The micro-budget decades: horror in a dying cinema, and the $11 opening

1999 — 2013

Shot for almost nothing: Digital cameras made Fort Wayne a place where anyone could shoot a feature, and the city's independent record is mostly horror made for the price of a used car. Its emblematic production is The Spell of 13: local filmmakers Richard Yates and Rodney Pasko shot their film — three men take refuge from a storm in an abandoned movie house where something has been waiting for them — inside the Holiday 1 & 2 cinema at the Northcrest Shopping Plaza, after the theater closed and before it was razed. The budget was $7,000, the camera digital video, and the film debuted on Halloween night 2003 at the Northwood Cinema Grill, an homage, the Journal Gazette reported, to the zombie and slasher pictures of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The era's most prolific Fort Wayne filmmaker is Glenn Berggoetz, whose Driving With Our Eyes Shut company works from the city. His The Worst Movie EVER! (2011) became nationally famous for the wrong record — an $11 opening weekend, the price of a single ticket — and his Midget Zombie Takeover, released 8 February 2013 and made for about $2,000, was shot in Fort Wayne and Golden, Colorado, on catalog listings, with cast members confirming the Indiana filming. In 2012 the California producer Rich Owens — a storyliner on television's Scrubs — brought two thrillers home to Indiana through his 1008 Cine Co and Tower Entertainment Group: The 4th Story, which began shooting in Fort Wayne on 19 August 2012, and Death Bank, shot that November with Clarence Gilyard of Walker, Texas Ranger; both are documented chiefly by the productions' own contemporaneous releases, and their life beyond those announcements is thin in the record. The faith audience produced its own Fort Wayne feature in the same years: Healed by Grace (2012), written, directed and scored by David Matthew Weese for the Fort Wayne company Blended Planet Pictures, which sold out shows at Rave Cinema Fort Wayne and was held over for a four-week local run in the summer of 2012 — a hometown company's film, carried on local lists as a Fort Wayne picture on the strength of its makers and its reception. The genealogical society's list, drawn from IMDb location data, also places parts of The Freak (1999) in Fort Wayne, on a shoot that ranged across Spencerville, Cedar Canyon, Garrett, Auburn and Waterloo; nothing further about it reached print in the sources this record could reach.

Sources:

1. The Journal Gazette, as reported by Cinema Treasures, 31 October 2003 — Yates and Pasko, The Spell of 13, the razed Holiday 1 & 2 at Northcrest, the $7,000 budget, the Northwood Cinema Grill debut.
2. HorrorNews.net review of Midget Zombie Takeover (2013) and Mr. Lobo's Cinema Insomnia program notes — Berggoetz as a Fort Wayne-based filmmaker; Driving With Our Eyes Shut; the $2,000 budget; The Worst Movie EVER!'s $11 opening weekend; cast interview at (re)Search my Trash confirming the Indiana filming.
3. Production releases carried by PRLog, 26 August 2012 (The 4th Story) and 13 September 2012 (Death Bank) — the productions' own announcements, used here as such.
4. Blended Planet Pictures release via PRLog, 23 July 2012 — Healed by Grace, David Matthew Weese, the sold-out opening and four-week holdover at Rave Cinema Fort Wayne.
5. ACGSI, "Videos for Allen County, Indiana" — The Freak (1999) and its multi-town location list, from IMDb location data.