As part of its Emerging Filmmakers Showcase, The Lindsay Theater in Sewickley will premiere “House of Tears” — written and directed by Pittsburgh area writer and director Josh Poe — on Dec. 12.
“House of Tears” was conceived by Poe, 25, of Bethel Park, as a nod to 1985 cult classic film “Clue.”
“The thing about ‘Clue’ that I didn’t like is that no one that really matters dies. It’s always the side characters and I guess that’s the whole point. But I’d like to see what happens if the stakes are raised and the characters in the house were also dying,” Poe said.
The film has a cast of 13 actors, including Sheldon Ingram, a general news reporter for WTAE.
Poe didn’t want to spoil too much of the plot, but the setup is intriguing.
“It’s this dinner that this guy hosts every year, essentially … he’s a chocolate maker, very reminiscent of Willy Wonka. Every year, he has this dinner party, and it’s to bring people together that he knows he has dirt on — and he tells them their dirt so they have to deal with it. The goal’s not to tell the public about it, it’s just so that he can watch them have to deal with it,” he said.
But things go wrong when the evening takes an unexpected turn.
Poe started writing screenplays before graduating from Denison University in 2022, where he was studying the business side of filmmaking.
“I found I really liked it. It was something that was fun for me, to tell a story that I’ve never been able to do before,” he said.
He’d written and directed other projects before, but nothing as daunting as a feature length film. But when he started writing the script that would become “House of Tears” in the summer of 2023, it quickly ballooned into a 200-page behemoth. After passing the script around to some collaborators and getting it into shape, they decided that it should be shot.
“This is a feature film, which is not the best to do if you don’t have the money. And that’s the thing we kept hearing. ‘Oh, you don’t have the money, you shouldn’t do it.’ And I thought, well, maybe that’s why we should do it, because we don’t have the money but we can do it.”
“Going into it, it’s the largest project I’ve done. Doing a feature is pretty crazy when you’re an independent filmmaker,” said Adam Collier, the director of photography and main editor for “House of Tears.” He and Poe have collaborated creatively on previous projects.
Some lucky breaks fell into place, but Poe was also able to use the skills he learned from his education background to shoot the film for around $10,000.
One of those turns of good fortune came in the form of a shooting location — a house in a rural area north of Pittsburgh owned by a friend and fellow producer’s grandparents.
“That’s where the majority of the film takes place. We had a really great location for free,” Collier said.
Poe admires films like “Scream,” the original “Suspiria” and John Carpenter’s “Halloween.” He was inspired by Carpenter’s passion and do-it-yourself sensibilities when making the 1978 horror classic.
“I like the grittiness. It’s very cheap, but what they do with that money — where they put the money — is perfect,” he said.
They cast the movie late in the summer of 2023. One of the actors who was brought on board was Payton Léjer, 19, who played the character Green.
“I went into the audition, I read for him, and I think it was one of those moments where I was like oh, OK, this is something. I really am going to enjoy this,” Léjer said.
He said that he felt a real connection with Poe and Collier, and that the production was a “beautiful” experience. “I made a lot of connections and a lot of best friends during that movie. It was an unforgettable experience. It was fun,” he said.
Filming took place from December 2023 to February 2024, and the editing process has been lengthy but rewarding.
“We had a rough cut by I think June, and we ended up showing it to one of Josh’s friends who is a professor at CMU, and we were thinking that it was almost done. … She kind of put us in our place a little bit,” Collier said.
Melissa Martin, an adjunct associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University — along with some other professional editors who saw the original cut of the film — gave tough but helpful feedback.
They’ve cut the movie down from 1 hour 45 minutes to about 1 hour 33 minutes since. “I think that drastically improved the pacing of it,” Collier said.
After a year and a half of hard work, the film will be coming to the big screen at the Lindsay Theater on Dec. 12. The Emerging Filmmakers Showcase series at the Lindsay is a huge boost for local up-and-comers.
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“The goal is to be the place where local filmmakers — especially ones how have made films locally — can screen their movies,” said Josh Axelrod, director of communications and media relations at the Lindsay Theater.
Screenings typically happen once or twice a month, and there is no cost to the filmmakers — they get a real premiere experience for free. “It’s just a really mutually beneficial relationship for everyone because we literally roll out the red carpet,” Axelrod said.
“It’s a legit theater, it’s got the whole theater feel and I really wanted to try to do that,” Poe said of the Lindsay.
He also noted that horror films like “House of Tears” are a staple of the series. “That’s because we live in Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh has been a hotbed of horror since ‘Night of the Living Dead.’”
After their big-screen debut, the team behind “House of Tears” is hoping to submit it to festivals next year, and maybe even find a home for the movie on a streaming platform.
Collier also sees this as a creative jumping-off point. “That’s kind of our hope, is to be able to show it to bigger industry people and have them embrace our vision and do another feature film within the next couple of years,” he said.
Learn more and RSVP for the premiere of “House of Tears” at thelindsaytheater.org.