OCCURRENCE AT MILLS CREEK

A young woman haunted by the death of her sister finds her reality eroding as she is plagued by a darkness hidden in her family's past.

IMDb Profile

A family secret is about to surface...

Occurrence at Mills Creek has been a labor of love that took 28 months to complete. The first draft was written in April 2018 and the final edit was made during the final days of August 2020. What started out some time earlier as an offhand joke between writer/director Don Swanson and actress Alexa Mechling became a short film that garnered the attention of many others while still in the early drafting stage. Among these were Betsy Lynn George, best known as Devon in the David Fincher directed music video for Billy Idol’s Cradle of Love, and Lynda Marnoni, an actress who worked with legendary horror filmmaker George Romero on Season of the Witch and The Crazies. It wasn’t long before Ava Psoras, Betsy’s daughter, joined the cast and the world in which the characters coming into focus began to expand well beyond the confines of a short film.

A unique approach to the project became the roadway forward, to make a short film out of the first act that could be tweaked to act as a standalone project and simultaneously be used to foster awareness and support for the remaining feature. It worked. With over 20 Official Selections resulting in 19 awards and 12 nominations, not to mention 50 reviews from critics and an aggressive Indiegogo campaign, the feature went into production in the summer of 2019, transforming a successful short film into the feature film that it was destined to be - a suspenseful supernatural thriller done in the slow burning style of timeless ghost stories. The feature was picked up for distribution by Indie Rights in fall 2020.