Behind the Screams: Director Peter Hartsock Brings Horror Home to Cortland County

Every good horror story has to start somewhere... For filmmaker Peter Hartsock, it started right here in Homer, New York. Now a Los Angeles based writer and director, Peter is returning to his hometown to film American Animals, a surreal horror comedy set to be shot in and around Cortland County this fall. Before the strange guests arrive and the cameras start rolling, Peter shares what drew him back home and why the landscapes of Cortland County make the perfect backdrop for the uncanny.

There is a particular atmosphere to Central New York that I have never been able to find anywhere else. It lives in the fields outside Cortland and the old farmhouses along Route 11 and the particular darkness of the woods past the edge of town. As a kid I was convinced the county was haunted, and a decade of making films has only deepened the suspicion. The place has away of paying attention back.

A lot of my earliest film education happened at the Center for the Arts in Homer. I helped out with the screenings at night, and after the lights came up I would clean the popcorn out of the rows and close the place down in the dark. That theater gave me my love of cinema along with a fair number of eerie experiences to go with it. The one I think about most happened after a screening of The Changeling. My mom glanced up at the church window and saw a little boy standing there, and for a moment she thought it was me. Then I walked up right beside her. We never quite explained that one, and it has stayed with both of us ever since. I keep coming back to this place, and not out of nostalgia. The landscape does something to a story that no amount of production design can manufacture, so I return to it the way you return to a collaborator who always makes the work better. Most of my films have shot in Cortland County since my college years, including Optic Nerve, Daddy Knows Best, and Brothers Beastly. Every one of them carries the county somewhere in its bones, whether in the actual locations or in the way I was thinking about the land when I wrote it.

What surprises people most is how much of this work has been a community effort. I have never made anything in Cortland alone. When we made Brothers Beastly, the Beachhouse on Main Street in Cortland became a makeshift soundstage through the generous support of Dave McNeil, Ty Marshal and the Center for the Arts. The county has a quality of showing up for its own. Local performers and local locations and local people understand that what we are making is about this place even when it is set somewhere else, and that understanding never has to be explained because it is already there.

Then there is the land itself. There is a stretch of Route 11, far enough out that the rest of the world falls away, that has been lighting up my imagination since I was young. I have dreamed entire films into existence on that road. The folk history and the cinematic quality of the landscape feed each other, and together they are the engine of nearly everything I make. The wilderness as a psychological interior. The old house as a container for inherited damage. The road at night carrying you somewhere you are not sure you want to arrive. None of these are abstractions to me. They are specific places I can drive to.

My next film grew directly out of that same well. It is called American Animals, a surrealist horror comedy set in 1913 about power and consumption and the American dinner that never ends. It came from a fascination with the Gilded Age and the extraordinary architecture that still stands across Central New York, those grand old mansions that remain as monuments to a particular kind of American wealth and appetite. It felt like the right moment to tell a story about that appetite, about who sits at the table and who is made to serve it, and to tell it through the strange and the surreal. We are shooting it in the county with a cast that includes performers from the local community arts space. The film is set among the powerful, but it was dreamed up here, in the specific blend of history and darkness and community that I have never found anywhere else.

I keep leaving, and I keep coming back. The landscape remembers everything I have made here, and I am still trying to be worthy of it.

To learn more about American Animals click here.

Peter Hartsock is a Los Angeles based writer and director and the founder of Fantasma House, a midnight movie production company. His work has screened internationally and received support from the New York State Council on the Arts. American Animals shoots in Cortland County this fall.

Get your daily dose of Cortland cool. Tag @experiencecortland607 and use #experiencecortland to snag your shot at Insta-fame!