How This Director Is Helping Save The Dallas Horror Filmmaking Scene
Preston Fassel
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Two years later, the departure of Fangoria Studios from Texas to Georgia has left a vacuum in the Dallas horror film scene that’s still struggling to find a way to fill itself. While it appeared for a brief, shining moment that the Big D was set to make its mark as the new hometown of independent American horror cinema, those dreams were quickly shattered. Innumerable writers, directors, and other creators left to pick up the pieces and contemplate either leaving the city or giving up on their dreams.
Then, in 2021, something magic began to happen—something quiet and behind the scenes, something that would begin setting the stage for a redemption arc straight out of the best underdog movies. Without realizing it, and working in total isolation from one another, a handful of Dallas filmmakers began producing and filming their own projects, determined not to let the horror scene die.
Lana Winters, president and CECO of production company Buzzard View Manor, filmed her own short film/proof of concept Midnight Cinema Hour; producer Jonathan Brownlee went ahead with casting on his New Hollywood-style killer epic The Eyes of Jefferson (co-written with yours truly), with the film entering preproduction; and most ambitiously of all, Bradley Steele Harding directed his years-in-the-making multimedia-based 13 Tracks to Frighten Agatha Black. It’s a loving ode to horror novelty records that he edited himself from the confines of quarantine. It also recently had its world premiere at Dallas’ Texas Frightmare Weekend. The aggregate result of this has been that—slowly, but surely, and with much optimism—the Dallas horror scene is beginning to not only heal but thrive once more.
Enter Mitch McLeod.
An accomplished writer and director, McLeod’s microbudget ghost flick Silhouette became a minor indie horror success on the eve of COVID, around the same time his script Yankee Rose was making the rounds of the Dallas production scene, where it fell into my lap. A thought-provoking character study about a middle-aged alcoholic finding redemption and a new lease on life after she falls in with a coven of witches, the script not only looks at the fraught road to recovery but also calls Christianity on the carpet for its historic treatment of women in what amounts to the church getting a collective #MeToo moment. It’s fantastic material that just never managed to make it off the ground; but, inspired by his prior success with Silhouette and interactions with the local film scene, he decided to make it happen—while fostering other filmmakers’ careers along the way.
That’s what led to the production of The Woman Under the Stage, a single-location thriller currently in preproduction here in Dallas. McLeod hopes the film will serve as the springboard not only for Yankee Rose, but other films as well.
“Our director, Ezekiel Decker, wrote and directed a no-budget feature film years ago right before we did Silhouette,” McLeod says. He went on to say:
“It was a Dallas project made with no money. I had a day-player role in it, so did my wife, and when I saw it come together and saw it edited it was good. Really good. It had budgetary limitations but it was a really solid film. I got tired of working on other people’s sets, it’s not that fun for me; it turns out I’m actually not passionate about being on set. I’m passionate about being on the creative side of things. The distribution company for Silhouette, ITN, wanted me to do something for them again. I didn’t want to direct another microbudget feature myself.
But, I saw this kid, Ezekiel, he popped in my head, and I think right now my goal in life is to help people I believe in get their things done like I’d done mine. I wanted to challenge this kid to make a feature film on the same budget I made Silhouette for. So I teamed up with him, he and Logan Rinaldi wrote a script, I helped them rewrite that script, and when it was ready to present to ITN, I took it to them, said I’m gonna produce, he’s gonna direct, and I’m pushing forward with this to make waves to make the way for Yankee Rose.”
Set entirely inside of a theater house, The Woman Under the Stage tells the story of a young actress who gets the break of a lifetime when she’s cast in the lead role of a play whose mysterious reputation proceeds it; as soon as the author completed it, he committed suicide, and the material is now rumored to be cursed. Moving into the theater in the leadup to production, the young woman finds herself being menaced by a strange cult that also seems to have taken up residence there. As the clock ticks down to opening night, she finds herself faced with a life-and-death decision regarding her desire for fame.
Says McLeod, “It’s about what people may or may not be willing to sacrifice to live forever in the minds of others. It also deals a lot with abuse in the entertainment industry in general through the relationship between the director and the actress. It’s very much taken from the stories of Stanley Kubrick and Shelly Duvall on the set of The Shining. It’s a really good, dark, but poignant film about art and success and the extremes that people often go to in order to achieve it.”
While the bulk of the film’s budget has been secured, McLeod has started an Indiegogo in order to help bring it over the finish line.
“We had $20K, which is $5K shy of what we had for Silhouette. So I’ve been trying to get Ezekial on an even playing field. We’ve raised just over $10K as of today, so we’ve passed the budget of Silhouette. He’s a stubborn dude like I am, which is why I like him so much. I told him to bring me something that could be done on a small budget with limited characters and locations and he puts together a fucking script that takes place in a theater house with actors all over the place! [Laughs] So we’re having to figure out ways to stretch a dollar and make it work. But we have a good team. So it can be absolutely done.”
McLeod and company are on track to shoot and potentially get one step closer to restoring the Dallas horror scene and getting Yankee Rose made.
“We’ve gotten pretty known for doing these low budget things that take things to a higher level than is typically expected on such a low budget. Silhouette didn’t go on to become some smash horror success but it did make some waves in the underground horror community. It’s always fun to go to horror groups online, people asking for recommendations, and every now and then you see someone throw out Silhouette. This is what I want to be known for, starting out in a low budget arena, getting quality work out of that, and then eventually journeying upwards with Yankee Rose.”
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