A New "Old" Era of Film Begins

POPLAR GROVE, Ill. - EntSun -- Maybe the last thing you would expect in 2025 is a series of silent short horror films. That's just what Spooky Ventures has begun, though. "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" hit YouTube as the first in a series.

Spooky Ventures has been around on YouTube and the internet as SpookyVentures.com since 2019, but producing films is a new activity. Its roots are tied to the horror hosting show from Spooky Ventures, Spooky Movie Time with Scary Gary. That show, which debuted in May 2024, features host Scary Gary and remote reporter D.B. Lovecraft showing horror movies and commenting about them.

How did that spawn a series of short, silent horror films? Each episode of "Spooky Movie Time with Scary Gary" starts with one such movie (some of the early episodes had more than one). Then that short gets a silly remix of it, all before the main feature airs. That requires a steady stream of silent shorts, and while there were enough for all sixteen episodes of season one, there aren't that many available to be used. So, that led to making short films for Spooky Ventures.

Gary Hill, who runs Spooky Ventures, and is both Scary Gary and D.B. Lovecraft, serves as director, co-producer, script-writer and more for the series. While it's his first time doing something of this scope, the "Spooky Movie Time…" shows are done almost entirely by him alone. He's also no stranger to a movie set and has been appearing as an actor in small parts in several films recently.

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For the second season of "Spooky Movie Time with Scary Gary," there will be a total of 15 of these films done and released. Each will go up as a separate film before being used in an episode. The first five have been filmed and are in various states of post-production, with only "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" being release thus far.

The films are intended to look like they were done in the hey-day of silent film, but it's also somewhat tongue-in-cheek in that regard. All the films will be based on short stories or novels. The majority of those are literary works that were around in the 1920s. The exceptions are stories by Gary Hill.

The first five films are "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (based on Edgar Allan Poe's story), "The Statement of Randolph Carter" (from an H.P. Lovecraft story), "Home Sweet Home" (based on a story from E.F. Benson, "The Secret of Growing Gold" (from a Bram Stoker story) and "The Yellow Wallpaper" (based on the story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman).

"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" can be viewed at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgSNoKnYID8