By Kim Hilsenbeck
Artist, author and filmmaker Christopher Moonlight, aka Christopher Cooksey, sees Hays County and the greater Austin area becoming the new place for making movies. As the producer, writer and director of a new indie film, Quantum Terror, which will be filmed in Kyle, Moonlight has every reason to want that to happen.
Born in England, Moonlight — complete with his English accent — and his family moved to Los Angeles when he was six.
“I lost it just in time to figure out that women loved it,” he said.
He wrote comic books for a while and had the fortune to know several screenwriters who mentored him in filmmaking. Moonlight also spent two years as a catalog Photoshop artist.
He even worked on a documentary about the life of Ray Bradbury, who wrote “Fahrenheit 451” and “The Martian Chronicles”.
“He’s a hero of mine,” Moonlight said.
He is also a fan of other supernatural horror genre authors including Stephen King, Clive Barker and Anne Rice.
“They have literature and meaning within their stories,” he said.
These days, Moonlight, along with his wife and two young daughters, live in Kyle.
Co-collaborators, Jenna Green and Lauren Morris, both of Buda, are committed to Quantum Terror. Green, who was on the reality show “Face Off”, will do the make-up. Morris of Scorpio Sound Design will score the film.
Moonlight thinks practical effects people — those who do make-up, create puppets and develop animatronics — got shunted aside in the Hollywood film industry with advent of CGI, or computer-generated images.
“Those special effects now dominate most Hollywood films,” he said.
That’s just one of the reasons Moonlight moved to Texas.
“I came out to the Austin area because Texas is so different than California,” he said. “The industry there priced itself right out of the business.”
“I didn’t want to be part of the big studio,” he continued. “I wanted to try movie making as a small business model. I couldn’t do that [there].”
The story line for Quantum Terror is something right out of a Bradbury or H.B. Lovecraft novel. The lead character, Samantha, goes in search of her missing twin sister, Silvia, a PhD student in quantum physics, who is in the tunnels under the streets.
Sam is joined by her ex-girlfriend and that woman’s new boyfriend, along with Silvia’s boyfriend, who is a suspect in the disappearance. The group encounters an alien being from another dimension.
Moonlight has several hand-made creatures for use in the film, many crafted from recycled and repurposed items. He will shot the film at his Kyle home.
“I’m taking Hollywood ideas and figuring how to make them from items around the house,” he said.
Moonlight believes there is a kind of a renaissance in the making when it comes to special effects.
“Practical effects are making a comeback,” he said, “because audiences are wise to CGI. It almost takes you out of the movie.”
He is confident his strong story and film techniques will offer audiences big budget film quality, despite a budget of less than $3,000.
“Movies used to never show the whole creature. Today we leave nothing to our imagination. We’re over-completing the thought for an audience,” he said.
He also has what he called “real” actors already committed to the film, including Paula Marcenaro Solinger, wife of rocker Johnny Solinger. The actress will be with Moonlight this Sunday at a fundraiser at Joe’s Crabshack in Austin to raise money for the film’s production. The film is also using crowdfunding through IndieGoGo to raise money for production.
Want to help?
Quantum Terror, an indie horror film by Kyle resident Christopher Moonlight, has a crowd funding campaign with IndiGoGo. Click here to donate and help the project reach its goals. The target end date is March 10. Moonlight calls Quantum Terror the next great indie horror movie.
