Thomas Breen photos
Is that NYPD Blue... in Wooster Square?
And who's the lady in white?
Ohh, it's a film shoot! For "The Monster."
In front of large computer screens and a focused film crew, a woman in a white dress walked up to a Wooster Square brownstone pretending to be New York City.
She reached the top of the entrance. Before she could open the door and walk inside, she stopped, turned, and walked back down the stairs — ready to repeat those moves again and again, as part of a new horror movie being filmed in part in New Haven.
That was the scene, so to speak, on a closed-off block of Chapel Street between DePalma Court and Wooster Place Tuesday morning.
A set of brownstones reminiscent of a New York City neighborhood were surrounded by a film crew, part of a Connecticut-based company called Chair 10 Productions.
The actors and directors and cameramen and security guards and dozens of other film-crew participants had come to New Haven for the day to work on the horror-thriller movie “The Monster.”
According to the film’s iMDB page, the movie is about “two millennials who flip NY apartments they don’t own to new buyers who don’t know they are being scammed. The con works brilliantly until they run into an apartment owner with a dark secret who flips the game on them.”
Most of the film’s shoot — which began on Nov. 6 and is scheduled to go until Dec. 13 — will take place in Danbury. The crew was scheduled to film in New Haven on Tuesday and Wednesday, working on exterior shots of the Chapel Street brownstones.
On the cold autumn day, nearly all of the leaves on the surrounding trees in the adjacent Wooster Square Park had fallen off. The crew walked around, bundled in puffers or thick jackets. Passersby walking their dogs or on runs all stopped to watch the filming process. Some even took out their phones to snap photos. That is, before they were ushered off the street so they did not interrupt the filming or make noises near the microphone. One passerby asked a production assistant about what the film was about, but the assistant didn’t reveal anything (“I’ve signed too many NDA’s”).
On DePalma Court, a small street adjacent to the brownstones, sat Chair 10 co-founders Jonathan and Laura Black. Behind them, trailers and prop trucks lined the street. Jonathan said that though the exterior shot will be of these brownstones, reminiscent of New York, the interior will actually be filmed inside Tarrywile Mansion back in Danbury. He highlighted this illusion as part of an appeal of filming in Connecticut — avoiding the high production costs and traffic delays of shooting in New York.
“Come to Connecticut, it’s way cheaper here,” Black said. “You get the look that you need for your film, but have a great experience filming.” (A different crew filmed a different movie on that same stretch of Chapel Street last year.)
That said, Black still had to negotiate with the city to close off the portion of Chapel Street on the southern end of Wooster Square Park from DePalma to Wooster Place — with police cars blocking off the roads and ushering oncoming cars to a detour route.
Jonathan is from Atlanta, Georgia, and Laura is from Newtown, Connecticut. The two lived in Los Angeles for 15 years, but moved back to Connecticut to raise their children during the pandemic. Since then, they have been invested in bringing film opportunities to Connecticut, or bringing “Hollywood to Connecticut,” as they put it. The two have also started the Connecticut Film and TV Alliance to increase networking opportunities for those who aspire to get involved in the film industry.
As for the set of “The Monster” itself, Black mentioned that the crew is engaging with local businesses as well as hiring interns from local colleges — such as University of New Haven and University of Connecticut — to help those interested in the film industry.
“From the perspective of the students, we’re obviously working with interns, really trying to build up the industry here,” he added.
Black and his partner Lauren, the other co-founder of the production company, declined to share too many details about the movie, referring instead to its iMDB page. The movie stars Djimon Hounsou, Lauren LaVera, and Mia Healey.
One security guard said the crew planned to be at work Tuesday through midnight, before coming back Wednesday for their final New Haven day of shooting.
Scenes from the scene on Chapel on Tuesday.
