Private Project

To Beyond

Catastrophe looms over an empty city. One dreamer searches for transcendence. Inspired by the novella “Through the Gate of the Silver Key” by H.P. Lovecraft and E Hoffman Price.

  • Stephen Michaels
    Director
  • Indy Jeremy
    Key Cast
    "Randolph Carter"
  • Galen Rokosz
    Key Cast
    "The Formless Thing"
  • Stephen Michaels
    Writer
  • Stephen Michaels
    Producer
  • Indy Jeremy
    Producer
  • Jonah Aaronson
    Art Assistants
  • Sheen Faulconer
    Art Assistants
  • Andrew Hastings
    1st AD
  • Stephen Michaels
    Director of Photography
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Feature
  • Genres:
    horror, sci fi
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 13 minutes 16 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    May 31, 2024
  • Production Budget:
    2,500 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Black & White and Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
  • Bizarroland
    Orlando
    United States
    December 14, 2024
    World Premier
  • Indie Gathering
    Cleveland Ohio
    United States
    August 17, 2025
    Mid West Premier
    Best Experimental Film - 1st Place
Director Biography - Stephen Michaels

I’m a filmmaker born in Philadelphia and raised between Northern and Southern California. Stop-motion was my first love; from an early age I enjoyed creating with my hands. In high school, I started shooting and producing micro-budget shorts & features with my friends - a group of collaborators I still work with today. While attending Chapman University for my BFA in Screenwriting and a minor in Creative and Cultural Industries, I studied experimental and non-narrative films in the graduate program under professors Chuck Workman and Thomas Ethan Harris. Since college, I’ve actively been working across a variety of features, shorts, music videos, and commercial content. I'm most passionate about media that challenges audiences to open up to new experiences and become active viewers.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

This film was conceived and completed within a period of personal loss. My mom went into hospice in November of ’22 after an eleven-year battle with lung cancer. I started writing the following January, and my mom passed away in March '23 shortly after filming started. I began reading HP Lovecraft around this time; cosmic horror became the best way for me to channel my existentialist fears. Through Lovecraft’s unraveling protagonists and grandiose terror, I found an eerie similarity to my own grief. The despair felt at the end of a life doesn’t care about the source, whether the cause be eldritch abominations or cancerous growths.

It was reading “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” that suggested there could be some form of solace for a Lovecraft character. The protagonist, Randolph Carter, experiences esoteric revelation as he leaves his earthly body, and his fictional redemption gave me hope to keep searching through my own anguish. Writers like Alan Moore, Manly P. Hall, and Aleister Crowley provided context to Lovecraft’s fiction, and their works helped shape a positive outlet for my experience.

Each night became a meditation as I continued filming, and in the quiet cold hours this film became my purpose during the mourning period. Intangible horrors through stillness and sound, the product of unseen, unknowable forces just outside the periphery of understanding. My intention turned to showing the depths of one’s anguish, and the redemption that comes with understanding. I hope that this film can provide for others the experience that it's been for me; a soul-examining journey of purpose in the throes of despair.