Cullen McFater's feature film directorial debut.
Was shot in only ten days on a micro-budget.
The location of Peter's house was a chance discovery during the summer of 2020 (one year prior to the film's production), as McFater rented the home for a few days with friends for his birthday. Writing the script at the same time, he realized the house had great visual character and large windows allowing plenty of natural light, and began altering the screenplay to take place there.
The film is based on the 2019 short film "Hector" co-directed by Cullen McFater and Michael McCreary. The original drafts of the screenplay were much more similar to the plot of the short film, but significant changes were made as further drafts were written with the final film bearing only slight resemblance to the original short.
While the initial drafts of the script took inspiration from the comedy/adrenaline/horror work of Sam Raimi and Tobe Hooper (notably The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), featuring much more gore and action, and a wider variety of locations and characters, the lack of a budget forced McFater to significantly simplify both the plot and set pieces, ultimately becoming what he described as "Phantom Thread if it was done by Hitchcock". This materialized into McFater directly parodying Hitchcock's style of introducing his films during the launch video of the post-production crowdfunding campaign.