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Tony Elwood was driving through the mountains of east Tennessee late one night in 1983, and he began to wonder - as any of us might - what would happen if he were crippled in a car crash and taken to a remote cabin by a lonely, deranged man who wanted to keep him as a secret friend.
More than a quarter-century later, the rest of us are about to find out. "Cold Storage," his version of that theme with an eerie love story at its core, gets its national DVD release this week.
When Charlotte director Elwood and producer Paul Barrett shot the movie in 2005, seeing it in Wal-Mart and Best Buy seemed far-fetched. But Grindstone Entertainment, a video arm of Lionsgate, picked up their genre-defying drama.
"Some within our company felt the film was almost too much," says Grindstone's Stan Wertlieb. "It grabbed me from the first moment with its originality. As much as I wanted to at certain moments, I just could not turn away.
"'Cold Storage' isn't just a horror film. I was taken by the creative direction (by) Tony Elwood and the impressive production mounted by Paul Barrett. The performance of Nick Searcy was as creepy ... (as) I had come across in quite some time. He was despicable, but at the same time you felt for him."
Searcy plays Clive, a gentle but deluded loner. He stumbles upon the victim of a wreck and takes her home, believing she's his true love. When her ex-boyfriend (Matt Keeslar of "The Middleman") and sister (Joelle Carter) come looking for the woman, Clive's protective nature turns violent. (The filmmakers lucked out: Searcy and Carter now have leading roles in the hit TV series "Justified.")
Working Hitchcock-style
"I heard a crew member say, 'This is old school,'" recalls Elwood, who wrote the script with Mark Kimray. "Modern (horror) movies have to be hand-held and zoom in and out and look like they were dipped in rust and corroded. Those are gimmicks. I don't think I'd have the patience to do that."
Yet patience is what he has had to learn over a career dating to the late 1970s, when the Northwest Cabarrus High School student worked as an animator in a lab off Central Avenue. (His current office at Indievision is just across the railroad tracks, 20 yards away.)
He scraped together $9,500 to shoot "Killer!" in 1989. "I wanted it to look gritty, like somebody had stepped on the film," he says. It did, though it ended up on Showtime and HBO. But he needed five more years to get around to a second serial killer movie, "Road Kill."
Then financial reality intervened. He began to use his friend Barrett as assistant art director on commercial projects, and they teamed up with Bert Hesse - first in Indievision, which handles creative branding and marketing, and later in Synthetic Fur, a production company supporting local independent filmmakers.
Hesse, executive producer on "Storage," first tried to raise $2 million for "Cold Chill," an effects-laden ghost story to be shot in an abandoned reform school in Cabarrus County. When a little less than half that money was forthcoming, the filmmakers got the investors' permission to switch subjects.
A festival favorite
They shot "Storage" from late May to early July in 2005, mostly in Saluda and at a former cotton warehouse in Mount Holly, which served as Clive's cabin and a production office.
The film won an audience award at the Dead By Dawn horrorfest in Scotland and has been accepted by festivals from Oregon to Mexico to Brazil. But the cost of prints and advertising made a theatrical release impossible.
"I've never found two more hardworking, honest guys in my life," says Hesse. "Tony and Paul can take a penny and turn it into something that looks like a dollar onscreen. So they had carte blanche to do what they wanted with this budget.
"When I suggest creative input, their eyes roll. When they suggest business propositions, my eyes roll. But they trust me implicitly, and I trust them."
Elwood and Barrett filled "Cold Storage" with actors they've often used elsewhere.
Jeff Pillars, who plays obtuse Sheriff Bullock, has been in all three Elwood features. When he heard his mom was dying of a brain tumor in Michigan, the filmmakers lightened his load. "To me, that really showed their character," he says.
Pillars shot the short 'Thing in the Road' for a young Elwood in the 1980s. Even then, he says, "Tony knew what he was doing. He has a good eye for plot. He doesn't necessarily stick to formulas. (And) he can find things that motivate the actors' imagination, then let them take it from there. That's the mark of a good director."
A higher ambition
"Storage" gave Elwood his first crack at a name actor in Searcy, who'd played Stupid the Clown in "Road Kill" before getting wide exposure. If the director was intimidated, says Searcy, he didn't show it.
"He had ideas about (how) to move the action forward, and when I got there with my limp and slow delivery and quirks, that all changed a bit," says the Cullowhee native. "With a character like this, you walk a fine line: He has comic and empathetic elements, and you don't want to lose those in fulfilling the action part. Tony stayed open to suggestions.
"Moviemaking takes an ease with the language of film, and Tony has always had that. He didn't choose his (first) films because he couldn't do anything better, but because he could get them done in 12 days on a certain amount of money."
Hesse aims to create a Piedmont Media Fund to provide a steady source of budgets in the $2 million range and up. For now, Barrett and Elwood will wait to see whether their last long labor finally pays off.
"I just want people to embrace the story of a man who falls in love with a woman who's dead," says Elwood. "Is that asking too much?"
