What I've Learned

When Emily Hagins was 10, she wrote a zombie movie. When she was 12, her parents helped her film it.

The movie, called Pathogen, is low budget – more like no budget – and took two years to complete. The actors were mostly kids from her elementary school. Fake blood was whipped up in the kitchen. Other props, such as a plaster head for a decapitation scene, were also homemade.

The result, though far below Hollywood or even independent film standards, was, nonetheless, watchable and debuted at a theater in Austin, Texas to a full house.

There is a documentary about the making of Pathogen. Available on Netflix, it's called Zombie Girl, the Movie.

Emily took what she learned from her first movie and applied it to her second, a ghost story/murder mystery called The Retelling.

By the time she was in high school, Emily had done what many college-level film school graduates had not: written and directed two feature-length movies and had them shown.

Her junior year of high school she began filming her third movie, My Sucky Teen Romance. A year later, Sucky debuted, not at a local theater, but at SXSW (South by South West), and not to an audience of family and friends, but to a real audience of adults.

Make no mistake, My Sucky Teen Romance has a lot of faults, as would any movie filmed on a slim budget with nonprofessional actors and a self-taught director. But audiences like that the teenage characters in the film are played by actual teenagers, not by 25-year-olds pretending to be teens. Audiences also like that Sucky is fun.

Here's the story line. Each year, four friends attend a local science fiction/fantasy convention called SpaceCON. Many attendees show up in costume, dressed as their favorite hero, villain, or monster. This year, because of blockbuster teen vampire movies (think Twilight), vampire costumes are popular.

It turns out that not only are many convention-goers dressed as vampires, but so are some actual vampires who are trolling for victims. One of the teens gets bitten, and her friends try to prevent her from turning into a full-fledged member of the blood-sucking undead, while working together to defeat the vampires.

My Sucky Teen Romance is light years beyond Pathogen in production quality. The acting is better. The directing is better. Everything about it is better. Still, it is amateurish in many ways. Sucky shows us, however, that a movie can survive most any fault, if we care about the characters – and we do.

Many budding film-makers put off attempting a feature-length film because they don't have resources. They don't have a good enough camera. They don't have proper lighting. They don't have experienced actors. They don't have good props or professional make up or decent sound equipment or a good-enough script or whatever, whatever, whatever.

Emily Hagins has shown that if you are willing to dive in and do the work, regardless of limitations, you can make a movie. And if you go on and make a second movie, it will be better than the first. And a third will be better than the second.

My Sucky Teen Romance is available on DVD at the Paris Public Library. The film, which is not rated, has the F word several times. There's no sex. There is blood, but, hey, it's a vampire movie.

It shouldn't surprise you that Emily, now 21, has made a fourth film. It's called Grow Up, Tony Phillips and has a tag line of "A coming of age story for people too old to come of age." It's in post production and is scheduled for release this year.