Peter Filardi was born and raised in Connecticut, but most people probably know him for his work on the other side of the country. In the 1980s, the Mystic native set off for Hollywood with the intention of seeing his name in lights. In 1988, he got his start, penning an episode in the third season of the hit series MacGyver.

But it was another two years before he really got his big break when he wrote a little horror movie called Flatliners. The 1990 film starred a group of young actors – Kiefer Sutherland, Oliver Platt, Billy Baldwin, Kevin Bacon, and Julia Roberts – as medical students who are obsessed with near-death experiences.

The Joel Schumacher-helmed film – fresh off of Lost Boys and St. Elmo’s Fire but pre-Batman – received mixed reviews but was well-received enough that Filardi’s career in horror continued. In 1996, he wrote the now-cult classic The Craft about a group of teenage witches who play a little too close to the dark side and which launched the career of future scream queen Neve Campbell.

This was followed by a series of TV series and mini-series based on the works of fellow New Englander Stephen King, with the most recent, the Adrian Brody starring Chapelwaite, premiering in 2021.

These days, Filardi is splitting his time between his big Hollywood projects and smaller passion projects, short films he creates with his community in his new hometown in Southern Connecticut.

Filardi did not always want to make movies. After growing up in Mystic, he moved north to attend Boston University, beginning his post-secondary journey as an English major. It wasn’t until a new friend at school introduced him to filmmaking that he thought he could apply his writing skills in a different way.

“Although I had been a huge fan of movies my whole life,” he recalls. “It never crossed my mind that that could be an occupation that I could be a part of.”

Newly energized, Filardi switched majors to Broadcast Film and the rest is history.

But that history required years of dedication and odd jobs to achieve. Filardi started in a notably unglamorous position.

“I started driving a truck for a small ad agency in Boston, returning props and picking and lugging gear to shoots because I had a class two truck license,” he says, adding that he had previously driven a beer truck during summers in New London.

But he wasn’t content to remain an errand boy for the people doing the work he went to school to do. To change his career path, he took matters into his own hands.

“I began writing commercials at night for our clients and dropping them on the creative director’s desk. And he was intrigued by what he read and promoted me to be his assistant.”

Filardi kept that job for a year or so and spent time working toward a new goal: Hollywood. At night, he would write spec scripts – finished scripts written without promise of pay as proof of your skill – for Miami Vice. The hope was that these scripts would prove he was hirable as a writer and get him a job in California.

With some good feedback on his work, he finally decided to take the plunge.

“I jumped in my grandmother’s old ‘78 Buick and drove to California with two other guys,” he says. “We had a tent and we camped out most of the way to save money.”

Once they arrived, Filardi says they couch-surfed and joined a huge pool of people hoping to make it big as actors, writers, directors, or producers. Then he started selling scripts.

“I thought I was going for three months but stayed for 30 years.”

Along the way in his Hollywood career, he met another writer named Claudia Grazioso, whom he later married. Out of sheer coincidence, his new wife was also a Connecticut native, having grown up in New Haven, and the two knew that someday they would want to return home to raise their family.

“We decided it would be nice at a certain stage, as they neared high school, to move back to Connecticut and sort of give them more of the upbringing and freedoms that we enjoyed growing up in Connecticut,” Filardi explains. “Free to run around your neighborhood, free to run around your yard without worrying about coyotes or ride a bicycle up and down the street without your parents watching you. Those types of freedoms. And so we moved back.”

Filardi did not move back to Connecticut with the intention of making short films on the side. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, he met a guy at a dog park.

“I met an actor in the local dog park who just had this great look,” he says. “This long hair, big beard, burly guy with a great Irish accent, and everything.”

That actor turned out to be Roger Clark, who is most well-known to fans as the voice and motion capture actor for Arthur Morgan, the lead in the video Red Dead Redemption 2.

“He’s wildly popular with gamers, goes around to conventions and signs autographs, gets a bunch of fan art and many, many followers,” he says of his new friend. “And we just started talking, and our dogs got along really well, and we would see each other regularly, and we said, maybe we should start making some short films together. And so we did.”

They got started on their first film together called Hazardous. Filardi wrote it, Clark starred, and both men took on producer roles. 

When it came time to fill out the rest of the crew, Filardi and Clark turned to others like themselves, professional filmmakers who had relocated to Connecticut for the lifestyle.

They found that initially in the crew at Fireside Films – including Alec Astin (a director and producer) and Doug Lively (a director and cinematographer).

Filardi says, ultimately, he was able to put together a group of people with tons of experience working in New York and Los Angeles. He refers to them as “wildly overqualified.”

“it was really surprising, honestly, the caliber of talent that was really all around me,” he says. “I just started looking and asking.”

Hazardous debuted in 2022 and Filardi decided to submit it to a few film festivals where it did well, winning some awards.

“It’s just the type of projects where everybody works for free but treats it very professionally,” he says.

About a year and a half later, the group reconvened, excited to do a second film. So, Filardi wrote one up. This time they decided to expand their crew to include some of the young aspiring filmmakers in their community.

Filardi has always been a horror guy. Not only did he make his name in the industry writing horror films, he has been a fan of the genre since he was a kid. 

When he was the ripe old age of 12, his grandmother, who was in a book club at the time, “slipped” him a hardcover copy of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. The book was just King’s second novel – published after his debut, Carrie – and followed a writer who returns to his hometown to discover the townspeople are turning into vampires.

Filardi says that reading a book like that in the sixth grade “blew his mind.”

“It was vampires, it was horror. But it was also set in a town so very much like Mystic, with characters very much like the people who lived all around me,” he recalls of his early entry into the genre. “He took horror out of the gothic castles and you know, and haunted houses and dropped it right into your neighborhood and it was like thrilling.”

For Filardi, horror gets under the surface of reality, adding a little something extra to the world we live in.

“There’s the world around us which, you know, is great and is rich,” he explains. “But horror just adds an extra little wrinkle or shimmer to the world around us. A little bit of magic, whether it’s dark or light. And I like that.”

Connecticut is a frequent location for low-budget horror films. Filardi says he likes shooting films in his home state because it has a different look and feel on film than California, New York, or Canada.

“The architecture is different, the fauna, just the colors around us are different,” he says. “I think the history of Connecticut has always been great and rich and something to sort of draw on or add another layer to a story”

Despite its appeal and ambiance, Connecticut can be a hard sell for big-budget studios. Much of that, argues Filardi, is because Connecticut cannot compete on tax credits.

“It’s very hard to compete with a place like Canada where your dollar is worth 30% more,” Filardi explains. “And you also have a government that’s very aggressive up there giving rebates and incentives, and in some cases, the government will pay as much as 40% of a Canadian crew member’s wage.”

Connecticut’s film tax credits have been the source of much debate. Critics have pointed to the state’s own reports that say Connecticut makes only pennies on the dollar for productions in the state, while giant insurance companies reap the greatest rewards. But supporters in the industry say that the subsidies are what keep the state’s filmmaking community going, pointing to research that shows big projects won’t come to a place with no tax incentives.

“We’re always going to be sort of on the fringe, I think, of major film production, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do great stuff on a lower budget or great stuff with the resources that we have,” says Filardi.

Recently, Filardi and his crew have wrapped up the work on their second short horror film, this time pulling in even more of the local Connecticut talent than before. Many of those talented volunteers came from an unexpected place.

“This time it was fun because we enlisted a lot of basically high school age, high school seniors to be department keys on the film,” says Filardi

By “department keys,” Filardi means that those teenagers didn’t fill the usual grunt role of Production Assistant, running coffee or schlepping gear. They had real, major responsibilities on set.

“One was the costume designer, one was the composer, one is the special effects makeup artist,” Filardi explains.

That makeup artist was actually a classmate of his daughters. She posted special effects make-up videos online and when Filardi saw the videos, he knew he needed to get her on board.

“They were so incredibly impressive,” he gushes. “I thought, man, I have to work with this kid. And so she came on board and did our monster makeup, and we had another girl who’s very handy on as prop master.”

A teen who Filardi says was a standout in the high school play was cast as the monster. 

“I was able to sort of cobble together this really fun mix of working professionals and enthusiastic young people and sort of introduce them to filmmaking on kind of a semi-professional, as close to professional Hollywood level as I could bring,” he says.

Filardi says the most pleasantly surprising thing about the whole experience was how well the teen participants rose to the occasion amidst their more experienced peers. The group held production meetings to make sure everyone understood the expectations of their position and to share both what they needed and what was needed of them, but the responsibility of the jobs themselves fell onto each individual.

“It worked out great,” he says. “I mean, it was really fun. And it was really fun to sort of poison local youth with a love of independent horror.”

Teens aren’t the only local talent Filardi has recruited for these passion projects. He has also turned to members of his local community to fill important roles on set. He brought in a local hairstylist who had also moved to Connecticut from California to help with the actor’s look and says recruiting strangers into a new experience was his favorite part of making these small films.

“It’s really just fun to work with friends and neighbors in a group, in a creative group capacity,” says Filardi. “And it’s such a fun way to make friends.”

Filardi says these projects, though very much labors of love, are a good opportunity for young people who might be looking to get into the industry in one capacity or another. Actors have a tape to show casting directors. Sound designers, makeup artists, costumers, and other artists have a portfolio. And those working as other kinds of crew have productions on their resume they could use to get future work.

With the film now complete, Filardi has moved on to the next phase: entering it into film festivals. And it has been well received so far, winning an award at the Block Island Film Festival with a planned run at the Mystic Film Festival and at the Horror Hound Film Festival in Cincinnati, Ohio.

“I applied to a lot of regional festivals because I want as many or as many of the crew to be able to come and, and participate,” says Filardi, who adds that he has also entered into some festivals in New York and Rhode Island.

Exactly what’s next for Filardi and his local team, we will have to wait and see, but one thing is certain, he’s planning to continue making independent horror here in Connecticut.

“I think the hope for a lot of people, especially, particularly for a lot of people involved is that we can take the next step and either, you know, do a low-budget feature or maybe even if I could set up a series, shoot a series locally,” he says.

“For me, it’s been a great vocation, but it’s a great hobby, too. And it beats golf.”

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