The boathouse on Bailey Island is dark and cold. A couple of long, wooden kayaks coated in dust are pushed to the side behind a stack of lobster traps. Johnny Berchtold kneels in a pool of light, trying to ignite an old tin heater. He looks up and peers into threatening shadows, then turns his attention back to the task at hand.
There’s a barely audible click and an ominous orange glow plays across the planes and angles of Berchtold’s face. He looks up again, gasps, and scuttles rapidly backward across the paint-splattered floor, his expression contorted in terror.
“Cut. Let’s go again, right away.”
Berchtold’s face relaxes into a grin. The crew repositions the camera dolly and checks the light output. They’re ready for Take 6.
“Headlock,” an independent horror film helmed by Carter Smith, filmed in Harpswell from March 30 through April 17. There will be one final day of filming in Los Angeles, Smith said.
Smith lived in Harpswell until the age of 5, when his family moved to Bowdoinham. He now splits his time between New York, Los Angeles, and one of several properties he owns on Bailey Island.
He graduated from Mt. Ararat High School in 1989 before embarking on a successful career as a fashion photographer. He shot for Vogue and GQ before shifting gears to direct his first movie.
He made “Bugcrush” in Bowdoinham and at the old Mt. Ararat High School. His debut won the Short Filmmaking Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006, garnering the attention of Stephen Spielberg and leading to Smith being tapped to direct Dreamworks’ “The Ruins,” a horror movie set in the Mexican jungle.
Horror has always been Smith’s comfort zone — and his passion. His work has explored a variety of horror subgenres, paying homage to the masters while honing his own approach to capture what he refers to as “the intersection of horror and beauty.”
‘Perfect for a horror movie’
“Headlock,” co-written by Smith and Berchtold, falls into the category of psychological horror, yet plays on other classic horror motifs.
“We found this really weird, interesting twist on a haunted house movie,” Berchtold said.
Berchtold, a horror fan from an early age, grew up in New Jersey and has acted in movies and television since 2015. Recent roles include the lead in the 2023 Netflix family film “Dog Gone” and the son of convicted murderer Alex Murdaugh in the 2025 Hulu limited series “Murdaugh: Death in the Family.”
Smith and Berchtold first worked together on the thriller “The Passenger” in 2023, with Smith directing and Berchtold starring.
“We knew we always wanted to work together again,” Berchtold said.
In November 2025, when they were both between projects, Smith was looking to sell one of his Bailey Island properties. Calling the red house near Mackerel Cove “too perfect for a horror movie not to film something in it before I sell it,” Smith suggested they create a story about a guy who gets hired to pack up a summer rental cottage on Bailey Island.
“Because he needed the house packed up,” Berchtold said with a chuckle.
“Headlock” is the result of that two birds, one stone approach.
The red house — and a boathouse on the same property — were the primary sets for the movie. Additional scenes were filmed at the Bailey Island General Store and the Merriconeag Grange.
The story follows a down-on-his-luck loner named Cody trying to put his life back together.
“He’s really been through it — mentally, emotionally, physically — for the better half of a decade,” Berchtold said.
Cody gets an opportunity to make a little money packing up a secluded cottage on the coast of Maine. But when his troubling background starts to catch up to him, he spirals into paranoia.
Berchtold said he’d always wanted to play an athlete, so he and Smith integrated Cody’s past as a high school wrestler into the plot.
“It’s like a very violent, visceral story masquerading as a cold, quiet haunted house movie,” Berchtold said. “We had a lot of fun finding ways to sort of subvert expectations in terms of what the true terror is.”
Smith agreed. “All good horror films, I think, are built around real, tangible human emotions that audience members can relate to,” he said. “Sure it’s a horror film, but everyone in this film is struggling with guilt.”
“And how we cope with it,” Berchtold added.
‘Maine has not disappointed’
“Headlock” would not have worked in any other place, Smith said. He wrote it with the house and Bailey Island in mind. Having grown up in the area and owned property there since 2003, he has an intimate understanding of the location and he made Maine part of the story from the first draft.
“And Maine has not disappointed,” he said after the first week of filming. “It snowed, it rained, it’s been gray, it’s been windy.”
“And yet every single day has been the most beautiful sight I have ever seen,” said Berchtold, who is getting his first taste of the state.
Smith counts the work of horror master and fellow Mainer Stephen King among his influences.
“I started reading his books when I was way too young,” he said. “I think that he’s responsible for so much of why the entire state is steeped in the sort of mystique that it has.”
Smith said he doesn’t think King “created” this mystique, but instead “responded to it.”
“And that’s something that we’re doing as well,” he said. “We’re not shoehorning our story into Maine. We’re letting Maine inform and sort of take a hand in creating and shaping the story.”
“Bailey Island feels very much like a character in the film,” Berchtold said. “You point that camera in any direction and you get such a beautiful shot. I think the production value alone skyrockets because of the location.”
‘Comfort in the weird’
The Maine of Smith’s imagination lends itself to the dark, unsettling aesthetic he has honed through his career.
“With passion projects like this one, you have to love what you’re doing — best to not make compromises,” he said.
That approach has garnered Smith a loyal fan base.
“Horror fans often end up feeling ‘othered,’ either by their communities or wherever it is that they grew up,” Smith said. “I think that’s part of the reason why the horror community is so tight and passionate. You can count on the horror family. They will always show up.”
Berchtold agreed. “I think there’s a comfort in the weird,” he said.
As a kid, he was drawn to the back of the video store, where the horror movies lived.
“The coolest, most creative stories seemed to be coming out of that section for me,” he said, “and I felt seen in a way that I hadn’t before.”
That’s one reason Smith plans to market “Headlock” not only to prestige film festivals like Sundance and South by Southwest, but also to the genre film festivals that have embraced his work in the past. He is hoping for the film to get picked up for distribution and perhaps released sometime in 2027.
Smith financed the production himself on what he referred to as a “microbudget.” He shot it on location with a small cast and crew of industry professionals from Los Angeles, New York and Maine. He said there were anywhere from three to 17 people on set on a given day.
“It can take years and years to get indie films made,” he said, but “Headlock” had a built-in timeline — less than six months from initial concept to wrap.
“Both of us really love that scrappy, DIY feeling of indie filmmaking,” Berchtold said. “We got to write to the space that we had available — and the limitations.”
Those limitations are part and parcel of Smith’s process in this film.
Back in the boathouse, the tension is ratcheting up. This scene involves an unexpected arm-wrestling match between Berchtold’s character and Simon, a groundskeeper played by Eric D’Agostino.
The camera starts wide, moves in, shifts to arms locked in combat, zooms in tight on hands, then tight on faces.
Smith, eyes glued to a monitor where he can see exactly what the camera sees, directs the actors, suggesting adjustments in position and expression that build on the sense of unease, of implied threat, of barely controlled anxiety, of existential dread.
“Less. Less. Less,” he says. “Just your eyes are giving me anything and everything I need.”
