Starry Eyes
Short description
Sarah Walker is an aspiring actress in Los Angeles, stuck in a dead-end job under a dismissive boss and going from one audition to the next without a breakthrough. After a string of strange tryouts, she is offered the lead in a film from a production company she knows nothing about. The people behind the project ask her to do increasingly bizarre things, and she goes along with them, driven by her desire for stardom. What begins as an opportunity turns into a deadly bargain in which her body and mind are the price of fame.
Starry Eyes was released in 2014 and runs 96 minutes. It is a drama, fantasy, horror and mystery film directed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, who also wrote the screenplay; Travis Stevens produced it. It was the first feature the directing pair made, ahead of Holidays (2016) and Pet Sematary (2019), with The Swallow following in 2026. Alex Essoe plays Sarah, alongside Amanda Fuller, Fabianne Therese, Noah Segan, Shane Coffey and Natalie Hauck among a credited cast of 30, with 88 crew members credited. The film drew a critics' rating of 7.1/10 from 23 reviews, while audiences were less enthusiastic: it holds 6/10 on IMDb from around 24,000 votes and 6.1/10 on TMDB from 528 votes.
What's left behind the scenes
- Filming took 18 days.
- During Sarah’s audition, director Dennis Widmyer and producer Travis Stevens, who are in charge of casting, appear on screen in the roles of assistant directors.
- Permission to film at a Los Angeles bar was denied after they read the script.
- Funding for the film was secured through Kickstarter – a website for attracting finances for the implementation of creative, scientific, and production projects using crowdfunding, or voluntary donations. Significant support came from fans of Chuck Palahniuk, author of the sensational novel “Fight Club” (1996). Dennis Widmyer, one of the directors and scriptwriters of the film, manages the author’s official website and his social media pages.
- Actress Alexandra Essou, who played Sarah, actually put cockroaches in her mouth for the bathroom scene. It was not computer graphics.
- The second audition for Sarah, where she had to undress, was added to the script after the directors and scriptwriters Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer heard about how David Lynch conducted auditions.
- Alexandra Essou genuinely cried in all the scenes where it was required.
- The scene on the platform was filmed without official permission.
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