Things that go bump in the night don’t seem to faze Joey Blackburn.

So, it's not surprising that the first film festival to accept his capstone, “A Fly in the Room,” is Elvira’s Horror Hunt. The indie genre festival is named for Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, the Los Angeles TV horror hostess played by actress Cassandra Peterson.

Blackburn (’12, TAT) describes his black-and-white film this way: “A writer is driven mad when he can’t get the buzzing sound of a fly out of his mind.”

Elvira’s Horror Hunt selected 13 features and seven shorts – Blackburn’s film is in the shorts category – to be screened Sept.7-9 in Indianapolis.

Three of the features and one short will be chosen for red carpet treatment in L.A. at Stan Lee’s Comikaze expo. But he’s not stopping there. “I’m still waiting to hear from 14 film festivals,” he said. Blackburn, a resident of Paso Robles, won this year’s Monterey County Film Commission scholarship and used the $2,000 grant to help with expenses for the film. He shot it on 16mm film, a more expensive option than video. “I wanted to shoot on film for the aesthetic feel in my movie and for the experience of doing so, knowing that most work opportunities will be in video,” he told the film commission. It wasn’t the first award for Blackburn. In 2011, his short film, “Pieces of War,” won first place and $1,000 in a contest sponsored by the George Eastman House Film Festival. Eastman contest judges described it as “a game of chess like you’ve never see it before.” Blackburn liked that description.

“I wanted to show how dignified the knight was in sacrificing himself,” he said. “. . . I have friends who are serving in the Army and when I was making the film, I felt as though I was making it for them.”

Learn more about the Teledramatic Arts and Technology Department.