Last month saw the release of The Pale Door, a dark and emotionally taxing horror-Western that centers on a one-night showdown between the famed Dalton Gang and a group of resurrected witches who had been unjustly killed years before. In the film, Happy Endings and Magnum, P.I. star Zachary Knighton plays Duncan Dalton, badly injured during a robbery gone wrong and in need of medical attention when his gang finds out that the ghost town they’re holed up in is home to actual ghosts. The rest of the gang, including characters played by Noah Segan and Pat Healy, are won over by what, at first, appears to be a brothel where Duncan can get some attention and they can get some…attention.
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Knighton told ComicBook.com that he was glad to play against type as a surly cowboy, since most people know him as an affable, smiling primetime guy. that said, he was never supposed to be Duncan to begin with; that was a happy accident.
Originally I was going to play Bill Sage’s character in the movie and it was going to be a lot more involved in the filming,” Knighton told ComicBook.com. “Somebody else was going to play Duncan, and there were some storms or some tornadoes, the shoot kept getting bumped. And essentially my window was closing. I only had two weeks of availability. And [director Aaron B. Koontz] came up with the idea of switching roles and going to play Duncan. So I thought about it, and I talked to [co-star Devin Druid]. I was preparing to play more of an insane character in that movie. I don’t often get to be that sort of hero archetype or what have you, so I just said, ‘Let’s just try this kind of straight man heroic Western character and see how it goes.’ So I had a lot of fun with it.”
The change in roles came with one particular challenge: with a relatively short shoot time, he and Druid had to come up with a completely believable relationship, since the pair’s onscreen chemistry is key to selling Druid’s storyline in the film.
“I think a lot of that is just being, we were in a motel in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma and all we had to do was make this movie and hang out together,” Knighton explained. “So we spent some time hanging and I was a fan of Devin Druid’s from 13 Reasons Why, and also just looking at the kid, I was thinking, ‘This guy, we can definitely be brothers.’ So we had an instant connection and Noah Segan and I had made a few movies together before, so that was easy. And all those guys are so great. I’ve been such a fan of all of them, Pat Healy and Bill Sage. And just everybody in the movie is really cool. So we kind of had a quick bond, we’re trying to figure out the one or two restaurants to go to in Oklahoma every night and we would all go together and maybe had a few drinks here and there. And we had a good time.”
The Pale Door is now showing in select theaters, and also available on digital and on-demand platforms now.
