This is the first film for UW student Maddi Conway.
It’s Halloween treat time for three Madison filmmakers who have just secured a deal with indie distributor Uncork’d Entertainment for their debut movie.
The Nursery is a project of Chris Micklos, Glenn Chung and Jay Sapiro, longtime friends and colleagues at Visuality Media Productions. Though they each wear many hats, Micklos is the primary writer, while Chung and Sapiro handle much of the technical and production work.
The three started making and building advance support for the film in early 2016, launching a social media and crowdfunding campaign that garnered more than 50,000 likes on Facebook before filming for The Nursery wrapped in late 2016.
The low-budget indie horror film centers around a college sophomore who is stalked by a sinister presence while babysitting for a family with a tragic past. It’s a Halloween-style plot where the protagonist and her friends are being hunted down one by one.
The filmmakers say they found some excellent actors in their initial Milwaukee casting call, but wanted more options and ran a second call in Madison.
“Turnout was astounding,” says Micklos. “Madison has a nice pool of talent for moviemaking.” Two of The Nursery’s leading actors, Maddi Conway and Emmaline Friedrichs, auditioned that night.
“I decided not to act in the fall,” Friedrichs says, “but then I saw the casting call for The Nursery that day — my resolve held for all of two hours.” Her first task: taking her laptop into the basement of a university building to record herself screaming.
Friedrichs was focusing on her coursework at UW-Madison — where’s she’s studying theater and psychology — but liked the producers’ approach.
“One of the things that attracted me was that female relationships aren’t usually the center of films,” Friedrichs says. Though The Nursery was primarily written by men, Friedrichs says the filmmakers were excellent collaborators. “They are very open to changes and shifts to be true to life,” Friedrichs says. “It’s something that was clearly important to them; we all wanted to make the best possible representation of women we could.”
Conway, who’s also a UW-Madison student, agrees. “After I first read it,” Conway says, “I thought ‘this is low-key feminist.’”
Conway has previous stage acting experience, but The Nursery is her first film. She says one of the biggest surprises was acting outside of the timeline of her character.
“In stage acting, you’re performing chronologically. You can build up naturally what your character’s going through,” Conway says. “But we didn’t film chronologically; you had to know where your character was.”
Shooting for The Nursery is complete, and the filmmakers have signed a deal for streaming and DVD distribution. Meanwhile the film was selected for screening at the Halloween Horror Picture Show festival in Tampa, Florida.
But the producers say they still have their work cut out for them. “Finishing filming was a moment to sit back and celebrate,” Micklos says, but “we are aggressively targeting the film festival circuit.”
Making The Nursery “has been a ton of fun and fantastically engaging,” adds Chung, who corrects Micklos after he says The Nursery is their only movie: “It’s our first movie.”
