A TikTok Script Expert Pitched Puppet Horror Movie ‘Play House’ at Fantastic Fest. One Year Later, The $100,000 Film Is Set to Debut After an ‘Intense’ Production — SkimNews
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- Nicolas Curcio won the inaugural Fantastic Fest Pitches competition, receiving $100,000 in production funding and a guaranteed Alamo Drafthouse theatrical run, with the film required to premiere at the following year's festival.
- Curcio and co-writer/wife Kirby Gladstein completed the microbudget film in under a year, then got married one week after wrapping production while keeping the wedding secret from Fantastic Fest.
- "Play House" stars Will Harrison as Elliot, who discovers unsettling kids show videocassettes in a fixer-upper house, alongside Jessica Sula, Jordan Gonzalez, and James Urbaniak as the sinister Mr. Morton.
- Curcio resisted test screening pressure to "cut to the horror," keeping the film relationship-focused after Gladstein insisted the script was "about a relationship" — a stance that eventually drew praise for "character-based horror."
- Divide/Conquer (Adam Hendricks and Greg Gilreath, the producing duo behind "M3GAN" and "The Black Phone 2") joined as executive producers after initially offering informal guidance on the project.
- Curcio is also scripting the "Magic School Bus" film adaptation and sold an erotic thriller co-written with Gladstein to Paramount Primal, while his animated basketball comedy "Goat" is set for an early 2026 DreamWorks theatrical release.
Why it matters: Curcio's success as the inaugural Fantastic Pitches winner — $100,000 funding plus guaranteed Alamo Drafthouse theatrical in under a year — gives the program a completed proof-of-concept film and puts him on the jury to select next year's recipient, validating a funding-plus-distribution model for microbudget genre filmmakers.
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