How a Craiglist ad led to team that made ‘The Boonies’ film
That was the mindset of Jeff Smee, 36, of Mt. Lebanon, when he responded to a Craigslist ad looking for local talent to make a movie near Johntown, Pa. He reached out to Brian Balog and Dave McMillan, who turned out to be exactly what they said they were: film producers.
Fromthat simple email exchange a few years ago sprung “The Boonies,” a locally shot horror movie about campers terrorized by cannibals in the Appalachian woods. It had a limited VOD release Tuesday with the full digital and DVD release coming April 20. “The Boonies” will also be playing Thursday at the Westwood Plaza Theatre & Cafe in Johnstown.
The lesson here?
“Never be afraid to take a shot in the dark,” said director and cowriter Lance Parkin, 35, an Ebensburg native currently living in Millvale. Parkin co-wrote the film with Matt Schultz, 33, of Bloomfield, his collaborator on the 2017 supernatural series “Theo & the Professor,” currently available for free via Amazon Prime Video. In “The Boonies,” Schultz also stars as Aaron, an “annoying, stick-in-the-mud kind of character” attending his brother’s bachelor party in the forest. James Quinn and Jess Uhler play a married couple who also become targets of the flesh eaters.
After getting Balog and McMillan on board, Smee served as the film’s director of photography and main editor. The crew turned the script around in about six weeks and shot “The Boonies” from August to November 2019 in Pittsburgh, Ebensburg and Somerset. The pandemic didn’t affect their shooting schedule, but it did slow down post-production a bit.
Parkin said he and Schultz modeled “The Boonies” after 1970s slashers like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “The Last House on the Left,” though he also noted that his film’s antagonists may be “strangely progressive in how they behave for being crazy backwoods cannibals.”
It’s not that hard to make Western Pennsylvania’s woodlands seem scary on film, Parkin said, while also showing off the region’s natural scenery.
“I adore the forests of Appalachia,” he said. “I think it’s beautiful and some people who live around here don’t always appreciate the beauty.... You can create a real sense of isolation and vastness because of howdense the forest can be.”
Schultz, meanwhile, is psyched that the movie is getting a wide release. “It still feels surreal at this point because at no point in doing any of this did I think that this would actually be happening.”
Same with Smee, who met Parkin while working as a bartender. He overheard a group of local filmmakers at the bar talking and they invited him to work on a 48Hour Film Project. Now, he, Parkin and Schultz, with the help of their Craigslist benefactors, have made a movie together.
“This is the largest release I’ve been involved with on any major scale,” Smee said. “It’s going to be exciting to be able to go on iTunes and see a movie there that we made.”
“The Boonies” follows “Red Woods,” another locally made horror film directed by Plum native Nick Danko and filmed mostly in Ellwood City.
Naturally, when anyone mentions horror and Western Pennsylvania, George Romero and his “Living Dead” films enter the conversation. Parkin isn’t worried about Romero’s oeuvre casting a shadow over his project.
“If anything, I feel like you’re participating in a legacy,” he said. “You’re standing on the shoulders of giants. If you’re doing an earnest job, you’re only reinforcing their legacy.”