with a dream about being followed by a man in a hat:

When Tomlinson awoke, that man was in his bedroom, just standing there, watching him. Tomlinson forgot all about it until he was having a conversation with a friend who reported having a similar dream. Tomlinson then did what anyone in this day and age would, he turned to the Internet looking for information.

What he found were thousands of reports of the man in the hat and other shadow people. "No one really knows what they are," said the Grimsby filmmaker. "You wake up from a dream and find a man in a hat standing over you or sitting on your bed and you're unable to move. There are hundreds of reports."

Thunder Strikes told Bell that the first recorded account of shadow people dates back to 1153 B.C. and that today, people are assembling them into their "world of perceptual reality, because they exist in a parallel dimension." Or as Bell rephrased it: people's negative emotions are completing the shadow people, most often when folks are at "their most sensitive" (sleep).

It's a fascinating program. Thunder Strikes details how humans actually have ten different eyes, and it is through some of these additional senses that shadow people are usually encountered. The Native American sage had to obtain permission from his tribe's Council of Elders before appearing on Coast to Coast to talk about the "inorganic beings," and not all elders were in favor of his doing so.

The Man in the Shadows was first screened at the 2015 Dances With Films festival in Los Angeles. The screenings in Grimsby will take place Friday March 25th and Saturday March 26th at coffee house Station 1. It's Tomlinson's first feature-length film project and was written mostly back at his parents' place in Grimsby.

The movie will be released online later this year.

[The Man in the Shadows]