Award-winning horror film ‘McCurdy Point’ has a strong Chico connection

Local actor and editor return for a special showing of their project on Sept. 24

By Ken Magri

The horror film McCurdy Point is coming to Chico with a simple storyline.

It follows four men who travel to a secluded cabin in Maine to celebrate their upcoming 40th birthdays, and…

Well, you know what happens in movies when out-of-towners vacation in secluded cabins.

Since its release last year, McCurdy Point has won six awards on a tour of horror film festivals, including Best Directors, Best Feature and one Best of Show.

Chico’s Pageant Theatre will host a special showing of McCurdy Point on September 24. It will include an after-film chat by two of the filmmakers who have local roots.

Nolan Ford edited the film. He is a Chico musician-turned-film editor who worked for North Sate Public Radio for five years. Ford is also known for playing in local bands, including The Secret Stolen, Perpetual Drifters and The Rugs.

Ford studied film editing in the Media Arts department at Chico State University and  has been working in Los Angeles for the past several years.

Actor/writer/producer Kiel Kennedy co-wrote and co-stars in the film. He has known Ford since grade school and both went to Pleasant Valley High together. Kennedy grew up performing in Children’s Theater at the Chico City Light Opera, the Blue Room, Shakespeare in the Park and high school plays.

Kennedy left Chico to study at UCLA but returned after college. He connected with Ford again when both were working at Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.

Eventually Kennedy returned to Los Angeles and joined the Groundlings, a non-profit improvisational comedy group and school. He became the director of its Sunday Company troupe of actors, which performs at the Groundlings Theatre every Sunday evening.

Kennedy coaxed Ford to move down to Southern California as well.

 “I didn’t want to leave Chico because I love playing music there,” said Ford. “Kiel really inspired me to come down, saying things like ‘you’ve got to get down here, it’s pretty awesome, you’re going to love it,’ and he was right. That’s when I really started to pursue editing as a career.”

Found-footage style of horror

McCurdy Point was made using a cinematic technique called “found footage.” This film style relies on footage originating from security cameras, phones, computers, social networks and other recordings which are made or discovered by characters in the story. The found footage enables the story.

Considered a small subgenre of films, the best-known examples of found-footage horror would be 1999’s Blair Witch Project and 2007’s Paranormal Activity.

Shaky hand-held camera work often puts viewers into a character’s point of view by using recording technology they are familiar with. The result is a film that doesn’t cost millions to make, but effectively asks viewers to believe that what they are seeing really happened.

Found-footage expert Alexandra Heller-Nicholas explains the appeal.

“Surviving by adapting to technological and cultural shifts and popular trends, found-footage horror is a successful and surprisingly complex experiment in blurring the lines between quotidian reality and horror’s dark tantalizing fantasies,” Heller-Nicholas observed.

And that’s partly what excited Kennedy.

“We decided to research as much as we could about it and tried to think about what we could bring to the genre that we were seeing lacking,” he said.

The filmmakers discovered that character development was something found-footage movies generally lacked, and added more to theirs.

“Because of the way the film was shot and edited it feels more like you are hanging out with these guys and all of a sudden these terrible things start happening,” Ford explained.

“We have that background in improv, so we were able to make scenes more natural, like these guys actually know each other,” Kennedy pointed out.

Horror with a touch of comedy

Since many of the actors in McCurdy Point have experience with improvisational comedy, the film had to balance the right amount of humor within a developing horror story.

“We were being funny but trying to make it authentic and real and kind of creepy, more focused on creating scary parts that are really scary,” Kennedy noted.

Each day, Ford was sent the previous day’s film footage from the crew in Maine, so he could begin the editing process while back in Los Angeles.

“Everyone in this film is so naturally funny that while editing I thought this was a comedy,” said Ford. “So, I had to rethink the whole thing and add those tweaks that make things feel a little bit eerie.”

Directed by Jeremy Brothers and Nick Paonessa, the film’s main stars are Kennedy, Ryan Gaul, Joey Krulock, Christian Roberts and Laird Macintosh.

The most anxious and powerful moment from the trailer for McCurdy Point shows Kennedy, Krulock and Roberts playing a variation on Russian Roulette, which the film calls “devil’s smile.”

This less lethal game has each player stand in a circle and aim their gun at the extended hand of the player to their right. Should any gun chamber have a bullet in it, someone’s hand gets a hole shot through.

“That was a manufactured thing,” said Kennedy. “We were playing with ideas like speeding up and slowing down time. I was proud of the way that turned out, as you see these guys slowly come under the spell of whatever this cursed cabin is.”

The very second this devil’s smile game is revealed in the trailer, one feels compelled to find out what will happen next. It illustrates the power of the found-footage technique. Viewers play voyeurs while watching the characters play devil’s smile through the lens of a time-stamped security camera, one of many installed around the cabin.

Pageant Theatre makes a great venue

Both Kennedy and Ford grew up going to movies at Chico’s Pageant Theatre, which has a history of showing the kind independent films big chain theaters routinely skip over.

“My mom would take me to the Pageant,” remembered Kennedy. “We used go to for the animation festival back in the day.”

“That’s funny that you would say that, because I have nostalgic vivid memories of that animation festival and just laughing my head off,” said Ford. “We were probably both there as kids with our moms and didn’t even know it.”

Doors open at 7 p.m. and local musician Pat Hull will play a short acoustic set as viewers come in and find a seat. The film starts at 7:30 and run time is around 80 minutes. After the showing, Ford and Kennedy will talk about how McCurdy Point was made and answer questions from the audience.

“The feeling of a one-night-only experience is an exciting opportunity, with a fully packed theater that will be jumping at the scares and laughing at the funny parts,” said Ford.

 “It’s a fun thing to watch with a group of people,” Kennedy added.

Ford also notes McCurdy Point is the kind of movie that a lot of people have never seen before.

“A lot of people have seen Blair Witch Project, but this is different because it is performed by these talented, trained improvisational comedians,” he emphasized. “We got so many good takes we were able to cut it down to an interesting, engaging 80 minutes.”