the story.
Johnny Darrell, our director, had a close encounter with a bear. He came out of it with a story, and a better question: what if the thing in the trees had been worse?
The bear didn’t make the cut.
Keith is a bedraggled punk who wakes up face-down in a remote forest creek. Within moments he is being hunted by a towering elk with glowing red eyes and a mouth full of fangs. He runs for a muddy logging road and thinks he is saved when a passing logging truck barrels into the beast. He goes back to look. The wreckage moves.
What follows is a chase through the timber, a brawl between cryptids, and a fall that Keith does not see coming.
the look.
The film is built to read like a horror-punk graphic novel that learned to move. Heavy, ink-drenched linework. Toxic forest greens and visceral crimson, with very little in between.
Green is the forest Keith is lost in. Red is the elk’s eyes, and everything the elk touches.
Kinetic 2.5D camera work pushes through layered artwork, so every frame has depth while the linework stays flat and graphic. The camera chases like live action. The image still looks drawn.
credits.
Written, directed and made by Johnny Darrell, with generative AI.
Music by Johnny Darrell.
A POWER SHIFTER Studios original.
the outcome.
The Beast is a finished POWER SHIFTER Studios original, written and directed from a story that really happened to its director.