Horror fans love to spotlight the indie projects that managed to get off the ground and take the world by storm, and there’s a reason for that. There’s just something about those stories that makes you really appreciate the business of filmmaking, and how exhausting and miraculous it can be. Among many of the tales told in the past decade, probably one of the best is how 12-year-old film buff Emily Hagins cut her teeth as a director while making her first horror film, as well as how her family and friends banded together to help her realize that dream.

With the easy accessibility of tech and software, independent filmmaking has made amazing strides in recent years. Today filmmakers are completing whole films on miniature cameras on phones, but things were a bit more complicated back in 2009. There was also much more preparation required. Released that year, Zombie Girl: The Movie was a raw, down to Earth documentary that helped us view the nurturing and evolution of a filmmaker and the birth of a new voice in the horror genre. Zombie Girl: The Movie was also ahead of its time in the way that it explored a female filmmaker delving into horror films and how she was celebrated for that. It’s a scenario, sadly, that wasn’t always commonplace in 2009 – or even today.

In the modern horror film climate where there’s an even larger, more vocal demand for horror tales from the female perspective, Emily Hagins can easily be considered something of a trailblazer. The film climate was changing drastically in 2009 as was the whole of the horror genre, and Zombie Girl: The Movie spotlights just how possible it’s become to make a film and build a passion project from the ground up thanks to various resources readily available. In the doc, directors Aaron Marshall, Justin Johnson, and Erik Mauck follow Emily Hagins and her mother Megan around as Emily hopes to take her love of film and transform it into her very first feature. Not content with merely making a short (upon the advice of her friends), Emily sets out to direct her first feature length zombie film, titled Pathogen.

Based on a script she wrote at age ten, Emily is inspired to write the screenplay after falling in love with the 2003 Australian zombie film Undead. With a barebones budget and the help of a lot of her friends (and classmates), Emily embarks on an odyssey that would connect in many ways with the world around her and help her find a voice. Twelve when we meet her, Emily has to work with a plethora of production difficulties including inexperienced actors, limited shooting schedules, and troublesome shooting locations. All the while she confronts typical problems of a normal teenager facing adolescence. This includes getting school work finished, learning to work around her parents’ rigid rules, and staying focused on her goals when introduced to social situations that promise to derail her efforts.

Emily’s enthusiasm for the art of film manages to provide a compelling tale of creation, the struggles of realizing a vision and the relentlessness of imposter syndrome. She goes through the normal drudgery of artistry all the while anxiously trying to confront a lot of the hurdles with as much patience and stride as possible. Mid-way during the shoot she runs out of money for the production and applies for a grant to finish the film. She also has to figure out how to race to complete a humongous scene in a local grocery store she’s managed to borrow, involving droves of restless zombie extras, and an increasingly impatient pair of parents.

Along the way we’re witness to how supportive the film community can be as Hagins is offered a lot of valuable help and encouragement from folks like Tim League and Sinister/Doctor Strange writer C. Robert Cargill. Cargill is especially hands on with Emily, stopping to offer tips on edits and devoting a lot of time to giving her a voice as a filmmaker. It’s wonderful to see.

Ultimately, the documentary about the young auteur transforms into a completely different film about the bond of a mother and daughter. As mother Megan nurtures and encourages Emily’s attempt at filmmaking, they inevitably begin to clash when Emily almost immediately builds her independence as a director and gradually carves out her own niche and rituals. This puts them at odds with one another as Megan realizes Emily views the filming of Pathogen as a real passion project, and not just a mother and daughter hobby. That’s further emphasized in a scene where Emily socializes with her cast setting up a shot as Megan sits on the grass, exhausted and competing for Emily’s attention. The daunting realization that Emily might not need Megan around all that much during her future endeavors puts a damper on the shoot.

There’s an interesting tension that’s built between the pair as Megan almost seems to push back against Emily’s progress on completing the film altogether; more so, whether intentionally or not, the usually meek Emily rebels against her mother through the filming process. But Zombie Girl: The Movie thankfully ends on a happy note, as Hagins took so much away from filming the indie Pathogen, which was completed and released, and went on to become a professional filmmaker lensing great genre fare like My Sucky Teen Romance, Coin Heist, and the stellar Touch segment from Chilling Visions.

Ten years later, Zombie Girl: The Movie still contributes to the conversation of indie filmmaking, touching upon a lot of the concerns and hopes for the film medium as it became much more readily available to just about anyone. In a way, this newfound accessibility made the canvas of film much more congested, but opened the door to so much cinematic talent we might otherwise have never seen. And Emily Hagins is one of those voices we’re glad to have.