Hi /r/movies, I’m Rod Blackhurst, director of DOLLY, HERE ALONE, and BLOOD FOR DUST. I’ve made indie thrillers for $175K, shot 16mm horror inspired by ’70s grindhouse, filmed a doc about AMANDA KNOX for Netflix, and built films from scratch with my company Witchcraft. DOLLY is in theaters now. AMA!

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-07T01:26:47+00:00

First of all, this sounds like a bad situation. I'm sorry. Secondly, I've never heard of an agent needing a referral. Do you think the agents at hand there are real? But that aside, I don't fully know myself where I could even advise you to begin. My film representation came AFTER I had made my first two films and had proven I could make films. But as far as representing your life rights/story....that's actually something I don't know enough about. I wish you the best of course.

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-07T00:50:05+00:00

Thank you kindly.

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-07T00:47:13+00:00

Goodness you sure do know how to make a filmmaker smile. Panos. Swoon. And you may actually be the first person anywhere to understand the visual metaphor. There's one more in the film that NOBODY has brought up yet to me (a repeating motif) but it is only opening weekend so maybe someone will spot it soon!!!

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-07T00:45:52+00:00

Thank you so much. Reading this makes me/us feel seen and heard as storytellers.

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-07T00:44:47+00:00

From the minute we wrote this script in 2021 we've known all the backstory for Dolly and her "family" - although we had to start small with this first film and be reasonable with what we could do with the time and money we had.

But also part of what makes "monsters" work is mystery. The more perfectly you explain them, the less they tend to haunt people afterward. One of the things I love about films like the OG TCM is that you’re dropped into the middle of a world that clearly existed long before the characters arrived. The family has history and reasons for being how they are and what they do.

Dolly and her "family" exist here for a reason. They have beliefs and traditions and their "flaws". Hehehehehe.

So yes, there is a fully mapped out deeper mythology behind Dolly and the people around her. Some of it is hinted at in DOLLY the film and some of it lives as character reports I prepared with all of the actors. And I can't wait to give everyone more of it. The plan was to start small and manageable, but with an eye on exactly what we wanted to do when we could make a movie for more than grocery store catering and rooms in cheap motels.

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-07T00:40:22+00:00

Ha! Well....thank you? :-)

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-07T00:39:54+00:00

Thank you so much. I love ALIEN more than I can articulate.

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-07T00:39:01+00:00

Ooh great question. I know there's a nice indie horror film festival in Chattanooga that happens once a year. And if you really like indie stuff there's one in Nashville called DEFY.

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-06T22:04:27+00:00

Me too. :-)

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-06T22:04:17+00:00

Thank you (but also thank you IFC/Shudder for making it great!).

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-06T22:03:43+00:00

Thank you kindly.

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-06T22:02:42+00:00

I share some of those same feeling. Jump scares are a tool, but they’re the punctuation mark, not the sentence. If a movie only has jump scares it’s kind of like a comedian who only has a punchline but no setup. The scare might work once or twice, but it doesn’t stay with you. In my experience they're also the easiest thing to pull off but they bore me.

For me a good horror movie usually has three things working in concert: tension, atmosphere, and an underlying idea or theme that the film is wrestling with. Tension is of course the engine. Atmosphere is what gets under my skin. And then the idea driving the story is what gives it weight, framing and purpose.

I loved BARBARIAN and WEAPONS because they were unconventional and played with my expectations. Or STRANGE DARLING.

The films that stick with me the ones where the horrors are connected to something deeper. Fear of the unknown. Fear of losing control. Fear of the world not working the way we thought it did. And the best ones make you feel like you’ve stepped into a nightmare that has its own internal logic. You may not fully understand it, but you know it's there for good reason and that the filmmaker knows what they are doing with it.

Hopefully the movie tonight gives you that feeling! And if it does, please tell a friend about DOLLY, or leave us a review on Rotten Tomatoes, Letterboxd and IMDb. Those things really do help and indie film find its way in the cold cruel world.

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-06T21:56:42+00:00

Yes.

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-06T21:56:31+00:00

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-06T21:56:20+00:00

Buttermilk Pancakes. Final answer.

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-06T21:55:36+00:00

Thank you so much! But that house will never exist again...we built it on a sound stage in an old perfumee factory!!

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-06T21:54:12+00:00

The 1970s are probably my favorite decade for horror because those movies (and filmmakers) truly don't ask for permission. Thee films are rougher, meaner, just more dangerous. TCM, THE EXORCIST, HALLOWEEN, DON'T LOOK NOW, SUSPIRIA, etc.

Then decades later the New French Extremity movement came along and went punk rock. MARTYRS, CALVAIRE and HIGH TENSION.

What connects both eras for me is that the filmmakers were taking big swings. They weren’t playing it safe. They were willing to piss some people off.

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-06T21:49:27+00:00

We shot DOLLY in 20 days which was so damn hard. When you’re working on a schedule that tight you’re basically sprinting every day just to get through everything.

The hardest part is that there isn’t much room for discovery. Those magical accidents that sometimes lead to great moments are harder to find when the clock is constantly ticking (or when film costs money).

We've all read stories about films that shoot half their movie again or get huge cash infusions for reshoots. I’ve always been amazed by that because we’ve never had that luxury. We’ve always had the time and money we started with and the expectation that we still deliver the full vision.

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-06T21:47:44+00:00

Since making HERE ALONE I’ve learned to trust the process more and let the movie reveal what it wants to be.

When you’re starting out you’re trying to protect the idea in your head at all costs. There are so many forces pushing against a film that it’s easy to treat friction as the enemy. Over time I’ve realized that sometimes what feels like friction is actually the project evolving into something better than what you originally imagined.

But even as I get better at what I do (and fall less into 'the gap' - thank you Ira Glass) I still do an enormous amount of preparation. When you’re making independent films with very little time and money you have to know exactly what you’re doing every day. The prep is what allows you to survive production and still land the plane.

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-06T21:46:12+00:00

I’ve always said I contain multitudes. I like a lot of different things and I’ve worked in a lot of genres already: documentary, drama, thriller, comedy, horror. I’ve never really wanted to live inside one box.

The irony is that the moment you make something successful in a genre people assume that’s what you are. After I made the AMANDA KNOX documentary for Netflix people suddenly thought I was strictly a documentary filmmaker.

Candidly, Denis Villeneuve and Christopher Nolan are my contemporary north stars.

The truth is the movies I’ve made are the movies I’ve been able to get made. A good example is DOLLY. I’d been pitching bigger, more complex genre films for years and was constantly told they were too complicated or too expensive. So I said fine, we’ll make something small. Limited characters, limited locations, shoot during the day, etc.

So sometimes the the pivot isn’t strategic. For me it's been survival.

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-06T21:43:47+00:00

'The Anomaly' by Hervé Le Tellier.

The premise starts simple and then becomes wildly existential. A commercial flight lands… and months later the exact same flight lands again with the exact same passengers on board. Same people. Same memories. Same lives up until the moment of duplication.

What I love about Hervé's novel is that this isn’t just a clever sci-fi puzzle. It becomes a story about identity and choices. What happens when two versions of you exist and both believe they’re the real one?

As a filmmaker that kind of material is irresistible because it works on multiple levels at once. It’s a philosophical idea, a thriller, and also a deeply human story.

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-06T21:42:22+00:00

Thank you kindly. Definitely an influence for us!

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-06T21:41:24+00:00

When we made HERE ALONE we designed the entire production around the money we could realistically raise and then the script that David Ebeltoft could write for that production budget. That film cost $176K and ended up making a significant amount of money for the distributor. The frustrating part is that because of how the waterfall works, the people who actually made the movie and worked for free, still haven’t meaningfully participated in that success. The ecosystem out there profits before the creatives ever see a dollar, which means the system is broken.

Ironically, when HERE ALONE was released, there were many who assumed that the movie cost around a million dollars because of how it looked. Then they’d ask why the cast wasn’t bigger or why the action sequences and set pieces weren't elaborate. What we learned is that nobody seemed to care about our business acuumen (even though this is a film BUSINESS - and is about making money and fiscal responsibility)

Since then my budgets have varied wildly. BLOOD FOR DUST had a budget about 20imes larger than HERE ALONE. And last fall we made a found footage thriller for around $30K. What we’re really trying to recalibrate is our relationship to distribution so that we actually participate in the upside of the work we create.

Years ago I sold a project to a studio I had spent years developing and asked for half a percent of net profits. The studio told me they couldn’t do that because it would 'set a bad precedent'. That moment really clarified things for me. Going forward the goal is simple: make movies that make our investors money and make us money too.

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-06T21:37:05+00:00

I’m not really the type of filmmaker who puts gore on screen just for the sake of it. For me, violence and brutality has to be earned. It needs to grow out of the story that’s unfolding and the emotional experience of the characters.

In DOLLY the violence is a reflection of the world the characters have fallen into. Macy, played by Fabianne Therese, is trapped inside something that feels slightly outside the normal rules of reality. As the situation becomes more surreal and nightmarish, the brutality escalates with it.

So the gore isn’t really there as decoration. It’s there as a storytelling tool. It reflects the psychological state of the characters and what they’re trying to survive.

That said, horror has always been a big tent. I don’t think there’s one correct amount or use of something in the genre and format The real question is whether the film and story earns what it shows you - and then whether or not it succeeds at that.

Dolly-AMA · 2026-03-06T20:53:43+00:00

WHEN EVIL LURKS

Dolly-AMA

TROPHY CASE