Austin native and Los Angeles actor Makenna Perkal has been cast in a new slasher thriller called "Spread: Pigs to Slaughter."
She will play the role of Mazzy in the film directed by Robert Christopher Smith. Perkal will also serve as the film's assistant director. Perkal was the first person cast for the film, and her connection to the material and to Smith's overall vision for the project led to her becoming the assistant director on the film, the Chicago News Journal reported.
"It is essentially the story of a group of young adults going into the woods to party together, some of whom never even make it there," Perkal told the Austin Journal. "And the rest are just kind of dealing with the repercussions of having two murderers in their midst. Something that I also really love about it is that there's not just one killer, there's two."
She said she's excited about the role.
"I'm just really excited about all the fun stuff that gets to come with the genre and the character, because she's really freaking cool," Perkal said.
The film pays homage to slasher films of the past like "Halloween,” "Friday the 13th” and even "Scream,” but "tries to bring something new to the game," the website IMDB said.
"Skeletons and bones, you know it's the same types of characters going into the woods, the same type of environment," Perkal said. "It's commenting on the world that we're existing in in a really raw and interesting way and it's utilizing different tools to do so."
One of the tools is an animated pig named Hanson.
"We'll be shooting for between two and two and a half weeks straight so that's in the indie style, when you kind of go basically straight through with maybe a day or two of stopping," Perkal said. "I like to think of it as a marathon."
Shooting was set to begin Monday.
"We want to remain 100% independent! No studios! No outside influence!" the film said in a May fundraising campaign.
After filming, the first step is to submit the work to film festivals, Perkal said.
"We hope to get some eyes on it and then after that get it into distribution," she said.