In the summer of 1990, teenage filmmaker Rolfe Kanefsky raises $100,000 to shoot a pioneering horror film named There’s Nothing Out There. 25 years later, he tells the story of a cult classic that never was—and reveals his theories on how it inspired a certain 90s horror box office hit.

After rapturous test screenings, a new kind of horror flick for the postmodern 1990s fell victim to fumbled distribution and a blizzard of bad luck. Channeling a quest for truth into a nine-minute video, Charlie Shackleton lends a microphone to the ill-fated filmmaker of an eclipsed cult classic.