Wendigoon and Evan Royalty’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R. film is the latest creator project to hit theaters

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of the Zone, the Wendigoon/Evan Royalty cowritten fan film that raised $320,000 on Kickstarter, is going on tour for its debut, and will be screened at theaters in New York, Florida, Texas, and California.

The film is based on developer GSC Game World‘s S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video games (which are in turn based on the novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky). Wendigoon, whose eclectic mix of horror, history, cryptid, conspiracy, and true crime content has brought him nearly 4 million subscribers on YouTube, cowrote with fellow YouTuber and self-dubbed “wannabe filmmaker” Royalty (688K subscribers).

Royalty also directed the film alongside co-director/director of photography Stephen Hancock (best known for making fan films based on the megaviral SCP Foundation universe). Actor Joshua Gray caps off the core team as co-star and lead producer.

In 2022, with Wendigoon and Royalty’s script in hand, the quartet banded together to Kickstart funds from just over 3,400 backers. Now, at one hour long, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. film is ready to premiere.

Its debut tour will start at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn Aug. 10, stop at Palladium in Tampa Aug. 12, then go on to Miracle Theater in Los Angeles Aug. 30, and will conclude at Dallas’ Arlington Music Hall Sept. 8. Wendigoon and members of the cast & crew will attend all four stops–and potentially more, as talks to expand the tour are underway.

Wendigoon (aka Isaiah Mark Nichols) tells Tubefilter he was drawn to making a fan film about the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video games because “I’ve always been fascinated in stories that naturally give birth to other stories. So in the story of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., you have a real-world scenario like the Chernobyl disaster, but then you have this kind of mythos that’s birthed from it of these different anomalies, this supernatural detail mixed with real-world history, which creates the kind of unification I love.”

With the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, “This world is so ripe with things to be told, other scenarios to happen,” he says. “What else could happen here?”

He and Royalty ended up focusing their story on a seasoned stalker–someone who enters the extraterrestrial-contaminated Zone to retrieve artifacts and sell them–tasked with guiding a band of mercenaries investigating a paranormal radio signal.

Royalty says that for him, the challenge was finding a way to adapt video games’ traditional shoot-shoot-bang-bang player progression into a compelling film.

“At the risk of sounding incredibly pretentious, one of the things that comes out of doing an adaptation of a video game is you’re not adapting a narrative that is conducive to the film-style telling,” he says. “A lot of video games are a framing device for you to kill bad guys. They exist within the mechanics of the game. So when you are thinking about adapting a video game specifically, you have to ask what the teleology of the game setting is within narrative. What is the story that only this setting can tell?”

Nichols, Royalty, Hancock, and Gray built that story with a grueling ten-day shoot where cast and crew worked for 12 to 14 hours straight. Post-production was tough, too; it hit a major yearlong delay when the first VFX studio they partnered with didn’t work out, and they had to build a new effects team from the ground up.

But, at the same time, “We’ve had so much support,” Gray says, then jokes, “You know, minus the fact that we had a Wendigoon in our corner.”

That support isn’t only coming from fans. Not long after S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of the Zone was announced, GSC Game World got in touch.

“We entered this entirely as a fan project. It was like, ‘We liked this story, we like this IP, let’s make a story. And then afterwards GSC was like, ‘This is cool,’” Nichols says. “Then it went from ‘This is cool’ to ‘Well, what’s it about? What’s this?’ They started asking questions. We started talking.”

And now? The Shadow of the Zone team is officially partnering with GSC, which plans to release the fourth game in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, just after Shadow of the Zone premieres.

Details about the partnership are currently under wraps, but Hancock says it’s been “this perfect combination.”

“We’ve been chatting for probably the past year and a half, and it’s been interesting watching fans who have been looking at Shadow of the Zone and been like, ‘I don’t know if GSC would like this.’ It’ll be a nice little surprise for them when they see that come out,” he says.

Tickets for the Shadow of the Zone tour are available here. It’s worth noting this is the latest in a growing number of films coming out of the creator sphere, with Hollywood studios picking up projects like RackaRacka‘s hit Talk to Me, Chris Stuckmann‘s upcoming Shelby Oaks, and Kane Parsons‘ backrooms film, and creators like Sam and Colby selling out nearly 200 theaters by self-distributing their documentary about the Conjuring house.