'It's horrifying': UNC professor's film investigates accountability for misdeeds

Professional screenwriter and UNC professor Michael Acosta said that a good movie isn’t just filmed. First, it’s written. 

"Blackest Darkness," Acosta's latest film that he wrote and produced, is a slow-burn horror following a man’s struggle to return to his wife, encountering strange characters along the way.

Acosta's film investigates the male protagonist's wrongdoings, he said. The theme of accountability over one's actions threads through the film, forcing readers to question: what does it mean for someone to be repeatedly punished, forever?

“If the things that we want are bad, we have to make the human choice not to do them, but our character doesn't make that choice in life and he has to pay for it,” Acosta said. “And that's what we're watching — we're watching him pay for it, we're watching him slowly realize that he's paying for it, and it's horrifying.” 

The film premiered as an eight-minute short last year, but was made into a full-length film in the fall, shot in Sanford and Hillsborough, N.C. 

A professor in UNC’s Writing for the Screen and Stage program, Acosta invited about 30 UNC students to be interns who learned more about the filmmaking process and assisted the crew, he said. 

The story’s events take place entirely at night, and Jessica Blaustein, the film’s lead actress, said some days lasted until 4 a.m.

“I actually kind of really enjoyed that,” she said. “There was something that just added to the otherworldly feeling of the whole production.”

Adam Hulin, the director of "Blackest Darkness," said he thought of subtle ways to invoke feelings of oddity on screen. For example, the film's strict adherence to a warm color palette with low-lit, red lighting, is intended to conjure feelings of discomfort in audience members.

“It doesn’t look like typical Hollywood stuff, which is also what we're trying to avoid,” Hulin said. “We want it to look professional, we don't want to look like everything else, because what’s the point? Otherwise, we're going to look like a low-budget version of whatever they're doing.”

Another eerie detail was having Blaustein play every female role. Hulin said it wasn’t the original plan, but was a change he was excited to pursue. This repetition of the same actress throughout the film allows audiences to piece together the protagonist's harrowing reality that slowly comes together, scene by scene. 

“​​When I thought about it, I thought, 'Well, if we can find someone who's really versatile, you can really change it up big time,'” Hulin said. “I said that would be fun to do, just to have like, the woman who plays his wife be all the female characters in the scenario so everywhere he goes every female he encounters is his wife.”

Acosta said the film has been picked up by various streaming services, including Plex, Fawesome, Stash TV and Reveel. Reveel allows viewers to watch the film for free, and since its debut on the site in April, "Blackest Darkness" has made several of the service's top ten movie lists.

Reveel focuses on independent films that are artistic and unique, Acosta said, so he and his team were excited to sign on to the platform.

The platform isn’t as popular among average movie-watchers, he said, but "Blackest Darkness" will soon be available on Amazon Prime Video, which will allow the film to potentially reach wider audiences, he said. Additionally, the service puts advertisements only at the beginning, and Hulin said that he is excited for viewers to watch the film without any commercial interruptions throughout.

The film’s marketing and commercial push will continue throughout the summer. Acosta hopes to get many eyes on the project because every time someone watches a film, the actors, producers, mixers, sound technicians and production designers get paid.

While he describes filmmaking as gratifying in itself, he said that artists deserve to be both recognized and compensated for their work. Movies, he said, deserve an audience. 

“You can’t appreciate something that you never see,” he said.

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