Logline

During an interview on a true crime podcast, the lone survivor of a terrifying hike tells the story of how she and her friends met a grizzly fate in the mysterious woods they first became friends in.

Synopsis

The Woods is the story of four best friends who first became friends when their middle school took them on a class hike together. Now, about to graduate college and go their separate ways, the friends want to recreate that original hike. However, things do not go as planned, and soon the mysterious nature of the woods themselves drives the friends apart, in grizzly ways. The events of this hike, and the unfortunate fate of the friends, is recounted years later on a true crime podcast by lone survivor, Kate Reed.

Director’s Statement

We can’t preserve the past by recreating it, and if we were to try, we might find that the past is different and more terrible than we remember.

I started writing the first draft of The Woods as an 8th grade English assignment, and returned to it again and again throughout the years, reworking the text and expanding on the original idea. During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and the upturning of life as we all knew it, I began seriously reflecting on mortality and regret. I found the one thing I would truly die regretful of never even attempting would be making a film. So, I dug out that old story, dusted it off, and spent the next few years drumming up a cast, crew, and budget for The Woods. I somehow always knew it would be the first story I would tell.

Film is the one art form that cannot be done alone. It is the most collective and collaborative form of expression we have come up with yet as a species. This little indie-film-that-could would not be possible without the hard work, sacrifice, creativity, and collaboration of the entire cast and crew behind it, and I am forever grateful to them for taking a chance on me and my dream.

The Woods is about a young woman who stands on the threshold of adulthood, naively believing she can preserve the past forever, and in doing so destroys both her past, present and, possibly, future. By choosing to ignore the warning signs of her friend’s rapidly deteriorating mental state, and focus instead on an imagined past, she chooses doom.

It can be so tempting to look back when the future seems dark. There is a presumed safety in our past that the future can never truly hold. We all find ourselves now in a very haunted landscape of possible futures that never were, amidst the deep, sickening knowledge that past was also monstrous. My hope is that The Woods serves as both a cautionary tale about the dangers of ignoring warnings from the past, and instead trying to recreate an idealized version of it. I also hope it provides something of a way forward. Kate Reed walks out of the studio and into new woods that are not dark and organic, but bright and made of steel. We may always be lost in the woods of some kind or another, but we can choose the ones we get lost in.