Interview with SIGHT UNSEEN Filmmakers Stephen Parkhurst and Oriana Schwindt - MIFF 2025

SIGHT UNSEEN, premiering at the Maine International Film Festival, is a Maine shot horror film directed by Parkhurst and written by the duo.

The Maine International Film Festival (MIFF) begins July 11th, and among the over one hundred films screening this year is Sight Unseen, a little indie horror film shot in Maine. For the sake of transparency, I grew up with director Stephen Parkhurst in Pittsfield, Maine, where we played the euphonium side-by-side in the Warsaw Middle School band. Needless to say, when I found out that Sight Unseen was having its world premiere at MIFF, I jumped at the opportunity to reconnect and interview Parkhurst and his spouse/writing partner, Oriana Schwindt, both of whom now reside in New York.

Tony Crabtree, The Maine Playweek: Stephen, I’ve known you for quite awhile. Oriana, I don’t know you quite as well, but I’m curious: where did Sight Unseen start? Can you walk me through the process from beginning to pre-production to the start of production? Where did the idea stem from?

Stephen Parkhurst, director/screenwriter: In essence, we knew we wanted to do a horror film as our first feature, and we knew we had to keep a very tight budget. Initially, we were actually going to do something totally different. It was a gory slasher film called The Taxidermist. We had written the whole script, had even started some very early pre-production. Just planning some stuff out. We kind of looked at each other one day, and we were like, “we can’t afford to do this in a way that would look good.” Because we wanted to do practical gore, sort of Evil Dead-style effects. There was just no way to do it without spending half a million dollars, which we did not have.

I had an idea a while before that, which I had never really fleshed out, about siblings inheriting their parents house. And I just returned to that, and we started working on that with a sub-$100,000 budget in mind. At first it was even, like, $50,000, or somewhere in that neighborhood. So we wrote very specifically for this narrow monetary window.

Orianna Schwindt, screenwriter: Yeah, which was kind of funny given that we had made a bunch of shorts together, and Steve had made shorts before I was ever in the picture. But it’s funny writing for a budget not having actually made a feature film before and just kind of guessing about what things are going to cost, how many days you’re going to need to shoot things. I think we approached it maybe almost too practically.

SP: Maybe.You know, it ended up being about $85,000, the total spend. Most of that was ours. We also did a Kickstarter, which, thank you [Author’s note: I donated].So that was a portion as well, and that was it. That was what we had. I think we knew enough to know certain things are going to be reasonably affordable if we do this way. If we have it in one location, small cast, small crew. We chose Maine because I’m from there and we had some resources up there. It’s also just a lot cheaper to shoot there than in New York. Even outside the city. People are more used to locations being used for film shoots outside the city, so you run into a lot of the same problems that you run into in the city. It sounds a little cynical, a lot of our decision making on that, but it was more about practicality. A haunted house film is all about the mood, it’s about the setting, and it’s more about what you don’t see rather than what is on screen. A big gory murder scene is fun, but it’s all about what you see. And if that doesn’t look good…

OS: You’re toast.

SP: You lose people. Whereas like, a bump in the night, a light switch going off, a shadow in the corner…that’s a lot easier to pull off when you don’t have any money.

TC: That’s a good point. So you were talking about how you chose Maine more out of, you know, you grew up here, you can do it cheaper here, so I was curious how you went about finding that specific house.

SP: Again, this is one of the reasons that we chose Maine. I just put up a Facebook post.

OS: That was our location scout!

SP: I never really post on Facebook, so I just put it out there, and was like “Hey! Anyone in Maine! If you know anyone who has a cabin! We’re willing to rent it and pay money to rent it, so put the word out!” And a few people did. We actually had a few people reaching out with their cabins, and the one that worked the best just so happened to be owned by a woman who ended up in the movie, Dee [Debra Lord Cooke]. I had never met her before, but she was through Deb Susi, who…

TC: Oh, yeah yeah! Deb Susi! For those who don’t know who Deb Susi is, can you explain who she is?

SP: Deb Susi was the drama coach at our high school, at Maine Central Institute, and she was my favorite teacher. She was never officially my teacher, but she was my favorite teacher there, and we’ve kept in touch over the years. And as far as I know, she’s still there. She’s still the drama coach there. I know she also does a lot at the Waterville Opera House. She was the one who connected us to the other Debra, Debra Lord Cooke. Dee is what she goes by, and Dee has acted in a bunch of stuff.

OS: She was in a Woody Allen movie!

SP: She was in a Woody Allen movie and a bunch of other things. Dee reached out, and it just kind of worked out. We were like, well, we actually have this role that she is perfect for, and we might have even cast her even if it hadn’t been her cabin! She worked really well for that role, so it was this serendipitous moment. When we weren’t totally sure if we were considering upstate New York, or New Hampshire because I have some connections there from when I went to college, or Maine, it ended up being like…Maine is a good choice.

TC: I honestly love when movies shoot up here, because it’s so strange to know the stuff. There was a director who made a movie up here named Mickey Keating, and he made a film in Maine, and the only reason I knew it was [filmed in Maine] was because, first off, it felt like Maine, and second there was a Hannaford brand candy wrapper in the movie. That’s a key Maine thing.

SP: Mmhmm.

TC: My next question is about the writing process. You both worked on writing the film, and I know that sometimes one person does one draft, and then another person will work off of that. How did you two collaborate on writing this film?

SP: We have co-written a few scripts now. I think this was the first one that we kind of collaborated on.

OS: Steve had written a version of this movie. We had talked about it extensively, because even stuff that we are working on individually, he is the first person I talk to about everything. We are constantly bouncing ideas off of each other, and “yes, and-ing” each other. We had talked about this a bunch, then you had pumped out a draft, and you were like, “Here, make it good.” We did some refining. This was how we set our little way of working, sort of our workflow. Steve will often just pump out a first draft, and then hand it to me, and then I will do a bunch of stuff to it, hand it back to him, and we’ll kind of go back and forth. In between, usually, we’ll be talking to each other at dinner or whatever, but it has worked really well for us. Steve is really good at plot and action, and where I’m a little bit better, I think, is the character dynamics and emotional beats.

SP: And dialogue.

OS: The dialogue, yeah. I guess.

SP: So it’s a good balance. I don’t like to self promote too much, but I’m really good at pumping out a draft of a script in, like, a few weeks.

OS: Whereas I was working on a feature script of my own, and it was like, three months for me to get a first draft out. I just can’t do what he does.

SP: And I can’t do what she does.

TC: And so combined, it works.

OS and SP: With our powers combined…

SP: Captain Planet!

TC: I know that you have talked about this on some of your Instagram posts, but thinking about influences on the film while you were writing or directing the film…

SP: Well, I’m glad you brought that up, because one thing I didn’t mention when you were asking about Maine, is I always get a little cheesed off when I’m watching a Stephen King adaptation and it’s not shot in Maine. Which is almost all of them. There’s only been I think, even back in the 80s, there’s only a couple that ended up actually being filmed here.

TC: Creepshow 2 was, but that’s not an adaptation…

SP: Creepshow 2 was, Graveyard Shift was…

TC: Langoliers was…

SP: I do get the economic reasons why it doesn’t happen, and it’s a shame, but we can touch on that later. Stephen King, though, being a big inspiration, his books and the movies. I mentioned Evil Dead earlier, even though that’s a very different vibe. It’s not exactly a different genre, but almost…

OS: The DIY-ness of Evil Dead, that sort of atmosphere on set, was kind of what we were trying to evoke.

SP: There’s one that I keep mentioning. I watched it just before we filmed, actually, so it’s sort of a late inspiration, but I thought about it a lot as we were filming. It was Oddity.

TC: Oh yeah. Love Oddity. It’s great.

SP: It was a surprise. I’d heard a couple people mention it and watched it and was blown away. It was one of my top three favorite movies of last year. Just because it was so effective. It’s not like, one of the greatest movies of all-time or anything, but it had a goal and it achieved it really well. It’s a small cast; most of it’s just in that house, and it’s just so well done for working with relatively little. So that was a big, sort of, last-minute inspiration. Not a movie I’d grown up with or anything, but like, I’ve watched it a few times since and I really appreciate it. Especially these days with, like…I like a lot of “elevated horror,” but I think that it’s come to be a sort of abused term. It feels like people go, “it has to be this traditional non-elevated, just gory…”

OS: “Schlocky.”

SP: “Schlocky. Or it has to be A24 or NEON.” Oddity felt like, no, you can have it be kind of classy looking, but still just good old fashioned scares. And The Babadook was one I was thinking about prior to this. Again, not that similar to our movie at all, but I like how they use the monster as the metaphor. How if you turned your brain off and just watched The Babadook, fun scares. But it’s also very clearly a story about being a single parent and the nightmare that can be. That was relatable even though I’m not a single parent. So, that was kind of used as a blueprint where you can have a metaphor, you can have your horror movie be about something else, as long as if people don’t want to read into that, it can just be a haunted house movie.

OS: It’s a haunted house movie, but it’s also about the housing crisis. It’s also about…what do we inherit from our parents, physically, emotionally, the world that that generation is leaving us. So we wanted it to work on all those levels, and in addition we have these scares. But also, if you were to, for some reason, remove those scares, you would have a hopefully compelling family drama about siblings and reverting to certain dynamics that can assert themselves.

SP: It kind of felt like we realized as we were filming and even as I was editing, this is actually just a family drama with a few scary scenes.

TC: So on Saturday, July 19 at 9PM, Sight Unseen is having its Maine premiere…

OS: It’s the world premiere!

TC: So what can the MIFF audience expect?

SP: I think it’s a crowd pleaser.

OS: Yes!

SP: It’s got horror, it’s got family drama…

OS: It’s also pretty funny, though.

SP: There’s some good comedic moments. It’s a tight 90 minutes. It’s actually a few minutes short of 90. Who doesn’t love that? So we’re not going to waste your time.

OS: And, the 19th is my birthday.

TC: People have to show up now.

OS: They have to show up and wish me a happy birthday for our world premiere. I think at the 9PM I’d love to have a nice rowdy crowd.

SP: We want people who really want to enjoy the horror, and really get into it.

OS: Because it’ll freak you out in, like, two places I think…

SP: At least two places! Hopefully more.

OS: Two places at least, you’ll scream. Hopefully.

SP: We did a cast and crew screening, and there were people there whose plus ones had never seen it, and we got some really great reactions. Some people were yelling and freaking out.

TC: And that’s what you want! That’s the goal!

SP: So if you can see it in a theater, I highly recommend it. And it’ll be fun. It’ll be a fun theatrical experience.

OS: If you’re looking for a good crowd experience, this will deliver.

Sight Unseen premieres July 19th at 9pm with an encore showing on July 20th at 3pm at the Maine Film Center in Waterville. Purchase your tickets here.