“All Your Friends Are Dead” is like the classic teen slasher film, but features actors in their 30s.
The film’s creators, Northern Kentucky natives Ricky Glore and Nicholas Hiance, said they wanted to create a semi-autobiographical movie.
The film follows 35-year old Matt Wilbee, who falls into depression, realizing his best days were in high school. He decides to end his life and writes an email to his old group of friends from high school, “The Pack,” to say goodbye.
Wilbee’s friends arrive at their old stomping grounds at a campsite to save his life, but little do they know, a masked killer is hiding in the woods.
While the pair never had a run-in with a masked killer, they pulled together ideas for the film from their own experiences from being friends at Campbell County High School.
The film’s lead character, Matt Wilbee, played by Glore, has elements from Glore’s high school years, like his knee injury from playing football for the Camels. Photos of Glore from his high school wrestling days are also seen in the film to represent his character.
Natives to the area might also recognize local businesses like Darkness Brewing in Bellevue, shown throughout the film. The brewery’s own Chris Morris also played the masked killer in the film.
“Darkness brewing in Bellevue was a giant location, and they’ve been a big supporter of us from the beginning,” Hiance said.
The brewery welcomed the cast to practice lines and to film there.
Wilbee is also sporting a Darkness Brewing shirt, which was created specifically for his character.
Hiance said the City of Bellevue’s police department also allowed them to film a scene inside their interrogation room.
Other areas in the region shown in the film are Wilbee’s grandmother’s house, which is behind Campbell County High School, and a hydraulics shop in Erlanger that was transformed into a hardware store.
“We were really fortunate asking a lot of favors with basically no budget while we were filming to be like, ‘hey, this is what we’re doing can we use this for a couple of hours?’ And people were incredibly gracious,” Glore said.
“All Your Friends Are Dead” was created on a budget of just under $6,000.
Aside from Hiance and Glore, the film has improvisers Eileen Earnest and Chance Kilgour who play friends in “The Pack,” characters that Glore said he wrote based on Earnest and Kilgour. Patrick Johnston and Kira Wilson, both commercial actors, also play members of “The Pack.”
They filmed scenes that required a cast in two days, with the first being a 15-hour-long filming session.
“We started at 7:30 a.m., took a couple of small breaks throughout, took a dinner break, and then had everybody come back at 9 p.m. and then wrapped at 10:30 p.m.,” Glore said. “So, we filmed like an ungodly amount of pages, which was like 25 pages of dialogue.”
Hiance said everyone involved wore many hats.
Mike Flinchum plays the hardware store worker, but he also worked a boom mic during the woods scenes and built some of the special effects for the film.
“The money that we were able to pay probably didn’t even cover your gas, especially getting out to Moscow, Ohio for the woods scenes,” Hiance said. “Everybody really chipped in and helped out a lot.”
“All Your Friends Are Dead” is open to the public at the Esquire Theater on Ludlow Ave. in Cincinnati beginning Aug. 25.
