Actaeon

A contemporary retelling of the Roman Poet, Ovid's Third Book, Metamorphoses, The Transformation of Actaeon into a Stag, combined with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic 1850s novel, The Scarlet Letter. Taking place in the mid to late 2010s at the height of the “War on Terrorism”. Actaeon follows the story of the last days of our protagonist, Jackson “Jack” Clarke”, in the small town of Fargo, Georgia, the Okefenokee Swamp, and Southern Wilderness. Jack feels responsible for the deaths of his wife and daughter following the events of a fatal car crash. A local man who’s spent nearly his entire life in the small town, he feels trapped, unable to escape the horrible memory. Confronted daily by constant reminders of his past indiscretions, he avoids society by hunting alone. Actaeon is the exploration of the consequences of running from pain and trauma and the inability to escape one's past, a large part of the human condition and a story some are all too familiar with. Coming from a small military town, any small community, you have no secrets; everyone knows everyone else’s business. You either embrace your past or be crushed by it. "I love how you’ve nicely fused together elements of Southern gothic, gothic horror, magical realism, and Greek myth to create a unique parable about grief and the healthy (and more often unhealthy) ways we cope with it. - at its absolute best moments, this really recalls for me media like Winter’s Bone and the works of Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor in its fusion of the dire elements of rural Southern living and magical realism/mysticism to examine the human condition." -- Preston Fassel; writer, Our Lady of the Inferno (Contributor, Fangoria Magazine, Rue Morgue, Screem magazine, and Cinedump.com)