The Directors Will Die

Six up-and-coming horror filmmakers have become targets to a murderous maniac who splices his or her kills into the films they've made. The group has to devise a plan to survive, before they become the victims of a death they directed.

A “Liam Maguren” FILM
WRITTEN BY Liam Maguren

Rolland Baikie has had mild success in the indie horror filmmaking world with his low-budget slashers ‘Cutthroat’, ‘Cutthroat 2’ and ‘Puncture City’. His pals in the filmmaking world – calling themselves the Nu Wave Nihilists – have also garnered profiles as twisted genre up-and-comers: demonic horror enthusiast Emily Hugo, proud torture pornographer Allen Matthews, sci-fi horror freak Dane Smith, feminist horror filmmaker Samantha Garland and experimental arthouse director Elliot Corlette. All six filmmakers have entered a movie into the ‘Curb Stomp Film Festival’.

Attending a 2pm matinee of Elliot’s feature debut ‘Flesh and Boned’, the rest of the Nihilists notice that he is strangely absent. But when the film starts to roll, the group are horrified to see the opening scene has been replaced with real footage of Elliot being horrifically tortured to death in the same manner as the first victim of his film, with the crowd cheering as unwitting witnesses of an actual murder. The scene ends with a new opening title: ‘The Nihilists Will Die’.

With a peculiarly uncooperative police force unwilling to look into the matter, it is up to the Nihilists to discover the culprit who is planning to kill them, faced with threat of being murdered in the manner that they themselves have directed. As Rolland re-watches the film he entered in the festival, agonising over all the different ways he might be murdered, he devises a plan that might get them out alive: faking his death on film. But doing so will require him to traverse a horror genre he swore never to sink to: the found-footage film.