Matthew
Bardis

Matthew Bardis is the founder and manager of Neon Pines Pictures, an independent horror film company. He has spent the last seven years studying cinema — the craft, the history, and the mechanics of why a single frame can make a room go quiet.

“The decade I keep returning to didn't invent neon. It just had the nerve to point a camera at it.”

That study is now a horror film. He is preparing to shoot his first full-length feature, and the 1980s run through it like a current: fog between the pines at a summer camp, a dock light on black water, an analog synthesizer humming under a wide shot, the confidence of a camera that refuses to move.

“Seven years of studying film, so that my first feature could be quietly, deliberately strange.”