When Night Falls has been a long labour of love for writer, director and producer Alex Galvin. It’s been over fifteen years since he first had the idea that eventually became the feature film.

“I was in my early teens when I first had the idea for When Night Falls. I was on holiday at my grandparents home, when I came across my grandmother’s collection of classic crime and mystery stories. My grandmother was an enormous fan of all the “Golden Age” mystery writers; like Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh. I really enjoyed the puzzle and mystery elements of these books, and must have read over 50 that summer.

I also read many stories from lesser known writers like Mary Roberts Rinehart and Ethel Lina White, who specialised in stories about young women (usually nurses) in peril in old, isolated country houses. Both writers had a real talent for heightening the characters’ feelings of isolation, claustrophobia and fear of the unknown. I distinctly remember thinking how great this basic premise would make as a movie.

Upon reading some of these stories again in my twenties, and although still I held them in high regard, I realised just how badly dated and formulaic many of them were. The premises were often excellent; but the characterisations were non-existent, the stories would follow an identical plotline and always, without fail, they’d have a happy ending. Soon after that I realised that I wanted to write my own country house thriller. I wanted it to have the same mood and atmosphere of those classic thriller stories, but go off in a much more contemporary direction. I wanted to turn the genre on its head!”

Alex wrote the script off and on for two years while working on other film projects and his first novel One Endless Day, which was published in 2006. He then worked fulltime on the script for six months before beginning pre-production on the film.

“I got a lot of positive feedback on the script while it was being written. And I was able to use the script as a selling point when approaching some top actors. The other thing that excited me about the script was that I knew it could be filmed relatively inexpensively - with a single location and a handful of actors.

Although I was very happy with the script, once we started rehearsing I continued to polish it further - cutting quite a lot of the dialogue. Good actors can often emote so well that things don’t need to be spelled out to an audience.”

Finally, after all these years, Alex’s vision has now become a reality.