Make the Budget Your Aesthetic with ‘Night Patrol’ Co-Writer and Director Ryan Prows

An LAPD officer must put aside his differences with the area’s street gangs when he discovers a local police task force is harboring a horrific secret that endangers the residents of the housing projects he grew up in.

How often does a film come along that checks all the boxes? Answer: Not often enough. No need to look much further (or wait for that matter) because Night Patrol isthe film that checks all the boxes. A stylized genre film where vampires are the corrupt LAPD night patrol task force and it’s up to rival LA gangs and a zest of Zulu magic to make things right… or try to. But wait, there’s more! A strong underscore of thematic elements and character’s journeys adds to this edge of your seat viewing experience. Oh, and I definitely can’t forget to mention the stacked cast. It is very highly recommended you gather up your friends and see this in a theater for the perfect communal experience.

Now, let’s dive into what co-writer and director Ryan Prows (V/H/S/94) has to say for himself with his second full length feature. If you’ve been tracking Prows’ film career, within the first 3 minutes of the film, you will think to yourself, “Yup, this is a Ryan Prows movie.” That’s because Prows, in addition to his longtime and frequent collaborators, Shaye Ogbanna (Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist), Tim Cairo (Shadow of God) and Jake Gibson (Lowlife), have a very distinct voice and vision, inherently their own. Of course, they’re students of the craft and maybe with a slight of hand, beg, steal and borrow from the greats that came before them… but they go all in. Check out their first independent feature film Lowlife – you’ll get the gist.

Yet, there is something very particular about this gang of creatives. While their stories may be heightened, they’re inherently authentic and grounded. This is thanks to the countless hours of research and directly speaking to the marginalized groups they are representing on the page.

Back to Ryan Prows and this interview. He recently discussed with Script his collaborative approach with his co-writers, akin to a writers’ room and Wu-Tang, how the film tackle’s themes of horror, crime and societal stigmas, using the genre to ground supernatural elements. Plus, he dives into how the narrative structure’s chapter headings was conceived, how the budget reflected the films aesthetic, and the importance of bringing longtime collaborator and cinematographer Ben Kitchens into the fold early on during the writing process.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: This is 100% a Ryan Prows movie, through and through. It's really cool to see that you kept the gang together. So, let's talk about the writing. I don't know how you guys do it, because there's so many of you, and also because you all have individual distinct voices, but you guys somehow always manage to have a very unified voice on the page. I'm curious about that writing process.

Ryan Prows: To give some backstory on it, we all went to school together and definitely had similar sensibilities. But like you said, everybody's kind of got their own unique sensibility they also bring to it, which is cool. And we always kind of joke we follow the Wu-Tang model of we do our own stuff, but then we can form like Voltron when the world needs us most, which is not often [laughs].

We did our first film Lowlife out of school. I would say it was the last year where we could get free stuff from people, being students, from school, including crew and equipment and everything. And once we were kind of making the rounds on festival stuff with that, we wanted to keep the band together.

It's kind of a cool process, we always treat it like a TV writers' room, where we all break story together. There's four of us on this, five on Lowlife, and Maxwell [Towson] moved to the east coast, so he's dead to us [laughs] - and with the four of us, we'll break story, and then on this we kind of all took our own acts. We went away and wrote an act a piece, and then came back, and everybody sort of touches it at that point.

So, I think you get a twofold, you get a cool thing out of it of everybody brought something that was a surprise. And obviously, as you're writing, you start coming up with fun stuff, or a bit, or whatever. And so that's always exciting - it feels like a little bit of a present. And it feels like you have some objectivity to it, because it's not you doing it, but then everybody kind of gets an honest hard time where we go through and kind of kill everyone's darlings. People can kill each other's darlings so maybe it doesn't hurt you so much to have to kill your own. It is definitely a unique process, but two movies down now it seems to be working.

Sadie: You're obviously tackling a lot here, thematically, but how you guys were able to funnel all of that through the lens of horror with this supernatural element is pretty cool. How did you guys collectively lean into that yet make it feel grounded?

Ryan: I love genre. I've been trying to do genre forever and horror specifically. And that was a big conversation early on, when we started building it was just, yes, you can push it, and you can talk about maybe things that you couldn't stomach in a normal drama, or would feel kind of too much. But it was always our intention of when we were starting it, can we make something that feels like a cop crime procedure, that you buy all of that, and then you buy all of the community aspect, and the neighborhood stuff and the gang stuff as well?

So that then when the vampire stuff comes in, that feels as grounded and as real and scary as the rest of it. And then you sort of let that, again, that's what's so great about horror, is you sort of let that metaphor work for you, and you don't have to really say too much else... it's going there.

I think that's the strength of it. And I think, obviously, it's had such a big resurgence, or a big couple of years where you can just make something real and really, hopefully, drill down on characters and let them kind of lead, but then leave you with something to think about or talk about.

Sadie: Framing the narrative structure, especially through these chapters, how did you guys land on that? Was that something that was happening on the page, or is that something that happened later on in post?

Ryan: Yeah, the chapter thing specifically came in, actually, when we were cutting it. It was pretty much the same linear through line. I thought it was pretty elegantly, sort of structured, where we had almost sort of baton handing scenes to the next character that then we follow them for a bit, and then we come back around to this. I think it was working, but it felt like a little unmoored or untethered, as our test audiences were watching it, where it just felt like if we had a little bit more of a framing, like chapter heading sort of thing, we could reset and know we're starting here. So that was interesting that that kind of just came out of the post side of it, of sort of show and tell and figuring it out and the trial and error of it.

Sadie: It works well. Can't leave Ben Kitchens out of this conversation. There is a very specific look to this film, a very specific tone. How early on are you bringing Ben in to those conversations during the writing phase, to get an idea of what you’d like to achieve and what's reasonable and what's going to service the story?

Ryan: That's a great question. Ben Kitchens, cinematographer, we all went to school with him as well, and he's done all of my projects. We brought him on super early. He read every draft of it, pretty much. We were writing this right after Lowlife, which is our no budget movie, and there was talk of OK is this the next one that we just do no budget? We gotta figure it out. And ended up, obviously, kind of not going that way, which was awesome.

But in the sense of making the budget your aesthetic, there was a lot of talk of what we can do, or how we can make the look of it help us and kind of keep it where it feels big and expansive. We're sort of not leaving anything on the floor. We're not having to address over here, if we made the decision of this is where we're looking and this is where we're looking. So, there was a lot of those conversations early on.

And Ben is so good with story as well. He's always been a great sounding board of not buying stuff or [saying] hey, maybe turn it this way, or wouldn't this character act like this, or why are they acting like this now? Very, invaluable.

Sadie: There’s a scene with a series of shots that comes to mind when they're getting the guns out of the refrigerators. Absolute gold.

Ryan: [laughs] The refrigerator thing... we were supposed to be in an old church that was going to be the setting for that, it was across the street from where we were shooting. And then we ended up getting booted out of that place. And we had our production office in that refrigerator store. And so, we were like, 'Can we shoot here?' [laughs] as we were going through. Ryan Martin, our illustrious production designer, opened up a fridge, he said, 'Should we?' and I just [said], 'Put the guns in the refrigerator? Yes!' [laughs] That was one of those kismet moments that was incredible.

Night Patrol hits Theaters on January 16, 2026.