Co-writers and directors Jay Drakulic, Mallory Drumm and Alex Lee Williams of Toronto’s Blind Luck Pictures are taking their self-financed micro-budget feature Dream Eater to the world stage after an acquisition from horror titan Eli Roth (Hostel).

Dream Eater represents Williams and Drakulic’s sophomore feature, and Drumm’s first, as writers and directors. “We put it all on the line and we bet on a story that we really believed in. We bet on ourselves,” Drakulic tells Playback Daily.

Following its premiere at Costa Rica’s Corrosivo Film Fest in August 2024, the found footage horror snaked through U.S. festivals and social media, eventually making its way to Roth. It was acquired by his company The Horror Section in May, and will receive its second theatrical release under the banner.

“I was so blown away that I sent the film to everyone at The Horror Section, and we all agreed that this is ‘the one,'” said Roth in a release on the film’s acquisition. “I believe Dream Eater will be the scariest film of the year, and truly has the potential to break out to be the next Paranormal Activity or The Blair Witch Project.”

Dream Eater stars Drumm as a documentary filmmaker who travels to a remote cabin with her boyfriend, played by Williams, to document his violent case of parasomnia. It heads to theatres in the U.S. and Canada on Oct. 24.

Financing and development

Development on Dream Eater began in August 2022. After making the decision to self-finance a feature, the Blind Luck team started looking for a project that was suited to a self-funding model. To do that, the group dusted off around two dozen concept cards they previously created featuring a premise, logline and tagline. One of those projects, conceptualized under the title Asleep, was a single-location movie that Blind Luck believed could move forward as a found footage micro-budget horror. (Telefilm defines micro-budget as no more than $250,000.)

The decision to develop the concept as a found footage film was initially for budgetary concerns, but the group says that the project’s intimacy and claustrophobia were enhanced as a result.

“We’re really happy that it turned into found footage, because I think the narrative was completely informed by the format,” says Drakulic.

Blind Luck financed the film through the company’s branded commercial segment, dedicating money to the project while being cognizant of food and rent. The filmmakers say Dream Eater‘s budget, which was not disclosed, represents five years of savings.

After writing the script and starting pre-production on the film, Blind Luck went to partner Vortex Media that December with pitches for other projects, and mentioned the self-financed feature in the pipeline.

Vortex was interested in the idea for Dream Eater and came on board for a minimum guarantee, representing around 25% of the film’s budget. Vortex CEO Justin Rebelo says the whole company got behind the project, giving creative feedback and supporting it with behind-the-scenes aspects such as insurance and tax credits. Drumm says the film qualified for the federal tax credit, but was ineligible for Ontario’s tax credit because they planned to film in Quebec. It was also ineligible for Quebec’s tax credit, due to not having enough key Quebec creatives.

Blind Luck’s relationship with the Toronto-based distributor goes back a decade to the film accelerator CineCoup, where Williams and Drakulic’s first feature Hellmington was crowned as one of two selections in 2015.

“Vortex was the company that was financing all the CineCoup winners,” says Vortex Media executive chairman Bill Marks. “I met them at a pre-judging [event] and was just blown away by their passion.”

Part of the rationale behind developing Dream Eater as found footage also emerged from Hellmington. Williams says the Michael Ironside-starring film was pitched as a found footage mockumentary, but it went in a different direction and those elements were stripped away.

“We didn’t even get to scratch the itch, because we love found footage. We just love the format,” he says.

Production and post-production

Dream Eater went into production in Quebec’s Laurentian Mountains in March 2023 and shot for nine days, along with four days of reshoots throughout the rest of the year. Blind Luck says the 2023 reshoots focused on adding some additional scares to the film as well as redoing some of the Foley.

Another reshoot, financed by Blind Luck, happened in June 2025 after Roth boarded the film and agreed with a change suggested by the filmmakers. The original project was packaged and delivered by the end of 2023.

The film’s core crew consisted of eight people, and the cast, outside of Williams and Drumm, featured a handful of small parts played by Dainty Smith, Kelly Williams, David Richard, Brittany Hayward, Robin Akimbo, Sade Green and Drakulic.

Following the initial shoot, Williams (pictured left), Drakulic (pictured right) and Drumm (pictured centre) decided to deviate from an unspoken found footage rule that Williams says moves the film into, what he calls, the “available footage” genre. They added a score.

“Purists of found footage will always say ‘don’t have a score,'” says Drakulic. “But, when we watched back that first cut … [we said], something is missing from this.”

The team leaned on long-time collaborator Julian Stirpe to compose Dream Eater‘s score. Stirpe had already been working on the film to incorporate diegetic music into scenes, such as when the characters are playing music on a record player or listening to the radio on a drive.

The score, according to Williams, adds an extra narrative dimension, bringing in the question of who could have added it to the footage and why.

Between Stirpe’s work on the music and score, the sound design led by Brent Bodrug and the amount of scenes redone for Foley, the three estimate audio was the film’s most expensive and time-consuming line item.

“You can really evoke a lot of sinister, inhuman images in somebody’s mind just with a sound,” says Drakulic. “That was something we wanted to play with in this movie.”

Drumm also recalls how a tedious part of the post-production process was her sitting under a blanket making frightened gasps and yelps to be inserted into the film.

“She’s probably spent an accumulated nine and a half hours just sitting in a chair, breathing,” says Williams.

Sales and marketing

Dream Eater received its first big accolade when it won the Best Feature Film Award at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival last October, where it made its U.S. premiere.

Afterwards, the team received multiple requests to screen the film. That included March’s Unnamed Footage Festival (UFF), dedicated to showcasing projects in the found footage and faux-documentary genres.

As part of UFF, screeners were sent to horror influencers and creators across social media. Those screeners led to a positive review from Chuck Shaughnessy, better known as Chuck the Movie Guy. His initial review of the film, with more than 290,000 likes on Instagram and 1.5 million views on TikTok, raved about how scary the film was, and declared it one of the better found footage movies he’s seen in a long time.

“Until H.P. Lovecraft, until Unnamed, [Dream Eater] was in a place where we were not sure where it was going to go,” says Rebelo, noting that it could have released as a home movie experience. “I think what we learned about this movie is that it really demands to be seen in theatres with an audience.”

With buzz building for the film online, Rebelo says Vortex had begun taking requests to screen the film at private theatres, such as Toronto’s Revue Cinema. It was then that Roth reached out over Instagram on May 10 asking to see the film. Blind Luck was initially unsure that it was really Roth on the other end, but, with Vortex’s thumbs up, Dream Eater was sent over.

Williams says their initial hope with Roth seeing the film was that he would say something nice that they could include on the poster.

Instead, the horror filmmaker asked to meet the next morning over Zoom. The meeting included Roth, Blink Luck and Rebelo. In the call, Roth praised the film, saying it was the scariest movie he had seen in years and that he was very impressed with Blind Luck’s dedication.

Not long after, Roth’s independent production and distribution company acquired the film at the Cannes Film Festival, securing its global rights outside of Canada. Vortex put a halt on bookings at private theatres immediately following Cannes. Dream Eater is The Horror Section’s second release, following August’s Jimmy and Stiggs from director Joe Begos.

“It has been so long since I have been truly terrified by a film to such a degree that I had almost forgotten what it felt like,” said Roth. “What these three filmmakers have pulled is not just remarkable on a low-budget DIY filmmaking level; they achieve the holy grail of horror, which is to make a movie that absolutely terrifies you.”

Rebelo says that, with The Horror Section now on board, the marketing strategy begins with “Eli Roth Presents.” To create as wide an Oct. 24 theatrical release as possible, the filmmakers, and occasionally Roth, will be going on tour with the film, using events to create buzz and word of mouth. The tour’s locations are still to be determined. The Canadian side of the tour is financed by Vortex, while The Horror Section is behind the U.S. portion.

“I think Eli in particular is really bullish on the theatrical experience,” says Rebelo. “He wants us to play for as long as audiences will have it.”

Image courtesy of Blind Luck Pictures; photo by Steph Montani