MORE DEMONS

My last feature, HEY ANDROID, came out in 2004. That's twenty-two years. In that time I've written a lot of screenplays and talked myself out of making every one of them.

I've been indecisive. I'd pick a script, live with it for a month, and then another one would start looking better. A comedy. A thriller. Something set back in Pittsburgh. Then back to the drawer. It's a very comfortable way to never make anything.

So here it is, in writing, where I can't take it back. My next feature is THE DEMONS ARE HERE.

A contract killer named Edwin Hershel Goat takes a job. Three young adults have stolen money from some drug dealers who don't forgive anything, and Edwin is hired to find them and settle the account. It isn't even that much money. That's sort of the point.

The three hole up in a cabin in the woods, figuring nobody will look there. They're mostly right. Edwin finds them anyway. That's what he does.

But the woods are already occupied. Something lives out there, and it doesn't care about the money, or the dealers, or who's hunting whom. Before long the hunter and the hunted have the same problem.

It's not a horror movie. It's a crime picture that takes a wrong turn and keeps driving.

Why this one? I've asked myself that. Part of it is practical. A cabin, some woods, a handful of people. It's a movie I can actually make.

The rest is harder to explain. I can put down the other scripts. This one keeps getting back up.

I'm rewriting it now. I'll post here as it comes together. No more switching horses.

Haunting The Better

Hill Rossin is an Independent writer, director, and producer with three decades of self-directed work across thriller, drama, and dark comedy. His filmmaking career started early; in high school, he took a college film course at Pittsburgh Filmmakers. In the summer of 1992, he shot his first 8mm film — a music video for Sonic Youth's "Sugar Kane," from their then-new album Dirty — for a contest on MTV's 120 Minutes. Although he didn't win, the project helped him get into film school. He studied at the College of Santa Fe and later trained again at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, gaining comprehensive skills in writing, directing, producing, cinematography, editing, and sound.

He founded Haunting The Better in 1996 and moved to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1998, where the company is now based. Through it, he develops original feature screenplays and no-budget narrative films, and in the 2000s he directed two features, As He Fired Up the Drum Machine and Hey Android. Over thirty years, his work returns to the same concerns — place, voice, and the dark humor of ordinary life — shaped by roots in western Pennsylvania and a sensibility in which violence and tenderness sit at the same table.

https://hauntingthebetter.com
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