A A

SYDNEY, N.S. —

It was a movie that nearly didn’t get made but these days, Michael Melski is feeling pretty good about his first horror feature film, “The Child Remains.”

And well he should. Released at the end of 2017, “The Child Remains” has received 16 best feature prizes on the international film festival circuit. And late last week, Melski and Craig Cameron of Malefic Films signed a distribution deal with Uncork’d Entertainment, a U.S. film and digital distributor.

Melski, from Sydney, will see his Nova Scotia-filmed movie open this summer in theatres across the U.S. It will also be released on demand in June. There will even be a Los Angeles premiere. It’s a huge accomplishment, and Melski couldn’t be happier.

Michael Melski

“Very, very small percentage get theatrical distribution,” Melski said from Halifax. “But the key thing is getting into theatres in the U.S. — it’s extremely hard for a Canadian movie, mainly because you’re competing with these Leviathan marketing budgets. It’s becoming arcade cinema essentially — superhero movies get the theatres and then American indies do and then way down if you’re really lucky and you’ve crafted something that’s good, then you get the Oscar releases in the U.S. so …,” he said with a laugh. “It’s pretty good.”

It’s a long way from the dark days of 2015 when changes to the Nova Scotia film tax credit nearly ended the project. Determined to save it, Melski rewrote the script and applied to Nova Scotia Business Inc.’s film and television production incentive fund. He eventually was able to finish the movie but it left a bad taste.

“It’s kind of miraculous that we have this sort of outcome when we were making the movie under horrific conditions,” said Melski. “The Nova Scotia tax credit debacle of 2015, we were the last film to get equity. The equity program has been eliminated and it’s going to make it even harder to get films made in Nova Scotia to compete with American production values, global production values, without that key piece.”

Melski and others in the film industry want the government to bring back the equity program so future films will have a chance to compete in the global marketplace.

“Something like that could make a difference in a film getting moved in the U.S. or being only available on iTunes. It’s pretty critical. The horror movie behind the horror movie was what the government did to our industry. But luckily we seemed to have emerged unscathed but definitely with a win so we’re all very pleased.”

“The Child Remains” was inspired by “The Butterbox Babies,” a book that examined what happened to children born out of wedlock at a maternity home in Chester. Melski’s story follows an expectant couple on an intimate weekend in a secluded country inn that was once a maternity home where unwanted babies and mothers were murdered. It stars Suzanne Clement, Allan Hawco and Shelley Thompson.

Film Facts

“The Child Remains” was shot in Windsor and Elmsdale, with some second unit photography in Halifax

Theatrically released in 2018, the film was shown in Sydney in 2018

Written, directed and co-produced by Halifax-based Michael Melski

Since the movie came out, Melski has travelled around the world promoting it and it’s only now that he’s getting back to his other projects.

“Now it’s finally getting to the tenfold projects that I have in development which is good problem to have but I find myself really grateful to be back in writing mode and looking forward to following up The Child Remains,” he said.

Those projects include a possible crime drama and an arctic horror thriller called “The Cairn.”

“’The Thing’ meets ‘Blair Witch Project’ is probably the best way that I could describe it,” said Melski. “It’s more that feeling that you’re isolated and bad things are going to happen to you.”

But fortunately for Melski these days, those bad things are only happening in his movies.