Intensely Independent: The Micro-Budget Films of Blake Eckard
Given the cinematic hegemony of LA and New York, casual moviegoers might find it surprising that Missouri is home to a lengthy roster of indie filmmakers with substantial narrative-feature credits. In St. Louis, for example, horror specialist Eric Stanze has directed ten (or so) full-length films, and his occasional collaborator Chris Grega —whose wide-ranging genre work includes crime thrillers, period war films, zombie actioners, and mockumentaries—recently premiered his sixth fiction feature (the Stanze-shot Red Night at Skye’s). A relatively recent transplant, Dan Steadman has one-upped even the prolific Stanze, helming an astonishing dozen films since moving to the St. Louis area a decade ago. Although that trio of filmmakers is especially fecund, others such as Jack Snyder, Wyatt Weed, Jay Kanzler, Doveed Linder, and Aaron Coffman have similarly directed multiple features since the mid-aughts. Current St. Louisan and Metro East native Brian Jun also merits a name-check: He has shot a quartet of films, including the Sundance-premiering Steel City, just across the river in Alton, Illinois. And down I-70, in mid-Missouri, Columbia’s Chip Gubera has released a string of quirky horror features, starting with 2005’s Song of the Dead (self-billed as “a zombie musical-comedy”).
As this selective list indicates, Missouri writer-director Blake Eckard is thus not entirely unique: There exists a bountiful crop of homegrown heartland auteurs. But Eckard’s background arguably qualifies him as sui generis. Working out of the isolated northwest Missouri burg of Stanberry—pop. 1,143—the filmmaker has conjured a half-dozen micro-budget features with an utterly distinctive sensibility and zero commercial compromises.
Growing up, Eckard saw relatively few films on the big screen: Given its tiny size, Stanberry lacked a theater, and during his formative years—he was born in 1980—the nearest movie house was in St. Joseph, an hour’s drive south. Home video had to sate the nascent cinephile’s increasingly ravenous appetite, and when Eckard exhausted the limited offerings at the local grocery and the Stop & Shop convenience store—which have made cameo appearances in his films—he turned to the Movies Unlimited mail-order catalog and began amassing his own VHS/DVD collection. Informed by Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide and Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook, both annual publications, Eckard ventured far beyond the standard-issue movie fare of the 1990s, sampling Hollywood classics, international films, and American indies. A subscription to the horror-film magazine Fangoria, first purchased in his eighth-grade year, helped round out the autodidact’s cinematic education, providing invaluable insight into movie production and identifying cult faves and provocative offerings outside the mainstream (such as the unsettling early films of Michael Haneke and the pre-Lord of the Rings work of Peter Jackson).
Working out of the isolated northwest Missouri burg of Stanberry—pop. 1,143—the filmmaker has conjured a half-dozen micro-budget features with an utterly distinctive sensibility and zero commercial compromises.
Then, in the spring of 1998, while still completing his senior year of high school, Eckard made a precocious jump from avidly consuming movies to actively creating them. (He had actually served a long apprenticeship, beginning at age seven or eight, by churning out more than 100 shorts using his family’s VHS camcorder.) Recruiting Stanberry friends as cast and crew, Eckard shot—on MiniDV—his first feature, A Simple Midwest Story, over three weekends. The story of a patricide and the spiraling chaos that results, the film is Eckard in pupal form—in future work, he considerably lowers the temperature of the overheated performances here—but many of the essential elements are already firmly in place: rural setting, working-class milieu, domestic strife, malevolent father figure, emotionally distant brothers, ratcheting tension, shocking paroxysms of violence, bleak worldview, unhappy ending. Most impressively, Eckard avoids the well-trod pathways of other teenage filmmakers—who generally produce cringey imitations of popular blockbusters—but blazes a rugged, brambly, forbiddingly shadow-enshrouded trail wholly his own.
Because of the daunting costs and rigors of moviemaking, most independent directors tend toward a one-and-done approach: The first film is akin to a trek up Mount Kilimanjaro—undeniably arduous but accomplished by thousands annually—whereas a second looms like Annapurna, a menacing summit too intimidatingly hard and high to contemplate climbing. Eckard, however, has displayed dogged tenacity and Job-like patience from the outset of his career, with A Simple Midwest Story’s brisk three-weekend shoot followed by an agonizingly protracted three-year post-production, delaying the film’s completion till 2001. While working full time at his family’s business—Eckard’s Home Improvement (whose backrooms often double as film locations)—Eckard has managed to write, direct, produce, edit, and sometimes shoot five subsequent features in Stanberry and nearby environs: Backroad Blues (2006), Sinner Come Home (2007), Bubba Moon Face (2011), Ghosts of Empire Prairie (2013), and Coyotes Kill for Fun (2017). For good measure, he has also co-written and deftly acted in the Stanberry-set They Had It Coming (2015), directed by American-indie legend Jon Jost, a similarly resolute iconoclast who has served as Eckard’s mentor, inspiration, and occasional collaborator.
Unfortunately, most of Eckard’s work has remained frustratingly inaccessible. The sad truth is that getting an independent film seen poses a far greater challenge than getting one made, and the lack of glossy production values, name actors, and sharp genre hooks in Eckard’s movies has only increased the degree of difficulty. Still, despite a vanishingly small number of festival and one-off screenings, Eckard has gathered a coterie of devoted fans, and that select group includes Jerry Chandler and Don May Jr., co-founders of Synapse Films, a DVD and blu-ray label that has recently issued a pair of his films on a disc. (Full disclosure: I am also a longtime Eckard acolyte. During my tenure as executive director of Cinema St. Louis, the St. Louis International Film Festival was one of Eckard’s most consistent supporters, playing all of his films except A Simple Midwest Story.)
Synapse originally hoped to issue a box set with all six of Eckard’s features, but commercial realities eventually downsized that ambitious plan to a single DVD, Intensely Independent: The Micro-Budget Films of Blake Eckard, comprising Bubba Moon Face and Coyotes Kill for Fun, the director’s films that most align with the company’s usual interests (horror, science fiction, and cult works). Although these movies qualify as horror-adjacent at best —most physical violence discreetly occurs offscreen—they both contain seriously disturbing content and induce a state of ever-mounting dread.
Eckard avoids the well-trod pathways of other teenage filmmakers—who generally produce cringey imitations of popular blockbusters—but blazes a rugged, brambly, forbiddingly shadow-enshrouded trail wholly his own.
Along with Sinner Come Home and Ghosts of Empire Prairie, Bubba Moon Face explores family dysfunction—in this case, of the most extreme and malignant variety. When his mother dies, Horton Bucks (Eckard regular Tyler Messner) returns to his rural Missouri home for her funeral, bunking with brother Stanton (Joe Hammerstone) in his ramshackle house, which is also populated by an array of taxidermied animals and a pack of baying hounds out back. A broken-down vehicle and a dearth of funds combine to trap Horton in town after the burial, and as he works to earn enough money to pay for the car repairs, he and Stanton while away the nights bickering, drinking copious amounts of beer—all Eckard films could effectively double as ads for Busch—and shooting pool at the shabby local bar.
Soon after Horton takes up temporary residence, Stanton’s home begins to fill like the stateroom in A Night at the Opera. Sabetha (Sylvia Geiger) is the first to arrive, a fierce, baleful storm blowing in with a baby girl (Blanche Eckard, the filmmaker’s own daughter), whom she claims is the product of a furtive coupling with Stanton. Although paternity is never firmly established, Sabetha and the child, alternately called Bubba and Moon Face, simply move in. They are then followed by Gus (Joe Hanrahan), the brothers’ long-absent, manipulative, meth-addicted father, and his casually promiscuous girlfriend, Tammy (Jennifer George). An exasperated Horton quickly grows weary of this madding crowd and flees to the home of Leslie (Misty Belew), with whom he had a long-ago (and highly age-inappropriate) sexual relationship. Now the waitress at the tavern where Horton and Stanton disconsolately hang, Leslie earns extra cash by turning tricks with the patrons and suffers physical abuse at the hands of her lover (Brent Jennings, another of Eckard’s ever-growing stock company).
A cross between the Southern-gothic grotesquerie of Cormac McCarthy’s early novels and the blue-collar ennui of Raymond Carver’s short stories, Bubba Moon Face sends its characters spiraling down into a Stygian abyss.
Shot over only five days, the film makes a virtue of necessity by employing frequent and effective long takes to avoid the delays of multiple setups, which has the benefit of allowing the actors to develop a naturalistic rapport, and the lo-res videography by St. Louisan Cody Stokes—yet another of Missouri’s feature directors (2019’s The Ghost Who Walks)—proves an appropriate match of smudgy form to scuzzy content.
A modestly redemptive ending saves Bubba Moon Face from plunging into total darkness, but Coyotes Kill for Fun refuses to allow even the thinnest sliver of light to pierce its endless night. Intertwining three related narrative threads, the film also toggles freely among different timelines, disorienting the viewer and creating a pervasive sense of unease.
Coyote’s primary plot riffs on James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. Unlike Postman’s Cora, whose motive for wanting her husband dead mixes grievance, avarice, and desire, Bev (Arianne Martin) wants only to escape the glowering, abusive Larry (Todd Morten) because she fears for her life and the safety of her two children (siblings Blanche Eckard, who was the baby of Bubba, and Harlan Eckard). With the aid of her middle-age babysitter, Sue Anne (Roxanne Rogers), Bev concocts a plan to dispatch Larry and secures the help of her horny, slightly dim truck-mechanic co-worker Cliff (Bubba’s Messner) by providing him with some desultory sex. As with all such schemes, however, vexing complications arise.
Chief among those obstacles is the sudden arrival of Larry’s brother, the terrifying Ed (Morten again), who is also Bev’s ex—she clearly has ghastly taste in men—and the father of her children (although he denies siring the boy). A looming closeup of Ed’s bloodied visage as he staggers from a car crash is among the film’s first images—both arresting and mysterious—and although he appears only in a few memorable sequences, his foreboding presence haunts Coyotes throughout. Recently sprung from prison—whether by escape or parole—Ed takes malicious delight in terrorizing all those he encounters: Whereas Larry appears a sullen and alcoholic bully, Ed is a full-out psychopath. Intent on recovering a never-specified item of value, he lurks in the shadows and then vampirically materializes to ask “Where is it?” to the cowed and baffled folks—first his former running buddy Freddie (Frank Mosley) and later Bev—whom he menacingly interrogates. Ed’s utter lack of conscience imperils everyone: Cliff, Sue Anne, Bev, and—most upsettingly—her kids.
Although these movies qualify as horror-adjacent at best —most physical violence discreetly occurs offscreen—they both contain seriously disturbing content and induce a state of ever-mounting dread.
Although the number of actual shooting days was not significantly greater than Bubba’s, Coyotes’ production stretched over three years, and a trio of cinematographers—Eckard, Stokes, and, very briefly, Jost—took turns behind the camera. Despite the hiccupping schedule, rotating shooters, and multiple locations—the film ventures beyond Stanberry to Butte, Mont., and Los Angeles for several scenes—Coyotes shows no unsightly seams and maintains a remarkably consistent vision because of Eckard’s sophisticated editing, which elides unnecessary exposition and requires heightened attention from viewers.
The film’s uniformly excellent ensemble further elevates Coyotes. Eckard prefers a subdued acting approach—he admires the spare work of Robert Bresson, who frequently used non-professionals to tamp down any exaggerated emotions—and Martin, Messner, Rogers, and Mosley deliver restrained, finely modulated performances.
Eckard’s films serve up an undiluted, deliriously potent drink, and not everyone will find it palatable. But if you are open to downing the cinematic equivalent of several shots of 190 proof Everclear, belly up to Intensely Independent’s bar and prepare for intoxication.
Intensely Independent: The Micro-Budget Films of Blake Eckard can be purchased directly from Synapse Films or through other sellers. In addition to Bubba Moon Face and Coyotes Kill for Fun, the DVD package includes several extras: a booklet written by St. Louis critic Andrew Wyatt, who offers an astute and thorough overview of the director’s entire filmography; Jon Jost’s disarmingly casual reminiscence of his relationship with Eckard; and a commentary track on Bubba that features a trio of St. Louisans—cinematographer Cody Stokes and co-stars Joe Hammerstone and Joe Hanrahan—discussing the film’s shoot and exploring several odd but amusing tangents.
A trailer for Intensely Independent can be found on YouTube.
