MONTREAL — Producer and media executive Kevin Healey (“Die Hart,” “Fameless”) and Viral Nation’s Head of Programming Paul Telner have boarded the feature adaptation of Spencer Zimmerman’s satirical body-horror thriller “Headcase” ahead of the short film’s world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival.
In “Headcase,” which screens July 26 before the world premiere of Kurtis David Harder’s “Influencers,” a desperate influencer (Siobhan Connors) hits a man (Pat Moonie) with her car while filming content and decides to make the most of the dead man to ensure her brand goes viral.
Zimmerman, whose previous films include the 2023 Leo Award-winning short “Darkside,” is currently a junior producer at busy Vancouver genre studio Oddfellows, where he is supervising production and running set. He recently worked on Osgood Perkins’ “Longlegs,” “The Monkey,” and the upcoming Perkins film “Keeper.”
Moonie presented Zimmerman with the idea for “Headcase” last fall and they co-wrote the script. A tight team of creatives, producers and execs kept the project on track to film this past spring.
“With the short film coming out well, and with the right partners on board, we were able to get onto the feature track immediately,” Zimmerman told Variety. “Grace Chin, one of executive producers, connected us with Paul Telner as mentor. As a talent agent for content creators and influencers, he was a champion for us during production.”
“I knew ‘Headcase’ was meant for greatness,” said Telner, an early YouTube comedy star, who joined the global influencer-marketing company Viral Nation in 2022. “I called Kevin Healey and said we need to back this project and take it to the next level. This is a mash-up of genres and pushes the boundaries of storytelling in a way I have not seen before.”
“It’s rare when a short film evokes such a visceral and powerful response,” Healey said. “The moment I finished watching ‘Headcase,’ I knew I wanted to help this immensely talented team take the next step into a feature length motion picture.”
“It’s early days, the ink is still wet on the deal, but we are heading into script stage,” Zimmerman said, “It’s still about a wanna-be influencer who commits manslaughter and goes down a dark path of dismemberment. It’s set up and we’re running as far as we possibly can with this.
“It’s our responsibility as storytellers to poke holes in the world around us.”
Currently in development, the feature version of “Headcase” will be directed by Spencer Zimmerman, written by Pat Moonie and Zimmerman, and produced by Siobhan Connors and Jessica To (“Final Destination: Bloodlines”) with Paul Telner and Kevin Healey as production executives and executive producers.
Frontières Fantasia 2025
Credit: Annick Mahnert
Frontières Market’s Shorts to Features Axis
Fantasia Film Festival programs and the in-tandem Frontières Market, which produces a day of curated project pitches and three days of one-on-one meetings and networking events, have proved a fertile spawning ground for shorts that grow into features. For example, Deanna Milligan and Ramsey Fendall’s trippy horror feature “Lucid,” which premiered July 21, participated in Frontières‘ 2022 Shorts to Features lab.
This year’s Frontières Short to Features cohort includes five projects grounded in strongly performing short films and with core teams and creative paths firmly in place.
Here are the five projects, which were presented at the July 23 pitch event:
Michael Gabriele’s “Get Away” (Canada) won the Gold Audience Award for Best International Short at the 2023 Fantasia Festival. Jason Levangie and Marc Tetrauelt (“The Queen of My Dreams”) are producing the feature, in which teen friends watch a disturbing VHS horror movie and realize the victims are their future selves in a repeating nightmare that is pulling them in.
Mai Nakanishi’s psychological thriller “Child, Uninvited” (Japan, South Korea, Singapore), in which a pregnant woman’s buried trauma surfaces after she opens her door to a neglected child, is being produced by Makoto Kakurai, Eun-Kyoung Lee and Tan Ai Leng.
Based on her cult-hit short, director-writer Talia Shea Levin’s satirical horror “Make Me a Pizza” (USA), about a woman whose compulsive desire to seduce pizza delivery men summons a pizza goddess, is produced by Kara Grace Miller, Jonathan Olson, and Talia Shea Levin.
Director-writer Koji Shiraishi’s “Red Spider Lilies” (Japan), about a trio of sister sorcerers seeking revenge on the scammer who ruined their family’s life, is being produced by Tomomi Furuyama.
Director-writer François Chang’s “The Sleepless Girl” (Taiwan), an alternate-reality thriller that unravels the mystery of a Japanese girl who never sleeps, is being produced by Patrick Mao Huang.