Please note this article contains spoilers for Night Patrol.
It seems like every year, January is always packed with horror movies that may offer unusual thrills that are more “down to earth” than they seem. This goes for Night Patrol, which recently premiered at last year’s Fantastic Fest with high praise. The action-horror puts a supernatural spin on many different topics, all of which are prominent today.
Night Patrol follows a Los Angeles cop, Xavier, who aspires to join a legendary group of officers known as the “night patrol.” However, when he discovers that the organization is targeting his childhood home and its residents, Xavier must find a way to put his aspirations aside or face justice (in the gruesome way the group puts it).
I had the chance to speak with Prows about Night Patrol, getting insight from the Los Angeles communities, the film’s surprising twists, and much more. Given how the film is deeply rooted in West Coast culture, Prows shared the important things he learned from Los Angeles’ communities when developing it. (You can watch the full interview below.)
“We knew early on, as we were building the film, that we wanted to shoot LA for LA and really ingratiate ourselves within those communities that were super important to us,” Prows began.
“That was a really big part of designing the film and marshaling resources where we had less days to shoot, but we had great crews in LA. We had the real locations, and we had the real people to help pull everything off.”
Going deeper into the feedback he gained from such communities, Prows shared what he and the crew did to envision how certain scenes in Night Patrol would play out.
“Early on, I was going and getting taken around different communities and meeting gang members or community leaders or whoever it was, just to get a feel of what that world is,” Prows recalled. “We were, very early on, pulling little nuggets from folks that were giving us some jewels. So that was really cool.”
“When we were in the rehearsal and building process, like right before we shot. We were able to introduce a lot of our actors to some of the folks in the community to have them get their questions answered.”
“It was very important for us to make all of that feel very lived in, real, and authentic on both sides of it [and] the police side as well,” Prows continued. “Hopefully, you know, that all supports when the supernatural stuff pops off, that feels very real world still, as well in a weird way.”
Speaking more on the supernatural elements of Night Patrol, Prows broke down how he envisioned the visual and narrative details about the dangerous, vampiric police force.
“It was funny! [Justin Long has] talked about in other interviews, but I call him a vampire traditionalist,” Prows joked. “He’s like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna have fangs, and I’m gonna put in contact lenses, and it’s gonna be like a thing.'”
“I do feel like we pulled references of all of the mind control stuff or the visual language of mind control or interconnectivity through from Dracula and other vampire lore,” Prows described.
“In a weird way, I do feel like we have made a traditional thing, but we just tried to push it further and make it feel like something you haven’t seen like the version of, you know?”
Due to how the night patrol organization in Prows’ film is much more unhinged than they let on, Prows recalled his process in coming up with the threat within and how he expanded upon it.
“We talked, just in doing screenwriting stuff, and then as we were building the characters with the actors, what their backstory was,” Prows explained.
“We used a like a shorthand of, ‘Okay, these are colonialists who are coming into some kind of indigenous land or dealing with some kind of indigenous or earthen force around the world.'”
Furthermore, Prows affirmed what the night patrol’s ideals really were. “If there’s like an overarching theme for the night patrol, it’s this colonial force coming in and like wrecking shop!”
One of the subtler, yet bigger, emotional aspects of Night Patrol is the doubt that’s built within Xavier as well as the rest of the ensemble characters. Prows broke down why it was important to establish that.
“That’s a cool observation because it was finding the balance of it where we don’t want them to be mustache twirlers,” Prows explained. “They all have their own motivation, but also at some point, we had a cut that maybe went a little bit further into all of that. You get lost in the sauce a little bit.”
“Even if they’re at odds, we know where they’re at from moment to moment, and that escalates the drama, the action, the tension, and everything. We also didn’t want that to get in the way of our core story and characters that we care about, and we’re on the journey with. It was always there.”
Specifically, that doubt builds between two characters who are two sides of the same coin: Xavier and his brother, Wazi. Although they’re separated for the most part, Night Patrol‘s climax brings them together at a harrowing crossroads.
Prows broke down how he wanted to pave the roads for Xavier and Wazi before reaching that point, and if there were any other ideas he had in mind when developing his final cut.
“At the script stage, we had different iterations of how they were interacting or if there were more or less or whatever,” Prows recalled. “We found really strong actors who could carry and really sell that bond. It became like almost you want that to happen and you wanna see this more so than getting a chance to see it.”
“We talked about it, but ultimately, I feel like they were strong. Those two actors were incredible, and they were just so charismatic, and I would love to make a movie of every one of the people in there.”
With Night Patrol‘s climax being one of the most shocking turn of events in the film, Prows discussed whether the climax was always going to have Xavier go through a gruesome defeat or take a different path with his character.
“That was always there cause it was that idea of brotherhood on both sides of it,” Prows explained. “It’s like the police-brotherhood stuff and then the literal family ties and how Xavier was torn between those two worlds and at odds with that.”
“That was always a pretty early foundational sort of part of the story,” Prows continued. “But again, Justin Long was able to somehow still make us be at root for him. He’s just so likable; you can still sympathize with him, and he’s doing horrible stuff throughout the film.”
Watch the full interview with Ryan Prows:
Night Patrol is currently playing in theaters.
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