An aspiring novelist purchases the “muse” of a famous dead author at a garage sale. But what does the muse want in return?

Any writer knows the pains of writer’s block, and the lengths they will go to find inspiration. ‘Feed Your Muse’ jumps on that desperation to deliver a nail biting and squirming story. Written by Matthew Sweeney and directed by Brendan Beachman, the film holds some of the masterful moments we find in screamish micro-horror shorts, but with a gripping and well developed story.

Matthew Sweeney, the writer and producer on this film approached me over a year ago to direct a short script that he wrote. The concept involved creepy statues, sleep paralysis, and a Faustian bargain…I really dug it. The only hold up for me was that in the climax, there’s a gruesome shot that I felt HAD to be achieved in-camera, and we just didn’t have the skillset or budget to do it ourselves. After racking my brain for solutions, I sent a hail Mary email to my insanely talented makeup fx artist friend Koji Ohmura for suggestions. By some miraculous stroke of luck, he just so happened to be available and interested in helping create a monster costume from scratch for basically nothing. We cobbled together a skeleton crew and I cast my friend Zachary Ray Sherman to be the lead, and we shot this in two marathon days.

Production happened a mere week before Covid19 forced LA into lockdown. Since then, my wife gave birth to our first child during the absolute peak of the 2nd wave. He sits in my lap as I write this through bleary, sleep-deprived eyes. That’s life I s’pose, and whether you like it or not, she trudges on.