A group of University of North Carolina students set out in 2022 to make a horror thriller called “The Harpswell Incident,” which would have taken place in a spooky seaside town.
“We wanted the opening shot to be of a secret policeman showing up to this small town on a ferry, coming out of the fog,” one of the students, Luca Huff, said in an interview.
After a major snowstorm shut down production, the students pivoted to making a dystopian drama called Days of August, which released on streaming services in 2025. One thing they carried over to the new project was the name Harpswell.
“We chose Harpswell just because we were like, ‘That’s kind of a cool name,'” said Huff, the film’s producer and editor. “There’s something to it that just felt sort of haunting in the context of the story we were trying to tell, and the quietness of the town we were trying to depict.”
Instead of being in foggy New England, the Harpswell in “Days of August” is a fictional Appalachian city in an alternate-reality version of America. Huff said the change of setting was a decision born out of necessity, because “logistically, (we were) shooting in Appalachia.”
The film focuses on a doomed romance between Godfrey Kilpatrick (Santiago Sepulveda), the son of Harpswell’s tyrannical leader, Thomas Kilpatrick (Thomas McCarthy), and August Dupree (Teryn Macallan), a young member of the city’s oppressed lower class.
“When Godfrey rediscovers the poetry journal of his lover, August, he is confronted by buried memories,” the film’s official synopsis says. “Deciding to read it, he is forced to relive his heart-wrenching past through August’s chronicling of their forbidden love, and must reckon with regrets from his upbringing as the son of an aristocrat in the heart of Harpswell’s iron-fisted regime.”
Huff said the film’s microbudget is evident from watching it, but he is proud that the students were able to make a full-length drama that was released commercially on video for anyone to watch. The film can be rented for $1.99 on Amazon or viewed for free with ads on the streaming service Tubi, among other options.
“I’ve often described it as sort of like ‘Romeo and Juliet’ if it were set in the world of ‘The Hunger Games,'” Huff said. “That sets the expectations a little high, honestly.”
Huff said he has never been to Maine’s real-life Harpswell, but would love to visit someday. He now lives in New York City and runs a small production company called 1716 Digital. He is currently promoting a new film called “Space Cowboy,” a sobering look at drug addiction made by many of the same cast and crew members from “Days of August.”
“Days of August” was directed by Mackenzie Marstellar and written by Sophie Montgomery and James Knowles, who served as co-director of photography with Joshua Campbell.
On Letterboxd, a movie-focused social media platform, Knowles said he was still amazed by what the young filmmakers had achieved.
“‘Days Of August’ isn’t a masterpiece — far from it. I’d do 10 trillion things differently if I had to work on it now. I’d bet my kidneys that anyone involved in it, in any capacity, would say the same thing,” he wrote. “However, it is an excellent tribute to the spirit of true no-budget indie filmmaking (dare I say student filmmaking). It should be watched, listened to, and understood within the context of the artistic world it was created in, and created for — that being, young people staring up at the immensity of Hollywood with bated breath, hoping to one day become a part of the magic show.”
