Director – Aaron B. Koontz, Screenplay – Cameron Burns, Aaron B. Koontz & Keith Lansdale, Producers – Cameron Burns, Roman Dent, Aaron B. Koontz, James Norrie, Inderpal Singh, Ashleigh Snead & Matthew Thomas, Photography – Andrew Scott Baird, Music – Alex Cuervo, Visual Effects – Brandon Christensen, Special Effects Supervisor – Conley Wilson, Production Design – Rebekah Bell. Production Company – Paper Street Pictures/Storyteller Media/Bondit Media Capital/Title Media.
Cast
Devin Druid (Jake Dalton), Zachary Knighton (Duncan Dalton), Stan Shaw (Lester), Pat Healy (Wiley), Bill Sage (Dodd), Melora Walters (Maria), Natasha Bassett (Pearl), Noah Segan (Truman Jones), Tina Parker (Brenda), James Whitecloud (Chief), James Landry Hebert (Cotton Mather), Doug Van Liew (Earl), Darryl Cox (Barkeep)
Plot
Duncan Dalton leads the Dalton Gang of outlaws. His young teenage brother Jake presses to be able to take part in the latest job – a train robbery. The gang pull over the train and eliminate the Pinkertons, only to find that what they were guarding was a locked chest containing a teenage girl Pearl. Duncan is wounded in the shootout. Pearl promises them that there is a doctor and a generous reward if they will return her to her hometown of Potemkin. They accompany her to Potemkin where the men are welcomed at the brothel run by the women of the town. They then make the discovery that the women are witches.
The Pale Door was the second directorial film for Aaron B. Koontz. Koontz had previously made the modest horror film Camera Obscura (2017) and produced the horror anthology Scare Package (2019), along with directing the Rad Chad’s Horror Emporium, Horror Hypothesis episode. In between these, Koontz has also produced a growing body of medium-budgeted films with the likes of The Pizzagate Massacre (2020), The Artifice Girl (2022), Blood Relatives (2022), Old Man (2022), The Requin (2022), Revealer (2022), Sorry About the Demon (2022), A Creature Was Stirring (2023), Trim Season (2023) and Snow Valley (2024). Koontz co-writes with Keith Lansdale, the son of horror writer Joe R. Lansdale, while Lansdale Sr also presents the film.
The Pale Door is a Western-horror crossover – I have an essay on Western genre crosshatches here with Weird Westerns. Amid this, there is a sub-genre of films dealing with Western ghost towns filled with all manner of weird things, usually ghosts, as in Ghost Town (1988), Phantom Town (1999), Purgatory (1999), 1313: Billy the Kid (2012) and Teardrop (2022). Into the mix, the script throws a variation on the plot of From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) that follows a group of criminals on the run as they seek refuge in a place whereupon the script conducts a sudden dogleg into genre territory – a vampire bar in From Dusk, a brothel run by witches here.
(l to r) Outlaws Noah Segan and Pat Healy in a town of witches
Aaron Koontz has quite an impressive cast line-up. Fully half of The Pale Door takes places introducing the characters, establishing the set-up and then depicting the train heist before the arrival at Potemkin. Along with some very naturalistic photography, this realistically grounds the film. On the other hand, the move into fantastical territory with the introduction of the far witches takes on more of a “huh?” aspect.
When we meet the witches, they are less witches in the cauldrons and pointy hats sense than they are in the Roald Dahl sense ie. hideous and warty a la The Witches (1990), while they are also burn disfigured, having been sent to the stake during the Puritan era. In fact during the scenes with people being pursued around the brothel – including scuttling along the ceiling! – and being nd readily slaughtered, they seem less witches in any traditional sense than they do zombies. And to me this was the point that the film’s reasonable grounded realism elsewhere slid irredeemably downhill.
