BROOKVILLE, Pa. (EYT) — By day, Presley St. James is a laborer at Eden Incorporated in Knox. By night, he is an aspiring filmmaker and will see the premier of his first full-length horror movie, “Goatman,” on Saturday, October 22, at the Moonlite Drive-In in Brookville.

“Goatman” will premiere around 10:45 p.m.

‘It’s a movie that I and a bunch of my friends made over the summer,” said St. James. “It’s about three college students that travel to a forest in Ohio because there’s a legendary goat-man that haunts the forest, and nobody wants to even do anything, and they don’t go to the forest anymore.”

Echoing the “Blair Witch Project,” the students decide they want to make a documentary, and they go into the forest and get lost.

As with most horror movies, it doesn’t end well for them.

St. James said the movie was hand-held “found footage” shot on a Samsung Galaxy S10 similar to the jumpy camera work in Blair Witch.

The night he was preparing the trailer for his movie, his mother, Mandi Smith, contacted Moonlite and she said that her son put a movie together and asked if they would be interested in showing it as a locally made movie. (Mandi is also the movie’s narrator.)

Moonlight wanted to see the trailer and know more about it. After the drive-in agreed and Presley provided the movie on a flash drive. The triple feature this Saturday includes Halloween Ends, Smile, and Goatman. It may be the first locally-made movie shown at Moonlight, according to St. James.

Goatman is his first movie and he hopes it isn’t his last.

“I’m very pleased with the way it came out, and I hope everyone else is, too,” St. James noted.

Asked what made him want to do a movie, he said it was his perception that nobody around here was making any movies here.

“No locals ever make movies around this area, so I figured, well, if no one’s going to do it, it might as well be me.

“I did go to Clarion University, and I have a bachelor’s degree in theater acting with a minor in business. I just figured I might as well do something theatrical.”

The majority of the movie was shot at the Clarion Loop area near the Clarion River and behind a Clarion University residence hall.

St. James will promote the movie after the moonlight screening.

“I am planning on trying to spread the word through various radio stations and just trying to raise awareness for it. Maybe I can get it premiered on Amazon Prime Video. I’m definitely going to be selling DVDs of it, whether it be through sites like eBay or Etsy. I am going to broadcast the thing pretty much any way that I can.”

As he contemplates his next movie, St. James said one thing he learned was the importance of staying with the script.

“I wrote an entire screenplay like Act One, Scene Five. Some of this first movie went off and some of it was off the cuff.”

Looking at the finished project, St. James likes the organic feel of the movie.

“We’re talking to each other; we’re screaming at each other. There’s one scene where we figure out that one of us isn’t exactly who we say we are. It’s just amazing. There’s a lot of screaming scenes.”

The future holds many opportunities for St. James, his stage name. Maybe Goatman II?