Cemetery Hill Begins: Why this story, why now, and what is coming

Some stories arrive as ideas. This one arrived as a feeling.

The feeling of watching someone you love disappear slowly. The feeling of knowing that what is taking them does not care how strong you are, how angry you are, or how much you are willing to sacrifice. The feeling of a family pulling apart not because they stopped loving each other, but because they each decided to carry the weight differently, and the weight does not negotiate.

Cemetery Hill started there.

The Film

Cemetery Hill is a 15-minute period folk-horror short set in 1897 Pacific Northwest. It follows the Grady family on an isolated homestead where something called Cutter has settled in and will not leave.

Cutter does not arrive all at once. It moves slowly. It marks the body first. Then it spreads into the house, into the family, into the space between people who used to know how to talk to each other. Henry Grady is weakening. The wounds do not close. His children watch him fade and split over what to do about it.

Naomi carries a rifle and her dead mother's conviction that you fight what is killing you, no matter the cost. Samuel carries a wooden cross and the belief that force will only make it worse. Their father, who has lived with Cutter longer than either of them, knows something they are not ready to hear: "He takes what's given in rage. Anything else starves him."

The film is not about whether the family survives. It is about what surviving costs when the thing destroying you cannot be killed with anger. Only outlasted. Only starved of what it needs.

Why This Story

I have watched what happens when something enters a family and begins taking someone away. Not all at once. Slowly. In stages that feel both endless and impossibly fast. You watch the person change. You watch the people around them change. Someone wants to fight. Someone wants to pray. Someone wants to burn the whole thing down because the helplessness is unbearable.

And the worst part is not the thing itself. The worst part is what it does to the people left standing around it. How it turns love into strategy. How it turns grief into blame. How it makes rage feel like the only response that means anything, even when the rage is feeding exactly what you are trying to stop.

That is the engine of Cemetery Hill. The horror is real. The threat is real. But the thing that will destroy this family is not the creature in the ground. It is how they choose to respond to it.

Redemption Horror

Most horror films end in destruction. The monster wins, or the survivor escapes broken, or the victory costs so much that it feels like losing. Those films have their place. But I have been more interested in a harder question.

What happens when the horror has a way out, and the way out requires the characters to do the one thing that feels impossible?

Cemetery Hill introduces what I am calling redemption horror. Not softer horror. Not horror with a lesson stitched onto the ending. Horror where the moral stakes are as high as the physical ones, and where survival depends on something more difficult than fighting back.

Cutter is not a metaphor for evil. Cutter is a presence that feeds on a specific response. The Grady family does not need a weapon. They need the one thing that grief makes almost impossible to hold onto: the willingness to stop letting the worst thing in their lives dictate who they become.

That is harder than any monster.

Why 1897 Pacific Northwest

The setting strips everything to bone.

No outside help. No modern distance. A family on a hillside with the dead buried in the yard and a wheat field that hides what moves through it. Candlelight, lanterns, storm skies, and the kind of silence that makes every sound mean something.

Folk horror works here because the threat is not separate from the land. It lives in the ground. It has been there longer than the family has. And the isolation means there is no escaping it. Only facing it or being consumed by it.

The period also gives the film its visual identity without needing a period budget. Natural light. Wood and iron. Dirt under the nails. The world builds itself when you commit to the setting honestly.

What Is Coming

Cemetery Hill is the second professional short from Ragged Films, following Beneath the Same Sky. It is fiscally sponsored by Northwest Film Forum with a target budget of $12,000. The Ragged Method, the same production system that delivered Beneath the Same Sky from funding to festival submission in 17 days and $3,000 under budget, is being applied to every phase of this project.

This post begins a production diary that will run through December 2026. It will follow Cemetery Hill from pre-production through festival submission, documenting each phase in real time: casting, production design, the shoot, post-production, and delivery.

If you want to follow the project, this is where it starts.

If you want to support it, Cemetery Hill is accepting tax-deductible contributions through Northwest Film Forum. Details are at raggedfilms.com/cemetery-hill.

Something has come to Cemetery Hill. It is patient. It has done this before. And it knows exactly what this family is carrying.

Written by Thomas Scott Adams for Gray Matter Featuring Ragged Films