By Sarah Opdahl

Growing up in New Fairfield, Dan Salem never thought he would want to work in the entertainment industry. Though always a funny guy to be around, he didn’t imagine a successful career in comedy someday. Fast forward to present day and he now has a fascinating resume as an thriving actor, writer, director, producer, and film editor filled with television appearances, short films, and an active online presence. Dan and his wife, and writing/filming partner, Mandi Mellen have completed their first feature-length psychological-horror movie, Alone, and to their delight, it was recently released on Amazon.

Dan explained that Alone is for viewers who “love a thrill ride, it’s not graphic, it’s not a bloody movie.” Instead, “this movie is going to keep you guessing.” The idea for an isolation horror movie understandably originated in the pandemic lockdown. Mandi, who was in the late stages of pregnancy, was inspired and began writing a 20-page script, to which Dan would later add color, in the form of dialogue and shots. Working on many short films over the past two decades, Dan and Mandi pieced together the 90-minute, feature-length film that takes place in a single day almost as if it is a series of shorts, playing wi th time and further bending minds with the sequence and the discovery of whether events were occurring in the day or night. In fact, Dan explained, “each one to five minute piece of the movie is its own little story.”

Following in the footsteps of his favorite director, Steven Spielberg, Dan wanted to keep the suspense strung tightly, asking the violinist who created the score to keep John WIlliams’s legendary, emotion-feuling Jaws and Jurassic Park scores in mind, especially in the build-up to action. Evoking another favorite director, Francis Ford Coppola, Dan stayed extremely organized throughout the shoot by keeping an old-school, giant binder in hand in which he wrote out every scene and every shot of the movie, from beginning to end. This was helpful as the actors were a mix of people Dan and Mandi had worked with in the past and a couple who were new to their orbit.

The couple worked to achieve their goal selling Alone to “get distribution so everyone can see it.” They were thrilled when awards and praise for the movie’s quick cuts and intensity started rolling in, as that led to Amazon picking up the film and it will soon be released on Tubi. In post-production, Dan spent countless hours editing the film with Davinci software and was pleased that viewers are “not really sure if the mundane is going to get crazy, or if the mundane is something the main character is imagining or happening. And so it works well, way better than we ever anticipated, because everyone that has seen the movie so far is questioning many things that we didn’t intend to, so that’s fun.”

Dan and Mandi already have a handful of feature-length films at various stages in the hopper. Working closely together since they met at Boston University in the early 2000s, the pair have a keen sense of what works on screen, not only for horror but, in particular, for comedy, which is where many of their efforts laid in the past two decades. Though they do create a lot of social media content for brands, Dan says they do not intend to go back to creating short-form films. A fan of Jordan Peele’s work, Dan is working on a horror-comedy film, in part “because I really want to do something comedic, because we have kind of lost comedy in the film industry recently,” while Mandi is writing a Christmas movie.

Graduating as salutatorian from New Fairfield High School in 2001, Dan went on to BU to study astronomy and physics, but life took a turn when his roommate was studying film and then he met Mandi, a film major, in sophomore year. He finds it funny that in high school he was aware of a distant performing arts scene, but he focused instead on his time in sports, especially as a captain of the Rebels football team. “I did very well in writing in English at school in New Fairfield,” but beyond that had not found the deep well of his creative side until he moved to Boston and then Los Angeles. Dan says his parents, Richard and Nancy Salem, who continue to reside in New Fairfield, “didn’t watch a lot of movies. I watched them with my friends on the side, so they weren’t putting movies on all the time. They still don’t watch that many movies, that’s not their thing,” he said. Though their pride knows no bounds, Dan is happy that, since it isn’t gory, his mom could watch Alone without needing to peek through her fingers.

In addition to his many projects, Dan was happy to reconnect with two former New Fairfield Rebel teammates, Phil Sember and Bud Seamon, several years ago and the trio joined to create a football podcast on YouTube, https://youtube.com/@buzzchompsports/. Dan noted, “one lives in Connecticut, one lives in New Jersey now, but the three of us all went to elementary school, middle school, and high school together. We all have an S last name, so we all sat together in homerooms.”

Dan encourages anyone who is interested to check out the movie. When you search on Amazon, he suggests searching for Alone 2024, since there are other movies and television shows with the same title. He pitched, in addition to it being a gripping, edge-of-your-seat film, “it’s only an hour and a half, it’s very approachable, and I bet you will like it.”