Horror starts from your gut and moves up. Your body often knows before you do, it clinches and your senses are heightened. You’re scared before you even realize it. AK Espada has an intimate understanding of when terror works and how to convey it.
She has received accolades including the Audience Award at Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, nominations for Best Director of a Short Film at SoHo International Film Festival and is an inaugural recipient of the Sundance Horror Fellowship. AK Espada is a writer, director, producer, and set designer with a passion for the stranger and darker side of storytelling. Originally she envisioned herself as a teller of tall fantasy tales but that soon changed when she encountered the dedicated fan base at the inaugural Brooklyn Horror Festival in 2016.
Espada’s journey started with a dream and sheer determination to make it some way somehow. Knowing nothing about the business she landed her first jobs in the corporate sphere and then onto a local television station in Brooklyn where she worked a politics beat. After several years of grinding away as a camera operator a fortuitous opportunity came along and led Espada into the world of set dec.
“My friend asked me to production design his web series because I production design on my shorts”, she recalled. This led to years working in the art department and set decoration on both commercials and feature films including ‘Creed III’, ‘No Man’s Land’ and ‘Lost in Russia’. While the projects paid the bills they didn’t scratch the itch for storytelling.
So far Espada has directed seven short films and written six of those. In 2022 she was accepted to the Sundance Institute Set Fellows Screenwriting Intensive course where she was able to expand her short film "This is Our Home" to a feature length script. The short deals with the dilemma of ethics and sanitation while living in a New York apartment with rats. The problem is exacerbated by an inattentive roommate and reaches fever pitch horror in an excruciating way. Spawned by a real life experience while living in New York it is indicative of much of Espada’s work thus far; lived experience expressed through the cinematic lens. Daily occurrences that can take on a form of existential horror. The real kicker is that they finished shooting ‘This is Our Home’ in March 2020.
New York lockdowns, job loss and family obligations drove Espada back to Georgia which became another unforeseen fork in the road.
“I just said I'm gonna put my stuff in storage and go stay with my family in Georgia for a couple of months and just ride this out. A couple of months turned into 4, 5 months, 6 months, and I finally said, I'm not going back. I don't think I want to go back.”
Estrada found a much different film landscape than the one she left behind after graduating Georgia State University. And she has leapt in with both feet. The Atlanta indie film scene has grown exponentially in recent years in both creators and audiences.
Espada took another leap when she decided to put together the Gothic South Film Night. After finishing "I Could Just Die, And that Would be Alright" she considered sending it off to the usual film festivals but that didn’t seem right.
“I didn't want my premiere to be something where I felt like it was just another film in a block”, she said. “I thought it was special. So I was like, I'm gonna curate my own block and it's gonna play at the end.”
And so on Wednesday, October 4th, 2023 at the historic Plaza Theatre that is exactly what she did. The block of short films consisted of filmmakers from the southeast which included ‘Brackish’ by Christa Boarini, Florida, ‘Violet Butterfield, Make Up Artists to the Dead by Brooke H. Cellars, Louisiana and ‘Eat Your Heart Out’ by Giovanni Tortorici, Georgia. The night was a success and while she doesn’t have a date for the next showcase it does seem imminent.
Until then AK Espada plans to keep on grinding whether it’s on her personal projects that keep getting bigger and bigger or as a hired hand on productions that make the dream possible.
