The trailer has dropped for director Pete Ohs’s microbudget horror film Jethica, which premiered at SXSW earlier this year. Ohs is also credited as the film’s cinematographer, editor and producer. Additionally, he co-wrote Jethica with cast members Callie Hernandez, Ashley Denise Robinson, Andy Faulkner and Will Madden. Acquired by Cinedigm today, the film will begin its theatrical run on January 13 at LA’s Lumiere Music Hall. Editor Scott Macaulay wrote of Jethica‘s premise in an interview we published with Ohs and the cast/co-writers out of SXSW: “Jethica is framed as a kind of post-coital campfire tale — Callie Hernandez’s Elena […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 8, 2022While most producers these days are worried about the latest CPI number—that’s the Cinematic Price Index—one group of filmmakers is, somewhat paradoxically, not: those working on the lower end of the microbudget, or “no-budget,” continuum, producing finished features for the very low five figures. For them, production is retrofitted from whatever money can be raised, and if the price of gas goes up, well, the shoot just has to make do with less in another area. Among such filmmakers, there’s perhaps no one whose model is as stripped-down as Pete Ohs, who recently premiered his latest work, the well-received Jethica, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 14, 2022Two women, each fleeing unspecified trauma, holed up in an aluminum-sided mobile home in the middle of a desolate patch of New Mexico flatlands is an apt set-up for a microbudget horror film, but the pleasures and originality of Pete Ohs SXSW-premiering Jethica are in the ways in which it avoids all the more obvious narrative pathways it might have taken. (Indeed, it’s an exemplar of George Saunders’s dictum of “ritual banality avoidance” — rejecting the “crappo version” of a story.) There are no screams or shaky-cam chases, no woman-in-jeopardy jump scares. Instead, Ohs has worked with his actors to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 11, 2022Drawing from the world of gaming, writer/director Pete Ohs is embarking on a post-production experiment for his pandemic-shot film, Jethica: live-streaming his edit. “I know that YouTube is overflowing with editing and software tutorials but I’ve never heard of anyone actually editing a movie live,” he writes in an email, and I can’t think of anyone who has done this either. Beginning this week, Ohs is using Twitch to transmit his editing screen as well as webcam footage of himself behind the console, allowing viewers to track his process cut-by-cut. “I imagine the audience for this stream is going to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 11, 2021