The Film
A road movie after the end of the road.
Logline
Years after the dead take the world, an isolated survivor escorts Sydney across the rural Midwest and is forced to let another person matter again.
- Format
- Feature Film
- Genre
- Post-Apocalyptic Horror / Drama / Western
- Country
- United States
- Location
- Illinois / Rural Midwest
- Status
- In Production
- Festival Target
- 2027
Synopsis
The dead are not the whole story.
Years after the dead have overtaken the world, Ray Holly has built his life around isolation. He scavenges, drinks, and keeps the remains of society at arm's length. Survival is routine. Connection is the danger.
When Sydney needs to cross the broken landscape of the rural Midwest, Ray reluctantly agrees to take her. The trip becomes more than a matter of food, fuel, shelter, and the dead. It forces two damaged people into an uneasy dependence and pushes Ray toward responsibility, grief, and the possibility that survival may still mean something.
HOLLER treats the apocalypse as environment rather than spectacle. It is a story about loneliness, guilt, parenthood, faith, and what remains worth living for after catastrophe has become ordinary.
Director Statement
“We wanted to make a zombie movie that was not really about zombies.”
The familiar genre machinery is here, but the more interesting question comes after the shock is gone. What does a person become when grief has had years to settle in? What does survival mean when there may not be anything left to survive for?
We are making this film in Jacksonville and the surrounding Midwest because this is the world we know. The landscape matters. The silence matters. The distance between people matters. This is a microbudget film, but it is not small in ambition.
Devin Smock & Samuel DavidProduction Stills
The rural Midwest after everything.
Images courtesy of Subterranean Sound & Vision.
