Are you a fan of found footage horror movies? Well, The Lost Footage of Leah Sullivan may be just the sort of film you need to see. I recently spoke to the star of the film, Anna Stromberg just days before the official theatrical premiere in Los Angeles on December 11. The film stars Anna Stromberg as Leah Sullivan. In addition to acting, Anna also gets a shared screenwriting credit with her director/husband Burt Grinstead. Read on for my interview with The Lost Footage of Leah Sullivan’s Anna Stromberg.

LRM: Well, thank you for taking time out of your day to do this interview with LRM. We really appreciate it.

Anna: Oh, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

LRM: Awesome. Okay, first question here, could you tell me about your character in The Lost Footage of Leah Sullivan?

Anna: Sure, yeah. She’s a quirky journalism student, very enthusiastic. And she returns to her hometown of Lutton, Massachusetts, to do a little student journalism project and she decides to do it about the cold case murders of the Mulcahy family. And from there, she meets a bunch of kind of crazy local characters and we discover that the case might not be so cold after all.

LRM: Awesome. Thanks for the answer. Great. Now, what was the production like in making this film?

Anna: So, let’s see. I helped write it and I was one of the producers on it.

LRM: Awesome. Really?

Anna: Yeah, so from the very beginning it was my boyfriend at the time and I, and my now-husband.

LRM: Congratulations!

Anna: Thank you very much. He came to me with the idea of the script that he had I think sort of worked on, or talked through with a friend of his who is sort of a found footage expert years prior, and the two of them came up with a story. And then when he showed me the script, then we kind of went through. I love the idea of just introducing a bunch of fun characters, so that was a really cool part of the process writing it together was creating some, what we thought, were fun characters.

And then we wrote the dialogue together. And then we started, we went to Massachusetts. I know you said you’re on the East coast, but I don’t know whereabouts you are, but we shot in Massachusetts.

LRM: Okay, awesome.

Anna: And we were there for about three weeks total, three or four weeks total, and we did a week of pre-production and then about, it was a two-week shoot. So that was kind of the process of it.

LRM: Awesome. Thanks for that answer there.

Anna: Yeah, completely.

LRM: Was there anything interesting from the set? I know sometimes in a making a horror movie there’s some odd tales from the set in some cases, and I wonder if you had that.

Anna: Oh my gosh, yes. Okay. So I think because when you’re on a shoestring budget, there’s just going to be funny things that happen. So we were actually staying at the cabin in the woods. So we would shoot all day and half of the night basically, and then we would just sleep in this, I mean, it’s a beautiful cabin, but we kind of decked it out and made it really creepy. So we were sleeping there, and there were a few points where I started to feel like art and life are blending here. I feel like everybody was going a little crazy. We were cooped up in the middle of snowstorms in this tiny cottage, and I just felt like everyone was kind of losing it a little bit. So there were a lot of really creepy moments.

The first night that we were there, we were done with the shoot, and we went to bed and then all of a sudden, we had so many heaters in there like plugged in and stuff, and it just blew the fuse. And the fuse box was downstairs in the basement, which is one of the creepier scenes in the movie takes place downstairs in that basement. So we had to, in the middle of the night, this was like flashlights and candles, like open up that creepy basement, and climb down these creepy stairs and try and find the fuse box. I mean it was bananas.

LRM: That sounds creepy. Yeah.

Anna: Yeah. It definitely set the tone for it.

LRM: It sounds like it. Do you yourself, are you a fan of the horror movie genre?

Anna: I mean, I am. I sort of have a love-hate relationship with it because I’m so affected by them that it will. I mean, I was scared shooting this movie. So, watching horror movies is just very, very difficult for me.

LRM: I gotcha.

Anna: And so I’ve always, yeah, I think I can handle about one horror movie a year, and that’s probably about it.

LRM: Do you have a favorite horror movie?

Anna: I’d say, that’s a good question. I mean, okay, so horror movies that really stuck with me and you know, Silence of the Lambs. I just really, that one has just throughout my life, I mean that comes back. I don’t know, it’s just I think that one is so great, and again, the characters in that are incredible and I think that’s one of the things I love about a really good horror movie is when you are following the characters, and every choice that they make, makes sense to you, it’s just circumstantially, you’re like, “Well, there’s no other way it could have been then that you just, you know, killed yourself.”

LRM: When does The Lost Footage of Leah Sullivan premiere?

Anna: Oh that’s awesome. So the premiere of the film is December 11th in Los Angeles, and all of the information and the updates can be found at blanketfortentertainment.com.

LRM: Okay, great. Yeah, I really appreciate that. What can fans look for you in next? What’s your next project?

Anna: Well, so my husband and I started Blanket Fort Entertainment, our production company, when we were doing The Lost Footage of Leah Sullivan, and now we’ve been working on some plays, like theatrical plays, and we’re getting one of those published.

And this year we’re going to be working on a feature film, and a short film, and then two more plays. So there’s going to be a lot of stuff. It’s all going to be on our website, but we usually trade off with directing. So he directed The Lost Footage of Leah Sullivan, I will probably direct our next feature film. And then we’ll probably swap off for the play, is what we’re going to direct and things like that. But yeah, we have a bunch of stuff that we’re working on.

LRM: That’s fantastic. Yeah, we’ll definitely put up the link to your website. So the fans can go check out what you have coming up next.

Anna: Oh fantastic.

LRM: Sounds like you guys have a great working relationship. That’s awesome.

Anna: Yeah. Yeah, I feel really lucky about it.

LRM: Great, great. Now let me ask you, in this age of Marvel, DC, all these comic book adaptations, and with our site being so focused on a segment of the superhero comic book community, I wanted to ask you, do you like superheroes and if so, do you have a favorite?

Anna: Okay, this is such a question for Burt, my husband, because he’s actually writing a comic book right now. He’s deeply, deeply obsessed with comic books.

LRM: Oh, really?

Anna: Oh, I don’t know. He’s going to be like rolling his eyes that I don’t have a good answer for this.

LRM: All right. I won’t hold that question over your head or anything.

Anna: I don’t know.

LRM: We’ll wait til we talk to Burt, when we interview him at some point in the future, and we’ll drop the question on him.

Anna: Okay. Okay. Sounds good.

LRM: Awesome. Well, I want to thank you for taking time out for the interview. It’s been a pleasure.

Anna: Thank you so much.

If you didn’t catch the premiere of The Lost Footage of Leah Sullivan at the Cinemark 18 & XD, be sure to head to Amazon Prime to watch The Lost Footage of Leah Sullivan.

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