Woodstock-Born Filmmaker Brings Paranormal Hit Home for Free Community Screenings

Two free public screenings of “The Hitchhiker Effect,” a feature film shot in Woodstock, will be presented on Friday, Oct. 3, at 9 p.m., and Saturday, Oct. 4, at 2 p.m. in the historic Community Theatre (est. 1940), 136 N. Main Street in Woodstock.

The first showing of the 76-minute paranormal dramedy will begin at the conclusion of the town’s Wander Woodstock event held Friday, Oct. 3, from 5-9 p.m. on Main Street.  The Community Theatre lobby will open at 8 p.m., an hour before the 9 p.m. screening.  On Saturday, the lobby will open at 1 p.m., an hour before the 2 p.m. matinee.  The film will be screened in the main theater and its 350 seats will be available on a first-come, first-seated basis.

Another reason to arrive early for either screening: The film’s four lead actors – Michael Beardsley, Allyson Sereboff and John Bigham from Hollywood, and LaVerne Onike Chesson of Maurertown – will be on hand to meet the public and sign a limited number of mini film posters, available for free.

“The Hitchhiker Effect” synopsis – A beleaguered conspiracy theorist in a contentious relationship struggles to understand the reality of paranormal events that begin when his eccentric neighbors drop by and refuse to leave.  (suggested rating: PG-13)

The film was written, directed and co-produced by Zack Van Eyck, 63, a member of the Central High School Class of 1980, in and outside the Shenandoah River cabin his family has owned since the 1960s.

“From fourth to eighth grade, we lived across from the theater in my grandparents’ house, now the law offices of Woodstock Mayor Jeremy McCleary,” said Van Eyck, a former sports and news journalist who served as the Shenandoah County bureau chief for the Northern Virginia Daily in Woodstock, 1990-91.  “My grandparents would give me a huge roll of movie tickets every year for my birthday in August, so I saw almost every fall and winter Friday night movie from 1971 to 1976.  And I mowed lawns, shoveled snow and babysat to earn money for more movie tickets.

“Directing my first feature and seeing it play in my home-town theater is a vision I’ve held for more than fifty years so this event means a lot to me personally.  I’m grateful to theater manager Shawn Garman and his family for making these screenings possible.  I also see the weekend as a tribute to the theater itself and what it’s meant to this community for the past 85 years.”

Van Eyck said the pair of screenings will serve as a trial run for a potential film series that would feature a different unreleased independent film once a month, or quarterly, at Community Theatre.  He has support from Garman and the Town of Woodstock, he said, but is uncertain whether Shenandoah County residents would be interested in seeing yet-to-be-released, festival-winning independent features before they go into distribution.

“Our movie is comparable in quality and style to the type of new movies being selected by film festivals across the country every year,” Van Eyck said.  “If there’s interest here in making such screenings a recurring event, I’m confident we can bring in an appealing and diverse collection of indie features, along with the occasional program of short films, and provide a festival-like experience – exposing local moviegoers to films they might not otherwise see – without having to leave the county.”

“The Hitchhiker Effect,” Van Eyck’s debut as a narrative feature director, premiered at the Regal L.A. Live cinemas in downtown Los Angeles on Feb. 22, 2024, and won that festival’s Best Sci-Fi Film award.  It has been screened at 30 U.S. and international film festivals, winning 19 awards and collecting 10 nominations.

The film will be released for purchase or rent on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV/iTunes and Google TV beginning Oct. 28, 2025, and will be available for free on ad-supported streamers Tubi and Xumo sometime in 2026.

As a journalist, Van Eyck is known for breaking the “Skinwalker Ranch” story in June of 1996 while working as an investigative reporter for the Deseret(cq) News newspaper of Salt Lake City.  He was the first to report about bizarre UFO and paranormal activity on a Utah cattle ranch later purchased by Las Vegas businessman Robert Bigelow and now the subject of a popular History Channel reality show, “The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch,” in its sixth season.

“The hitchhiker effect is a very real, fascinating mystery that has affected some of the researchers who’ve spent a lot more time than I did out on the ranch.  I felt compelled to further explore the idea that people who are exposed to paranormal activity in one location can have subsequent interactions with the same activity despite being thousands of miles away from where the initial contact occurred,” said Van Eyck, who had previously lectured about UFO history and extraterrestrial disclosure, and offered a seminar on those topics at several festivals where the film was shown.

“I’ve written a script about what the Sherman family went through while living on the ranch for those two years, but the special effects will require a much larger budget.  With ‘The Hitchhiker Effect,’ I was able to dive into a concept related to my own investigation of the ranch while also, hopefully, attracting investors interested in producing the origin story, which I believe has blockbuster potential along the lines of ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ ‘Poltergeist’ and ‘The Amityville Horror.’”

Chesson, originally from the D.C./Northern Virginia area, was a last-minute replacement for the role of Jane after, Van Eyck said, a union actor from Hollywood declined participation in the project due to a scheduling conflict.

“I really wanted an experienced minority actress for that role and wasn’t sure I could find one in or near the Shenandoah Valley.  I was very fortunate to find LaVerne’s acting profile on Backstage.com.  And amazingly enough, she lives just a short drive away from our set,” Van Eyck said.  “She had only done some musical theater before but turned in a fantastic performance.  I’m pleased all of her friends and family here will be able to see her excellent work on the big screen in October.”

While working as a screenwriter in Los Angeles in 2010, Van Eyck began attending weekly meetings of the filmmaking collective We Make Movies, which invites writers to bring in their material for staged readings by professional actors.  It was through that group that he met the three experienced, award-winning union actors who would later form the nucleus of “The Hitchhiker Effect” cast – Beardsley, Sereboff and Bigham.

Beardsley, originally from Santa Cruz, Calif., is a veteran actor with well over 100 produced credits including roles in television’s “Freaks and Geeks” and the movies “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” “Lizzie Borden’s Revenge” and “Dude, Where’s My Car?”  He is also the co-producer of “The Hitchhiker Effect” along with Van Eyck, and plays the lead role of Alan.

Sereboff, originally from Baltimore, is a certified firefighter – but luckily her life-saving skills were not needed on the Woodstock film set.  Her acting performance in “The Hitchhiker Effect,” playing the role of Alan’s wife Liz, garnered several Best Actress awards on the film festival circuit, Van Eyck said.

Bigham, featured in Van Eyck’s 2016 “Sweet Caroline” series on Amazon Prime, plays a prominent role in the recent horror-parody film, “The Mean One,” now available across major streaming platforms.

Van Eyck said “The Hitchhiker Effect” would have been impossible to complete without the help of four Virginia-based crew members – Kat Vivaldi (first assistant director/script supervisor), Ben Weingartner (sound design/boom operator), Kyle Fightmaster (gaffer, second assistant camera) and Forest Veerhoff (sound mixer).

“We got about 10 responses from our job post on the Virginia Film Office site.  Most wanted higher wages but we managed to convince those four to accept our low-budget terms and the insane notion that a feature film could be shot in six days,” Van Eyck said.  “Kat Vivaldi, our first assistant director, handled two or three other jobs on set and worked extremely well with our talented Director of Photography, Sara Bravo, who has won several Best Cinematography awards at festivals for her work on this film.”

Vivaldi is a 2019 Virginia Tech graduate.  Weingartner, Fightmaster and Veerhoff are all somewhat recent products of Virginia Commonwealth University’s film school.

Van Eyck was born in Richmond and attended elementary school there before his father was hired to teach history at James Madison University; the family moved to Woodstock as Zack entered fourth grade.

“I saw three of the original ‘Planet of the Apes’ movies, a bunch of spaghetti Westerns, James Bond, Billy Jack, disaster movies – pretty much every film that came out during the five years we lived on Main Street,” he said.  “I especially loved Woody Allen’s comedies and was very much inspired by his work.

“Living across from the theater, I had an important role to play.  Most of my classmates took the bus to school and didn’t pass by the theater, and you never knew which film was going to show next until they put it on the marquee.  So my job was to report to my classmates which movie was now playing.  I guess that was my first journalism job – unpaid though, just like filmmaking.”

In the summer of 1976, Van Eyck’s family left Woodstock and moved to Alaska, where his mother’s teaching salary was more than double her earnings as a fourth-grade teacher in Shenandoah County (Strasburg).  The following summer, at age 14, Van Eyck began working as a freelance sportswriter for The Anchorage Times, a job that became fulltime when he turned 16 and led to Van Eyck receiving the Grantland Rice writing scholarship to attend Vanderbilt University.

Van Eyck’s grandfather, Dr. Joseph B. Clower Jr., was a Presbyterian minister and professor at Hampden-Sydney College.  Upon returning to Woodstock for retirement, Dr. Clower became known as the local historian, writing four history books published by the Woodstock Museum.  Van Eyck’s grandmother, Mary C. Clower, was well known as a volunteer at Shenandoah Memorial Hospital, Belle Grove, the Woodstock Library and the Woodstock Museum.  His Great Uncle, James S. Clower, was a former Woodstock Postmaster and a longtime volunteer for the Woodstock Rescue Squad.

Van Eyck’s mother, Rosemary Clower, served as an associate producer on the film.  She cooked all the meals for a cast and crew of 13, “hauled all the garbage to the dump in her van when it was over,” her son said, and even played a small supporting role in the film along with the youngest of Van Eyck’s two daughters, Sammy.

The budget for “The Hitchhiker Effect,” now totaling nearly $40,000 including deliverables for distribution, has been cobbled together using “every penny” of Van Eyck’s retirement savings, the Social Security payments he began receiving last year and the sale of 78 walnut trees (and a piece of antique furniture) to a local logging company.

The film was shot April 9-15, 2023, beginning with what turned out to be the film’s opening frame – the scenic view from just below the Woodstock Tower.

Asked if his crew encountered any major setbacks or complications, Van Eyck noted he was extremely concerned about rain heading into the shoot because the cabin has a tin roof, making it impossible to shoot audio-dependent interior scenes during any significant rainfall.

“We got very lucky that it only rained once, for about 90 minutes on the last day, and we were already ahead of schedule so we relaxed and enjoyed the sound,” Van Eyck said.

But there was one issue that occurred during preproduction that Van Eyck said almost financially crippled the production.

“I’ve always used astrology to plan events; avoiding Mercury retrograde is step one.  And our shoot went incredibly well so I picked the right dates.  But I didn’t realize until after we were locked in that the Sunday before our shoot was Easter.  That meant the $300 roundtrip tickets I needed to buy for our five actors and crew members flying in from out West were instead going to cost $800 each.  I sweated a lot over the money but we cut corners elsewhere and somehow came in about $450 under budget.”

In a 43-minute “making of” video available on YouTube, Van Eyck said he’s not sure he wants to shoot another film precisely because of how smoothly things flowed on the set of “The Hitchhiker Effect,” arguing he doubts it could possibly go that well a second time.

“You hear a lot of horror stories about film productions that flame out in disastrous fashion, so just completing a feature and getting it into distribution is a major accomplishment,” said Van Eyck, who shot his first-ever film, three minutes on 8mm, in Woodstock while in the fifth grade.  “But I think all of us are ecstatic with the way it turned out; the festivals have been very generous with their awards.  And I love that the number one comment I always hear from people after they see it is, ‘I’ve got to watch it again!’

“If you can get everyone who sees your film to watch it a second time, maybe you really can make enough money back to make another film.  I mean, we’ll have more walnut trees in 30 years but I don’t want to wait that long.”

Van Eyck said he’s interested in hearing from local actors and crew, even those with little experience, as potential participants in future projects.

“We hope to shoot our next film a year from now, if we can make enough back from this one,” Van Eyck said.  “I have four more feature scripts, all of which can be shot for under a hundred thousand dollars, that are ready to go.  So now all we need is a hundred thousand dollars.”

Van Eyck and Beardsley, the other co-producer, said they changed their minds several times about what to list as the film’s primary genre.

“Paranormal was a good fit.  But we also liked ‘psychological’ because it’s very much that,” Van Eyck said.  “We called it a dramedy, too, but then I had to cut 10 pages so we could actually afford to shoot it and there went most of the comedy.  So we called it a drama until we saw it with an audience for the first time and we got some laughs, there was still a lot of humor in it, so we went back to calling it a dramedy so people would know it’s funny in parts on purpose and not on accident.”

Film festivals didn’t seem to know how to categorize “The Hitchhiker Effect,” either, as evidenced by the variety of awards and nominations it received, including: Best Sci-Fi Film; Best Dramedy; Best Dark Comedy; Best Mystery/Suspense/Thriller; Best UFO Film; and Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Supernatural Film.

“I think it’s an advantage that our film encapsulates such differing qualities in tone and theme,” Van Eyck said.  “In many ways it’s a relationship or romance film.  It’s also a hero’s journey with a wounded hero.  But everything from the plot to the setting is mysterious and anyone who enjoys armchair detective work will have fun sleuthing all the pieces together.”

Woodstock joins an eclectic mix of U.S. towns and cities where “The Hitchhiker Effect” has been shown in theaters during its 18-month, pre-release festival run.  That list includes: Atlanta; Canton, Ohio; Erie, Pa.; Hunter, N.Y.; Los Angeles; Muskogee, Okla.; New York City (Manhattan); Ocean City, Md.; Parkersburg, W.Va.; Richmond, Va.; Roswell, N.M.; Sacramento, Calif.; St. Ignace, Mich.; Temple Hills, Md.; and Woodstock, Vt.  Outside the country, the film has screened in Barcelona, Spain; Cipoletti, Argentina; Rome and Torino, Italy; Tamilnadu, India; Toronto; and the U.K.

Among the film’s 19 festival awards are two “Audience Choice” awards, one from a Los Angeles festival and one from the DMV International Film Festival in Maryland.  Van Eyck said those honors in particular tell him that streaming audiences will love the film – if they know it exists and know where to find it.

“We have a zero-dollar marketing budget so we’re counting on word-of-mouth advertising,” he said.  “We hope a lot of local folks will come to one of our free screenings, enjoy the film and encourage their friends to find it online when it starts streaming on Amazon and other sites on Oct. 28.”

Watch the trailer: