The film, written, produced and directed by Cholfin, tells the story of eight road-tripping friends who get stranded in the ghost town of Garlock, CA. As darkness falls, each member of the group realizes they are not cut out to survive in such a foreboding and dangerous place, and the innate fear that someone, or something, is watching them, breeds paranoia, driving them to the darkest place in their minds.
“We constructed a series of events that could have actually occurred,” says Cholfin. “You watch in real time as the terror plays out, a piece of these people’s lives that we intend to seem so real it is hard to distinguish from reality.”
Cholfin and his producing partner, Ariana Farina, built the movie to avoid the usual clichés, and the contrasting wide-open spaces and too-close-for-comfort settings in The Garlock Incident keep viewers edgy throughout.
“We want to bring audiences something new to the genre,” says Cholfin. “The experience is unique in that nothing happens as you think it would, or should. We want to explore the darkest in human nature, in ourselves, by asking the question, ‘What would you really do to survive?’”