MRH: Was it hard to track down so many people, or did you find social and community ties helped you along the way?

Jeff Carney: All these people kind of spread out, and most of them really hadn’t kept in contact with each other, so it was very much a detective hunt on trying to find everyone. A lot of them were still in the eastern area, and we really had to hunt for them to find them. Some of them didn’t have listed numbers, and it took quite a while to track everyone down, but we did it.

Jim Cirronella: Because of the budget we had to limit what we could do in the Pittsburg and western Pennsylvania area. We were aware of a few other people that either live on the west coast or were several hundred miles away and we couldn’t include them in this one, but I’d say about 85% of everybody that we looked for, we found.

MRH: Were many of them open to talking about the film?

Jeff Carney: Most of them were really surprised that they were being contacted forty-some years after filming. We did 21 interviews, and the majority of those had never really talked about the film before, so they were astounded that anyone was even contacting them or would even interview them.

When we sat down with them, their initial response was ‘Well, we really don’t have much to say,’ but when you start talking to them, you start getting all these wonderful stories and memories coming out, and that’s what we really enjoyed doing. It was a lot of fun.

MRH: You visited a number of the locations. Was there enough information to track down whereabouts of the farmhouse, the roads, etc.?

Jim Cirronella:  We kind of already knew that. At least I did. Maybe a couple of years before my interest in NOTLD came back, I was travelling through the western Pennsylvania way a lot on my way to Ohio, and I was doing that trip maybe once a month or so, and I just started thinking, ‘Hey, I should visit those areas where NOTLD was filmed… I’m over here… Let me see if I could find where everything is.’

The cemetery is public property and is open to the public, but the other areas are private properties, so I didn’t want to disturb anybody… I started contacting people from the area and asked them ‘Hey, is it okay if I take some photos?’ and that’s how I found some of the people who were in the film.

Without a question, everybody involved with this film was friendly, and they liked talking about it and appreciated the enthusiasm… I don’t think they fully understand that this movie changed a lot of lives… Whenever this documentary is shown somewhere and we have discussions, I would ask ‘Out of everybody here, how many people did NOTLD change your life?’ and almost everybody raises their hand.

MRH: One aspect one gleans from the interviews is how the film affected the local talent pool and community citizens. I wonder if you have any comments on how the film influenced future filmmakers within Pittsburg and the state, and why seemingly everyone associated with the production remains staunchly proud of the film.

Jeff Carney: I think they were proud of the film for the simple reason it was a low budget independent film made out of Pittsburg area. At the time, a lot people in the area probably said ‘Yeah, sure. You’re going off to make a movie.’

I think [it’s] like Gary Streiner says in one of the interviews, ‘Sure, you’re going to go off and make a movie… Good luck!’ And then they went off and they actually did it, and they did it better than anyone had done up to that point, making a horror movie. It’s an extraordinary piece of work, and it inspired generations of people to go into the film business.

I know when I first saw it, I think I was 7 or 8. Bill Cardille had his show Chiller Theater in Pittsburg, showing horror films, and I was from Illinois, so we had Chuck Acri and the Creature Features that showed horror movies, and that’s where I saw NOTLD for the first time.

It scared me to death when I saw it because it convinced me Bill Hinzman was in my local cemetery, waiting for me, so whenever I went there with my parents to visit relatives’ graves, I was always on the lookout for Bill Hinzman.

But it was around the time I was 10 or 11 and started to get into filmmaking, and really was into John Carpenter at the time that I went back and saw NOTLD and realized what an extraordinary thing they did on such a limited budget in Pennsylvania, and how amazing of a film they turned out.