Just about every kid experiences a fear of the dark at some point during their formative years. The entire nightlight industry relies upon it. While the dark has long been the setting for the vast majority of horror tales, a supporting player for scores of boogeymen, isn't it about time the dark itself became the featured attraction?

Enter Vanishing on 7th Street, director Brad Anderson's (The Machinist, Transiberian) ambitious post-apocalyptic tale about a small group of survivors searching for an explanation after a mysterious occurrence eliminates the vast majority of Detroit, leaving only piles of clothing in its wake.

Hayden Christensen leads a cast as Luke, a local TV personality who becomes the de-facto leader of a small group of survivors. Joining Christensen are Thandie Newton as Rosemary, a mother searching for her child, John Leguizamo as an animated movie theater projection named Paul, and 14 year-old Jacob Latimore as James, a young boy raised in a saloon that now serves as a safe haven for what might be the last people on earth.

I recently spoke with director Brad Anderson about developing and shooting Vanishing on 7th Street, filmed in just 20 days around Motor City in late 2010. Read our conversation after the jump.

What was the starting point for this project?

I read [Anthony] Jaswinski's scripts and it was one of those scripts that you get immersed in more and more with each turn of the page; this very weird logic and very weird sort of mystery. It actually makes the story that much more unsettling in my mind, having no real answers. The characters are all grasping at straws trying to find some explanation as to what's happening to them. They never really get a real answer themselves. So it had a bleakness to it that I found interesting. It conjured up this spooky, empty dark city devoid of people with little piles of clothes everywhere, shadows lurking along walls. It had a cool tone to it that I was interested in trying to capture.

This is a pretty unique cast of characters. Can you discuss the casting choices?

The first one on board was Hayden. He just responded to the mystery of the story like I did and he was looking to play more of a merciless character that he hadn't really played before. And I wanted to assemble an ensemble that was diverse and felt like they could be a cross-section of Detroit. Different ethniticies and classes of people so that the story took on a fable quality. It wasn't just four frat boys trying to survive, but these were four kind of everyday people in this American city struggling to join forces to survive against this threat. Thandie just has a soulfulness that felt really real for that character, the more religiously inclined character. I wanted someone that your heart went out to. You really felt for her and her desire to reunite with her son. And then John [Leguizamo], I needed someone who was kind of a character and had a kind of kooky outlook on things. And with the kid, we found Jacob [Latimore] in Detroit. We looked at a lot of kids and he was the best. He did a great job.

How much of a limitation was the tight budget and quick shoot schedule?

We did adapt the script a little to the realities of shooting a movie in 20 days and not having all the resources at our disposal that we could have used. We shot it in Detroit, which gave us a chance to open up the scope of the movie. That city already has parts that are abandoned and devoid of people. We were able to shoot some of the sequences that were downtown and it wasn't that complicated, where as doing the same thing in New York or L.A. would be a bigger ordeal and you'd need more money. Shooting in Detroit gave us the ability to shoot certain locations that we wouldn't have been able to get elsewhere. Like that church at the end of the movie, it was not a functioning church. All across Detroit there are these abandoned churches because everyone's left the city.

Did you have to actually shut down all of the abandoned streets we see in the movie?

Most of them we had control, but we didn't have to do much production design-wise. It was kinda just what it was. Sometimes we could kinda steal shots just because it was so empty you could believe it.

Did you have a vision of how you would make the dark effectively terrifying on screen after reading the script?

I didn't really have a vision of how I wanted to do it. You know, in the script it's the kind of thing that's described as "shadows move, darkness descends from the ceiling, darkness grows," you know? I didn't really know where I was going until we were shooting the movie and I started to really mess around with the digital shadows and our effects guy here showed us examples of different ways to go. We needed to establish how the shadows behaved, how they moved, whether they were going to be humanoid and demonic looking or just huge shadows that change shape in unusual ways. And we kind of went with the idea of keeping it really organic looking. The shadow's movements look like a natural phenomenon the way a fungus or mold will grow on a wall.

On the page it would seem quite challenging to pull this off, to make the dark appropriately scary.

Yes. Another way to do it would be as a much bigger movie with much more dazzling effects, a bigger and ballsier movie. But on the other hand, it was very contained - a small group of actors and characters and limited locations. It also had the simple lines of a more conventional apocalyptic thriller. We wanted to capture that in the movie. What I liked about the script was there were levels of meaning to it, in the sense of these characters offering up these explanations of what might be happening. In the movie, we leave lots of little clues and hints as to what might be going on. But Jaswinski's script never really wanted to lock into one singular explanation. He wanted to keep it more open-ended, and that was probably the biggest challenge in the movie was trying to convince the producers that we could do that. I don't think you could get away with that ambiguity in a bigger studio movie.

Vanishing on 7th Street is now available On-Demand. It will open in a limited theatrical release on February 18th.