Chris Goodwin, owner of the indie film studio HIDDEN HORIZONS was kind enough to share a press release for his studio’s latest feature film Reel. Reel is a found footage horror film that follows real life film critic Todd Smith, that ends in a horrific bloodbath that you won’t want to miss.

Hidden Horizons Press Release – Reel (2015)

HIDDEN HORIZONS is an independent movie studio committed to bringing the world DIY entertainment. We are always on the lookout for efficient team players…basically anyone who shares our vision, we welcome.  Our patience was soon tested though, when we met the director of our new horror movie ‘REEL’.  We knew right off the bat the filmmaker was a little odd, we just had no idea how crazy he really was.   But let’s starts the story off right at the beginning….

HIDDEN HORIZONS met Slashervictim666 on ChatRoulette randomly quite a few years back. He was wearing a mask which we figured was used to scare people on ChatRoulette, a fairly common practice at that time.  No matter how many times we asked for his real name all he would give up was different aliases

Coming from a family of filmmakers, he said he had been shooting for years and was ready to show the world what he could do. Truth be told, we didn’t really take anything the guy said seriously as he seemed like your average loud mouth wannabe filmmaker.

Years later once HIDDEN HORIZONS was up and running, we were contacted by none other than Slashervctim666.  He said he now had a movie he was officially working on.  Remembering back to our encounter with him, we sidestepped him pretty quick, telling him that we wanted to keep our projects and movies more ‘in-house’ like the old days in Hollywood (esp. Poverty Row).  Oddly and tragically enough, within the next couple of weeks multiple apartments related to HIDDEN HORIZONS began having small fires break out.

We were beginning to realize that maybe we were dealing with someone who was more than a little bit off. Still we had our standards and weren’t going to let anyone pressure us into releasing a movie. That’s just not HIDDEN HORIZONS style. This proved to be another mistake. Pets related to HIDDEN HORIZONS quickly disappeared and were turning up dismembered…Beethoven the turtle, Gumball the cat just to mention a couple.  And then came the abduction of our grandparents…

It was at this point we had no choice but to meet with this guy.   No matter how many times we pushed for his real name, he would not give it up.  In a warped way, you kind of had to admire his determination.  So we told him we’d accept his movie, which was to be called REEL, on the grounds that he stopped harassing us and released our grandparents.

Fast-forward a couple months later to the agreed upon completion date and his movie still hadn’t arrived. We didn’t want any more break-ins, grandparent abductions or amphibian massacres so we decided to cut him some slack. The rare times we did end up communicating with him, he would just keep raving about his film’s authentic edge. He said it was going to the ‘realest movie of all time’. We agreed to handle the marketing and release of the film in exchange for a percentage of the profits and a producing credit.

The movie finally arrived and he was right. It was oddly too real.  It didn’t seem so much a horror movie but rather Slashervictim666 stalking people with his camera. We couldn’t tell if this was his aesthetic intention or not. We approached him to talk about his movie and that’s when the real crazy started.

Slashervictim666 immediately began trashing HIDDEN HORIZONS publicly. Any chance he could he spewed garbage towards our company. He complained about the poor marketing, thinking we were trying to hide his masterpiece from the world. We got a bloodstained cease and desist from a questionable lawyer stating we remove our logo from all promotional photos and undo years of our hard work.  It was all becoming a total disaster.

Eerily everything came to a standstill.  Our phone calls, emails and texts all went unanswered.  The legal troubles and threats had abruptly ended.

Knowing this sudden silence was an omen for something still to come, we tried to do a face to face at his home and have this finished.   We waited and watched his home for hours on end but to no avail.  Just when we were beginning to breathe again, we received a tape on our doorstep.   We watched the film.  It was footage of him watching us with his video camera

That was the final straw for Slashervictim666. Enough was enough.

So that brings us to now.  We terminated any more communication from and to  Slashervictim666.  We completely took over the marketing of his movie. We invested too much time and aggravation to let this film be handled by an unstable yet oddly gifted mind. Communication slowly began again, but on our terms.  We felt, it would be best for both parties if we handled the promotion of his movie.  Many have mistaken Slashervictim666’s genius dissection of pop culture as jibber jabber…even HIDDEN HORIZONS thought it was too weird for audiences.  But upon repeat viewings we realized that we somehow overlooked the film’s brilliance. We realized we had an obligation to bring it to a wider audience. To achieve this goal we are going to replace his blackened trailers with ‘normal’ trailers – no more out of context Luis Bunuel quotes or strange scribbled drawings. Whether this movie is actually real or not, we don’t know, he still won’t tell us.

Our main importance right now is getting his movie out in the public for you all to see. We hold no grudges for what he did to us. And we hope you don’t either.

So with that please enjoy Slashervictim666’s movie on Todd Smith.