Horror movie wraps up filming in Franklin cornfield

The Connecticut-based filmmaking Bloomquist brothers made their new movie, “She Came from the Woods,” in 12 days, then had to wait for corn to grow.

The brothers’ Mainframe Pictures company filmed most of their latest feature, “She Came from the Woods,” at the Channel 3 Kids Camp in late May and early June. “We cleaned up and got just a day before the camp season began,” Bloomquist says. He says the camp was very supportive of the project, even finding archival photos of how it looked in 1987 — the year in which “She Came from the Woods” is set.

They had one final scene to shoot, involving a bus and a cornfield. “But the corn wasn’t ready,” says Erik Bloomquist, who directed the film, co-wrote and co-produced it with his brother Carson, and also appears in it as a camp counselor named Danny.

So a final day of filming happened Friday in Franklin.

“Franklin has tons of farms,” Bloomquist says. “It’s very peaceful.” And, when it needs to be, spooky.

“She Came from the Woods” stars William Sadler (who was Death in “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey” and President Matthew Ellis in the Marvel Cinematic Universe) and Cara Buono (who’s played Karen Wheeler in “Stranger Things” and Gemma Cooper in “Supergirl”) as a father and daughter running a summer camp.

The film is an expanded, featurelength version of a short film that Mainframe made in 2017. Bloomquist describes it as a “campfire story” and a “coming-of-age movie that happens to be a scary movie.”

For the new version, “more family elements” have been added, he says. “We went back to the roots of the screenplay.”

The film has largely been edited and assembled, and will be released in October in time for Halloween. The cornfield scene filmed Friday will be inserted once it’s shot. “This is one of the scenes that bridges act one and two,” Bloomquist says.

The Bloomquist brothers routinely shoot their films in Connecticut. One other local connection is that they love the dairy products produced by Farmer’s Cow in Bozra, and like to find a way to include them in all their movies.

Bloomquist says he loves the horror genre — “it restores a sense of imagination, a childlike sense of play” — but that he likes to work in many genres, both as a writer/ director and as an actor.

Besides “She Came from the Woods,” Mainframe Pictures has at least three other projects slated for release in the next few months. One of them, the romantic drama “Christmas on the Carousel,” will be out in time for that holiday. It was filmed at the carousel in Bushnell Park at a time when the attraction was closed to the public due to the coronavirus crisis. Other impending releases are “Weekenders,” which the International Movie Data Base synopsizes as “a scheduling mix-up at an Airbnb brings four twenty-somethings together,” and the thriller “Night at the Eagle Inn.”