Meadville movie makes its premiere

The pig people are coming — and a contingent of Meadville filmmakers are going, flying, in fact, and soon.

“Pig Hill,” the horror movie based on a local urban legend and filmed in Meadville in 2023, is set to make its world premiere Aug. 23 at FrightFest, a five-day international film festival held each year in London that is the largest event of its kind in the United Kingdom. Based on the book “Pig” by Nancy Williams of Conneaut Lake, the movie’s producers include Ted Watts Jr. of Meadville and R.A. Mihailoff of Townville, the Hollywood veteran best known for playing the title character in “Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III.” Both Williams and Watts will part of the entourage headed to the premiere.

The premiere comes as the result of a competitive selection process and is the culmination of a labor-intensive process. Fortunately, the group said, the years-long journey resulted not only in exactly the sort of intense cinematic experience they were hoping before, but one that they hope will prove a launching pad for additional film projects in the area.

Gathered in front of Tattered Corners New and Used Bookstore last week — the bookstore provided a key location in the movie as the workplace of the main character — the moviemakers recalled the production process.

“On the first day of shooting, right here in front of this store,” Mihailoff said, pointing across Chestnut Street, “right there, sitting on my highboy chair, what a beautiful warm day, I was just looking around, looking at the people, the equipment, shaking my head and going, ‘Man, I cannot believe what we’ve put together.’”

What they had built, he continued, was a privately financed production that rivaled many of the independent studio films he had worked on during more than 30 years in Hollywood. Having returned home several years ago. Mihailoff said he has no plans to leave.

“We intend for ‘Pig Hill’ to be the springboard for a continuing slate of movies filmed in northwest Pennsylvania.”

The producers drew inspiration from George Romero’s Pittsburgh-area productions and even worked with several of the people involved in Romero’s living dead films, according to Watts. While it added many steps to the process, Watts agreed that they had made the right choice in taking a similar approach.

“This is truly independent and that makes it a little tougher up front,” he said. “At the end of the day, we’ve had great control over the movie and what we wanted it to be.”

While the movie depicts the terrifying pig people rumored to be living on Radio Tower Hill, one of the scariest elements came behind the scenes.

“I had gotten spooked, for lack of a better word,” Watts recalled. “On our trail to find the production team — the director and the designers — I’d had a few conversations with some people that we were considering and the direction wasn’t what we wanted.”

The goal was to stay true to the book.

“This is the kind of movie we wanted to make,” Watts said. “We had to really protect that because that could get away from you if the wrong people get their hands on it.”

The novel, originally published in 2019 by Hellbender Books, a subsidiary of Sunbury Press Inc., was Williams’ fifth book. She recalled setting out to write a classic monster-based horror story and settling on source material from her youth — stories told by her older brother and sister to scare their younger sibling.

“A mutant strain of pig people seemed like a good way to go,” she said with a laugh. “It’s always been with me. My brother told me a story — it’s in the first scene of the book — so I thought it’s local, I’m local, what better material to start with if I want to make a good horror story?”

Seeing her creation translated to the screen has been a dream come true for Williams, who started writing when she was in high school. The London premiere will be her first chance to see the final version. Based on a director’s cut of the movie and the trailer that was released last month, she said she got goosebumps watching a film that was “not for the faint of heart.”

“They just nailed it — I think they did a little more, I call it ‘stabby, stabby,’” she added. “They definitely went more with that aggressive horror aspect to it, which was totally appropriate. I’m really looking forward to it.”

The film was directed by Kevin Lewis, who received positive reviews for the 2021 Nicolas Cage vehicle “Willy’s Wonderland.” For “Pig Hill,” Lewis came up with what Watts called a “visually stunning” approach that creates the sense of a “punk rock fever dream.”

“It’s hard to find your footing when you’re watching this movie,” Watts said.

Part of the goal of the premiere is to draw interest from distributors as the production team plans its strategy for a domestic and international release of the film. At some point during that process, the made-in-Meadville movie will have a Tool City debut, Watts said. Viewers will recognize not only many of the locations — Tattered Corners, Voodoo Brewery, Firehouse Tap & Grille, Family & Children Community Association, and Radio Tower Hill among them — but some of the onscreen faces and even some locally sourced music.

“The greatest thing about it was that all of the locations depicted in the film are the actual locations as they are in Meadville,” Watts said. “We will definitely be doing something in Meadville.”