Todd Moore
If you had told 11-year-old me back in 1982 that one day I would be making a micro-budget 3-D psychological horror movie called Scream a Little Dream and that it would be my first ever full-length feature film, I probably would have looked at you like you had six heads. The idea of me ever making any movie back when I was 11 and living in the small town of Bridgeton, NJ was just crazy talk, let alone a horror movie let alone a 3-D horror movie. But here I am, 55 years old and with just such a film done and out. And getting there has been quite the journey.
An Early Obsession
Like most filmmakers, I was a film buff first. Growing up, I loved movies, especially old ones. I saw my first 3-D movie in 1982 when a local station aired Revenge of the Creature , then a couple of months later another station showed Gorilla at Large. Neither one really worked, but when you’re 11, they look pretty cool and the crazy glasses were fun to wear. It was when I saw Jaws 3-D the following year that I became obsessed. By the time the 1980s were over, I was a full fledged 3-D nut, wanting to watch everything ever made in 3-D and dreaming of one day making my own 3-D movies.
I developed other interests in movies back then, too. Because of Indiana Jones, I got into cliffhanger serials. I grew to love Film Noir, too. And by the time I started to make movies in 1997, I wanted to do it all: serials, 3-D movies, 3-D serials (!), film noir, etc. I decided to start out by making crappy horror movies that would make money so I could make the type of stuff I really wanted to make. It was that or porn and having seen a 3-D porn back in 1991, I decided that wasn’t where I wanted to go. By the way, that 3-D porn convinced me that I didn’t need to see Everything that was made in 3-D.
The Humble Beginnings of The Burglar
The idea of doing these films was a result of stumbling upon a company called W.A.V.E. Productions at a film convention. Their films were terrible but successful so I figured if they could do it, so could I. I got in touch with one of their actresses, Laura Giglio, and gave it a whack. We did a fairly lousy short called The Burglar in 1998 and a fairly decent crime film called The Perfect Accident. I shot The Burglar like it was a 3-D movie, even though it I didn’t have the equipment. Laura and Zaughn are both hilariously over the top in it. The problem was, the two films are only about 8 minutes each. You couldn’t sell a VHS in those days if it was anything under 30 minutes.
Then I tried a feature with the wild title of I Was a Teenage Dormitory Psycho or TDP as I called it for short.
TDP was written in the wake of Scream. As such, it had a lot of nods to Scream, as well as a 1984 3-D slasher called Silent Madness. It also had a lot of O.J. Simpson jokes in it. It was silly, goofy, derivative, and actually fairly bad. I had no idea what I was doing as a director and the cast didn’t think too much of the film. It imploded in the most ugly way possible for a number of reasons. At that point, I took a step back and asked myself what the heck I was doing. I didn’t even like the type of films I was trying to make.
Pulling off the Impossible
I regrouped and tried a serial next. It was an ugly shoot in it’s own way but the resulting film, King of the Park Rangers, was far better than it had any right being. It was also one hell of an accomplishment: the first full 12 chapter sound serial since 1956. Yes, it was micro-budget. Okay, the acting is uneven. Sure, I couldn’t pull off the things I would have liked to with it. But it’s not a bad little picture. Well, not so little. Those 12 chapters run a total of over 2 ½ hours. It may not have been as great as Flash Gordon, but it wasn’t as lousy a serial as Young Eagles, either!
Park Rangers told the story of Patricia King, a New Jersey Park Ranger in the Pine Barrens. The villains of the piece are looking for the Buried Treasure of Captain Kidd and using the legend of the Jersey Devil to keep people away. When a State Trooper is murdered, an FBI agent enlists King’s help in tracking the villains down. All very Scooby Doo sounding, true, except for the fact that the Jersey Devil was, in fact, running around.
The First Full Sound Serial Since 1956
The serial was a play on old Republic serials like King of the Royal Mounted and King of the Rocket Men, where the lead male character was named King. Flipping it to the heroine was my cheeky joke. As I say, it was a bit of an ugly shoot and the making of it could likely fill a book. Indeed, if I ever actually told the story of the making of it, most people would assume that about 95% of the story was a lie. It wasn’t.
Finishing King of the Park Rangers was a huge step. Others, upon seeing it, claimed they could pull off the feat, too, and do it even better. To this day, however, I remain the only person to truly repeat what I did with Park Rangers.
3-D, Another Failed Feature, Another Successful Serial
A few years later I learned how to make movies in 3-D thanks to the internet. I whipped up a rig using two Sony D-8 camcorders and made a pair of shorts in what was supposed to be a series called Tales of the Dark Avenger. There were technical challenges for both and the editing was mind-numbingly tedious, but hey, I finally did a couple of 3-D films! I tried a third Dark Avenger film, this time trying a feature in 3-D. An unenthusiastic cast and some generally poor footage convinced me to abandon it. I was wondering if I would ever actually do a feature after this.
Some more 2-D stuff followed, including a second serial called The Dangers of Deborah. On a technical level, Deborah is a better serial than KOTPR, though I still have a soft spot for my scrappy little first serial. Deborah was a mystery villain serial, with a group of suspects all seemingly opposed to the villainy but secretly one of them is the madman causing all the mayhem. Some people compared it to a similar spoof from the 1960s called Captain Celluloid vs. The Film Pirates, but that serial is only 4 chapters and silent. Mine was 10 and sound, and frankly, a better story than Captain Celluloid’s! I was finally settling in making serials.
But then tragedy struck.
The Lean Years
While making a third serial, my brother was diagnosed with cancer and eventually died. The depression that followed meant that I never edited that serial. Just when I considered editing it, one of my regular actors, Marcus Danforth, got cancer. He died in September 2011. Marc had been a big part of my films, being in pretty much everything I did from 1997 on. To this day, that third serial, The Adventures of Nick Rockwell, has not been edited or released.
I considered giving up filmmaking after Marc died. It wasn’t fun without my partner in crime. But fate and filmmaking wasn’t done with me yet.
The Burglar Lives Again
In 2013, I was in Hollywood for the third (and final) World 3-D Film Expo. One of the attendees showed me a 3-D camcorder he had, a knock off of the Sony camera. I was intrigued and upon returning to Philadelphia, I got one off eBay. But then I had no idea what to try to make. So, I got in touch with Laura Giglio and remade The Burglar.
This was my third crack at the short, actually. Laura and I redid it in 2000 with Tracey Bates, who went on to do KOTPR for me. This time, I got Laura and two more actresses who had done work for W.A.V.E.: Debbie D and Natalia Jablokov. I rewrote the script, making it more snarky and shot it. It’s still a lousy short but watching it in 3-D is fun, especially for the shot where Natalia gives the camera the bird!
The 3-D Time’s The Charm
The premise is that Natalia is a burglar hired by Debbie to break into her friend Laura’s house and steal something only ever called a dingus. Debbie’s one job was to keep Laura out of the house, which she fails to do. So Natalia knocks out Laura and ties her up. When Laura breaks free, she proves to be more than slightly psychotic.
There’s a back and forth for a bit of Laura being bound, escaping and trying to kill Natalia until Laura gets the upper hand and ties Natalia up. Debbie shows up finally and gets captured, too, The finale of Laura killing her too captives (after taking a break to watch The Bachelor!) is a total send-up of the WAVE strangulation scenes, with Laura strangling Debbie until she seems to die, then Debbie coughing to life, leading to an ever exasperated Laura having to strangle her again. This goes on for three or four times.
The 3-D was fun in this one as it was the first time I got to try the sort of out of screen effects I planned when I first shot the film. Natalia whacks the audience with a flashlight, tapes the audience’s mouth, holds a doll Laura swears is his baby out of the screen, and gives Laura (and the audience) the bird! Yeah, it’s not a high class 3-D film like House of Wax, but it’s a goofy way to spend 30 minutes.
Have I Lost My Touch?
I remade another of the Laura/Tracey shorts with Tina Krause and Debbie D, also in 3-D. Originally called The Abduction, this version was titled Bound for Revenge. Tina and Debbie are old classmates who get together. Debbie roofies Tina and holds her captive for revenge on stealing her prom date 25 years ago! It’s snarky, goofy, and frankly more absurdly funny than the original, though I didn’t do as much with the 3-D as I did with The Burglar remake.
Then I decided to go ahead and remake the first short I did, a 4 minute thing called The Stalker. At first, I was going to just do a straight up remake. But then I added a character, a psychiatrist, and expanded the script, re-titling it Scream a Little Dream. The first jab at this was in 2017. That attempt failed for a few different reasons. I tried it again in 2018 and again it failed. I had been kicking around doing a feature of it and even discussed it with a different cast as far back as 2018, but never finished the script. Part of this was how bad the first two attempts went. I was convinced I had lost my mojo, perhaps doomed to only do bad WAVE style films after all.
3-D in a Post-Pandemic World
In 2021, I tried another 3-D short, Murder Me Murder You. I used a couple of actresses I had used for some Zoom films I did in 2020. This one went better than Scream a Little Dream, though not without its issues. In 2023, I decided to give Scream a Little Dream one last try. I had also decided that if it failed, I was going to hang up my hat and move on with my life.
The Last Hurrah…Or Is It?
I reached out to the actress I had wanted in 2018, but she couldn’t do it. So I found two off Facebook, one of whom was Megan Magee. I also pulled in one of my Zoom actresses, Meaghan Bloom Fluitt, to play the psychiatrist. Magee was supposed to be the roommate. The actress who was supposed to play the film’s Dreamer had to bow out for medical reasons. So, I asked Magee to take over as the Dreamer and pulled in one of the Murder Me Murder You actresses, Julie McNamara, to play the roommate.
We shot the short in 3-D over the course of one weekend. 22 pages of script, 41 minutes of film, all in less than three days. It was one of the best filmmaking experiences of my life. I was over the moon. All three actresses were wonderful, both in terms of performance and just to work with. I had it edited in record time and was entering it into film festivals all over the place. It got a lot of rejections (as happens) but when it was picked up by Shock-A-Go-Go in New York, I was thrilled.
There was an issue with the short, however. The original ending, which you’ll see in the feature, had a shot right towards the end where the boom mic is visible in the center of the screen. I mean dead center. Don’t ask me how I didn’t see that when shooting but I didn’t. So I had to cut the original ten minute finale and end the film a different way (which still works). But that became my excuse to do the feature.
One More (Literal) Stab At a Feature
I finally got around to finishing the script. Two out of three cast members had been in a series of Zoom films I had done in 2020 called Happy Hour. So I yanked in three more members of the Happy Hour cast for the feature as well as bringing back the trio from the short. When Magee almost wasn’t able to do it due to scheduling conflicts, I considered dropping it and just quitting altogether again. Then the actress I wanted in 2018 said she might do it. Then Magee and I worked out a schedule she could do and the film was back on. I felt bad for the other actress, but she might do the sequel, so it all works out.
Two more full weekends of filming followed along with another day of re-shoots and pick ups. The result? An 81 minute 3-D feature that gloriously harkens back to the style of 3-D movies the 1970s and 80s produced. Lots of mayhem and lots of things flying out of the screen at you.
Scream a Little Dream 3-D Comes to Life
It’s first showing was a Shock-A-GoGo showing in Hollywood back in June where it won for Best Actress for Megan Magee’s performance as Jessica. There have been other showings since, including an especially memorable one at this year’s FilmScream 2025 at the ICFilmScene in Iowa City. It was a midnight showing in Active Shutter 3-D, with a fairly enthusiastic crowd of 100 people.
Yeah, it’s micro-budget. But hey, I can say without fear of contradiction that it’s better than some 3-D movies made over the years, including Francis Ford Coppola’s first, The Bellboy and the Playgirls. The story and acting have impressed most people who have seen it. The 3-D effects are fun, with coffee cups, baseball bats, knives, masks, and Magee reaching out of the screen into your lap. If you think that sort of thing is fun, then we think you’ll have a great time with it. Besides the 3-D, the cast is genuinely terrific, especially the three leads. I am proud of this little film and especially the cast. So, check it out if you get the chance.
Who knew a silly 8 minute WAVE knock-off like The Burglar would lead to an award-winning 3-D feature?
INTO THE 3-D FUTURE
It may come as no surprise that Scream a Little Dream 2 has already been written and is being planned as a 3-D feature shooting Spring, 2026. It’ll have a different cast and story but similar themes to the first one. I’m also kicking around doing a 3-D film noir next year. And I’m currently doing two flat noir films with a few of my regulars. Updates will be on my Instagram page (@cliffhanger_productions_3d) and you can check out (almost) all my work at https://www.thecliffhangerproductions.com.
