Escape from Tomorrow is a 2013 American horror film written and directed by Randy Moore in his directorial debut. It tells the story of an unemployed father having increasingly bizarre experiences and disturbing visions on the last day of a family vacation at the Walt Disney World Resort. It premiered in January at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and was later a personal selection of Roger Ebert, shown at his 15th annual film festival in Champaign, Illinois. The independent film was a 2012 official selection of the PollyGrind Film Festival, but at the time filmmakers were still working on some legal issues and asked that it not be screened.
The film drew attention, because Moore had shot most of it on location at both Walt Disney World Resort and Disneyland Park without permission from the Walt Disney Company, owner and operator of both properties. Due to Disney's reputation of being protective of its intellectual property, the cast and crew used guerrilla filmmaking techniques to avoid attracting attention, such as keeping their scripts on their phones and shooting on handheld video cameras similar to those used by park visitors. After principal photography was complete, Moore was so determined to keep the film a secret from Disney that he edited it in South Korea. Sundance similarly declined to discuss the film in detail before it was shown. It has been called "the ultimate guerrilla film". Rather than suppressing the film as Moore anticipated would happen, Disney did not respond.
It has been compared to the work of Roman Polanski and David Lynch. Although many who saw it at the Sundance Film Festival expressed strong doubts that the film would be shown to a wider audience due to the legal issues involved and the negative depiction of the parks, the Walt Disney Company did not prevent the film from being released. At the time of its premiere, Disney stated that it was "aware" of the film; since then the online supplement to Disney A to Z: The Official Encyclopedia has included an entry for the film.
It was released simultaneously to theaters and video on-demand on October 11, 2013, through Producers Distribution Agency, a Cinetic Media company.Zeitchik, Steven (August 19, 2013). "Guerilla Disney film 'Escape From Tomorrow' headed to theaters". Retrieved August 19, 2013. It has received mixed to negative reviews, praising its visuals and ambitious production, but criticizing its execution.
Plot On the last day of his family's vacation at Walt Disney World, blue-collar worker Jim White gets fired for an unknown reason, during a phone call with his boss at the Contemporary Resort Hotel. Refusing to ruin the vacation, Jim keeps it to himself. The family leaves their hotel room and takes the monorail to the park alongside two French teenage girls, Isabelle and Sophie, who pique Jim's interest, unbeknownst to his wife Emily, and their two children Elliot and Sara.
During the rides, Jim has a series of bizarre and disturbing hallucinations, such as the faces of Audio-Animatronic characters warping and taking on evil appearances, and his family verbally abusing him.
After an argument with Emily, Jim takes their children to various Disney park rides, while pursuing Sophie and Isabelle. Later on, he meets a mysterious woman, who uses her necklace to hypnotize him, making him black out and wake up to her raping him. She informs him that the parks' wholesome, costumed princesses are actually part of a secret prostitution ring that services rich Asian businessmen and that the turkey legs sold in the park are actually emu meat.
Jim's attempts to meet Isabelle and Sophie are noticed by Emily, causing tension between her and Jim, even when they go further with the children to Epcot. After Emily and Elliot return to the hotel following an argument with Jim resulting in her slapping Sara, Sophie approaches and invites Jim to come with her and Isabelle. When Jim refuses, Sophie spits in his face and walks off. Jim notices that Sara has disappeared and frantically searches for her, until the park guards use a taser to knock him unconscious.
Jim awakens in a secret detention facility under Epcot's Spaceship Earth where he sees pictures of a naked woman he imagined on the Soarin' ride, and video screens displaying events that happened earlier. A scientist discusses Jim's flights of fantasy and imagination, revealing that he is part of an experiment by the Siemens Corporation ever since he first went to the theme park as a child with his father. His boss is in on the conspiracy and his firing was all part of the plan along with the closure of the Buzz Lightyear ride, just as he and Elliot approached the boarding area. The scientist also tells Jim that he had turned in Elliot to them, like Jim's father had done to him as a child.
After damaging the instrument panel with medical ointment and decapitating the scientist, who turns out to be an android, Jim escapes the laboratory through a sewer. He finds that Sara has been captured by the mysterious woman, now wearing a Snow White costume. She proceeds to tell them about her past as a costumed princess, which ended after she crushed and killed a girl. She hypnotizes Jim with the necklace again, but Sara removes and destroys it, freeing Jim from the spell, and allowing her and Jim to escape.
After returning to the hotel room with Sara, Jim has digestive distress, and vomits up a large amount of blood and hairballs, which he recognizes as symptoms of cat flu, brought on by Sophie spitting on his face earlier, unknowingly infecting him. Elliot, awoken by the noises in the bathroom, comes in to find Jim on the verge of death. He weakly begs Elliot for help, but he closes the door.
The next day, a distressed Emily finds Jim's dead body, which now has cat eyes and a grinning face. Cleaning staff arrive to remove the proof, with one of them filling Elliot's head with false memories of riding the Buzz Lightyear attraction. As Jim's body is taken away, a new family comes to the hotel, which consists of another version of Jim, the woman from the Soarin' attraction, and their daughter.
Cast
Roy Abramsohn as Jim White Elena Schuber as Emily White Katelynn Rodriguez as Sara White Jack Dalton as Elliott White Danielle Safady as Sophie Annet Mahendru as Isabelle Alison Lees-Taylor as the Other Woman Lee Armstrong as the Man on Scooter Amy Lucas as the Nurse Zan Naar as the Fantasy Woman/New Wife Stass Klassen as The Scientist Trevor McCune as Valet Roger Davies as Roger Harrison
Background Randy Moore, a native of Lake Bluff, Illinois, frequently visited his father in Orlando after his parents were divorced. The two often spent time together at Walt Disney World nearby. "It was a special, physical place, and it became an emotional space," he told Filmmaker. He added: "Obviously, I have a lot of father issues that I can't separate from that place." Later, their relationship deteriorated.
He decided to pursue a career in film. After attending two other film schools, he graduated from Full Sail University in another Central Florida town, Winter Park, as the class valedictorian. He moved to Southern California and became a story editor, primarily doing uncredited rewrites.
In Hollywood, he married and started a family. Much like his own father, he frequently took his own children to Disneyland. "It wasn't until our first family trip together that this very visceral emotional landscape of my past, that I had by now nearly all but forgotten, hit me again like [a] bullet." On the family's first trip to Walt Disney World, the emotions grew stronger. "[I]t was like he was there as a ghost. We were going on the same rides I used to go on with him, but now we're no longer talking anymore."
His wife, a native of the former Soviet Union who had no memories or expectations like his, saw things with fresh eyes. Moore said "She's a nurse and goes between floors at hospitals. At one point she turned to me at some princess fair or something and said, 'This is worse than working the psych [ward] at the hospital.'"
He read Neal Gabler's biography of Walt Disney and took the children to Disneyland more frequently. "I became obsessed with finding a connection," he recalled later. He wrote the screenplay for Escape from Tomorrow in a month along with two others. An inheritance from his grandparents provided the bulk of the film's budget, which he put at around $650,000, triple what he had originally planned.
Production
"There was nowhere else to do it," Moore says of his decision to use Disney World as a setting and shoot at the parks. Disney, which has a reputation for aggressively protecting its intellectual property, has been tolerant of visitors uploading videos of their visits to YouTube and elsewhere since most of those user-created videos project a positive image of the parks. But Moore did not expect to get permission from Disney to shoot there given his negative, surrealistic portrayal of the park.
Moore used guerrilla filmmaking techniques, which sometimes call for using locations without getting permission. Escape from Tomorrow is not the first film made in whole, or part, this way at the Disney parks. In 2010, the British street artist Banksy shot a scene for Exit Through the Gift Shop in one of the parks with his collaborator Mr. Brainwash. They managed to smuggle the footage out after being detained and questioned by park security. The following year, a viral found footage short, Missing in the Mansion, filmed in the Haunted Mansion, was distributed online without interference from Disney. In addition, the 1984 shot on video crime film "Blonde Death" includes scenes shot at Disneyland without permission.
Extensive pre-production was necessary. The unique nature of the film shoot dictated steps not normally taken in filmmaking, such as charting the position of the sun weeks in advance since they could not use lighting equipment. Scenes were rehearsed and blocked in hotel rooms, rather than the actual locations. "We must have walked through the entire movie at least eight or nine times during multiple scouting trips before we ever rolled camera," Moore says.
Before principal photography, the cast and crew bought season passes to both Disneyland Park and Walt Disney World Resort. They spent ten days in Florida, then returned to California for two weeks at Disneyland, making the resort depicted in the film a combination of both properties. Actors and crew entered the parks in small groups to avoid attracting attention. "At one point, I even made the camera department shave off their facial hair and dress in tourist attire, which almost provoked a mutiny," says Moore. Despite the actors wearing the same clothes for days on end, Moore told the Los Angeles Times, park personnel never appeared to notice them, save for one day near the end of filming when Disneyland security thought they were paparazzi harassing a celebrity family.
The film was shot using the video mode of two Canon EOS 5D Mark II and one Canon EOS 1D Mark IV digital single-lens reflex camera, which helped the filmmakers look more like typical park visitors. To compensate for their inability to control the lighting, the film was shot in monochrome mode. "[W]e were shooting with really fast lenses wide open, so our depth of field was razor thin. Black and white helped us enormously with focus and composition, since we were doing almost everything in camera and didn't use a focus puller," Moore recalled. It was an irreversible choice. "[B]ecause the 5D doesn't shoot RAW, we customized settings in its monochromatic mode and couldn't go back to color, even if we had wanted to." Moore was comfortable with the result because of the surrealistic, dreamlike quality it created, forcing viewers to see the familiar sights of the Disney parks in a new way.