Crew
Director – Warren Skeels, Screenplay – Sharon Y. Cobb & Warren Skeels, Producers – Anne Marie Gillen, Terri Lubaroff, Michael W. Nole, Paul Scanlan & Warren Skeels, Photography – Gareth Paul Cox, Music – Scott Thomas Borland, Production Design – Lauren Spalding. Production Company – Garrison Film/Legion M/Skeels Films.
Cast
Madison Wolfe (Annie Williams), Brec Bassinger (Margaret Williams), Ali Larter (Helen Williams), Sean Astin (Richard Williams), Skai Jackson (Patty Tolliver), Noah Lomax (Mark Newsome), Gavin Warren (Darren Williams), Addison Riecke (Joanna)
Plot
Brooksville, Florida, 1975. Teenager Annie Williams grows up in a rural area with a conservative family. She becomes fearful after she sees a white van prowling around the area, following her and then even driving up onto the property. Her parents and older sister Margaret are dismissive of her concerns. However, the mystery man in the white van becomes more sinister in his actions, pursuing Annie and trying to break into the house.
Legion M is a production company set up by actor Seth Green in 2016 that allows fans to become involved in the financing of films. Legion M has been responsible for a number of productions and releases including Bad Samaritan (2018), The Field Guide to Evil (2018), Mandy (2018), Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019), Memory: The Origins of Alien (2019), Tolkien (2019), Archenemy (2020), Save Yourselves! (2020), You Can Call Me Bill (2023) and My Dead Friend Zoe (2024). The Man in the White Van was the feature film debut of Warren Skeels who had previously made the documentary Thespians (2010) and directed/produced the reality tv series Siesta Key (2017-22).
The Man in the White Van is a True Crime film based on Billy Mansfield Jr, a convicted sex offender who was originally arrested in 1981 in Florida, along with his brother, as a suspect in a murder. An excavation of the Mansfield family home at Spring Hill uncovered the bodies of four women ranging in age from early teens to late twenties. At the trial, during which he managed to make a prison escape at one point, Mansfield pled guilty to avoid execution and received four life sentences, which he is currently serving.
Now I have to qualify this and say that The Man in the White Van is only loosely based on the case of Billy Mansfield Jr – that is loosely almost to the point of non-existent. The film takes place in Florida in the 1970s and concerns a serial killer but that is about the only point of connection. Mansfield was convicted of only four murders and one other that he admitted to but was never charged. The film has the victim count much higher than that. Even the title The Man in the White Van is of no real significance to the Mansfield case – the nearest is that Mansfield drove a van and appears to have abducted some victims in it for sexual assault. But it is not even clear where he encountered or how he lured most of the victims he killed to his farm so to say the van was his prime mode of transport is a leap. Indeed, the rest of the time drove a 1966 Ford Fairlane. There are also scenes where tv reporters are referring to ‘a serial killer’ in 1975, several years before the term came into wide usage.
The film blows Mansfield’s van up into the central aspect of the movie. He is identified as the van much like the way the driver in Duel (1971) is never seen and only represented by the menacing presence of the truck. Here the white van is constantly seen lurking in the background of shots or creeping into frame, ominously sitting in wait, revving or turning its headlights on full beam. We only ever see the killer in the climactic scenes where he emerges from the van to pursue Madison Wolfe through the barn and house, but we never see his face. It is akin to Halloween (1978) where Michael Myers is first seen lurking about in a stolen station wagon and then as a shadowy unstoppable figure pursuing the heroine with relentless intent, but whose face is never seen. All of which seems a far cry from what is known about Billy Mansfield Jr and his crimes.
The Man in the White Van isn’t badly put together. It has a medium budget and has one or two moderately well-known names – Sean Astin, Ali Larter – in the cast. Of these, Madison Wolfe plays fragile, individualistic and intelligent and shows she is on the way to going places. So then why do I give the film a one-star rating. Firstly, it is its highly dubious to almost completely untrue claims to being based on a true crime story.
Secondly, there is Warren Skeels’ direction. Or more so the soundtrack. This is filled with scenes where almost everything that happens from appearances of the van to Madison Wolfe’s brother or boyfriend jumping out at her, even people she passes while walking are accompanied by loud amplified slams, the revving of the van’s engine or what sounds like metal being beaten. The rest of the time the dialogue is so soft you are straining to hear it. I was having to turn the sound up so I could hear what was being said only to then find that I (and the neighbours) were being deafened as Skeels and the sound engineer throw in more loud amplified sound effects. It is a majorly annoying, not to mention completely false way of making an audience jump.
Trailer here