PITTSBURGH — Zane Hershberger always had a keen eye for when a fight scene in a schlocky 1980s movies wasn’t up to snuff.
“I remember watching indie movies growing up, some super low-budget stuff,” said the 47-year-old Wexford resident. “When you’re watching people fight, you can tell they’re pulling their punches.”
A few years ago, his friend Chad Bruns approached him about working on a film that would pay homage to ‘80s action movies. Hershberger, a seasoned independent filmmaker with a black belt in karate and a degree in film and video production from the now-defunct Art Institute of Pittsburgh, was ready to ensure the fight scenes would be worth the price of admission.
Their collaboration resulted in “Force to Fear,” an action-horror mashup that finds a random assortment of weirdos trying to survive the night in an abandoned school. The film was released on Blu-ray Disc in July 2021 and recently became available to buy or rent via Amazon Prime Video.
“It’s a down and dirty fight movie,” Hershberger said. “It showcases a lot of filmmaking talent we have here in the ’Burgh.”
“Force to Fear” follows two kidnappers (played by Joseph Setticase and George Saulnier), a drug dealer (Mitchell Musolino) and six college students looking for a good time as they try not to get slaughtered by the mysterious figure (Ted Opalinski) who is hunting them. Loyalties are tested and hidden motives are revealed as the evening progresses.
The film is the brainchild of Bruns, 34, of West Mifflin, a University of Pittsburgh graduate and engineer by day who has been a part of Pittsburgh’s independent filmmaking scene for 10 years. Hershberger thought Bruns was joking when he laid out his ambitious plan for a violent action flick with complex fights and horror elements.
They made it work though, and the two ended up splitting writing and directing duties on “Force to Fear.” Hersberger said the original title of the film was “Wrath,” but they eventually decided that was too generic. They chose “Force to Fear” because they thought it invoked “an ’80s style Canon video movie that people would watch,” Hershberger said.
It was first conceived in 2018 and was mostly shot in 2019 at the “Haunted School of Terror” in Weirton, W.Va. Bruns said that 95% of the crew on “Force to Fear” live in and around Pittsburgh, and many were current or former Point Park students.
There are several brutal fight sequences in the film, all choreographed by Hershberger. Many of those set pieces involved the character of Nova, a co-ed with shady motivations played by Sable Griedel, 32, of Freedom. She met with Hersberger three or four days a week prior to filming for training and to make sure she had the fight choreography down to a science.
“I would put up our fight scenes against most independent productions,” Bruns declared.
One big fight involves Nova going up against Socks (played by Bruns) and Anomaly (April Yanko). Bruns described bringing that fight to life as “a battle of endurance” that required two 12-hour days to complete. The temperature fluctuated wildly during that time between reasonably chilly and scorching hot, which wasn’t fun for any of them.
Everyone was battered and bruised by the end, especially Bruns’ bare arms that took the brunt of Griedel’s punishment.
“After watching the finished project, it was worth it, all the takes it took to get it right,” Griedel said. “I’m really proud of it.”
Bruns and Hershberger had fun writing a script where characters were constantly switching from villains to heroes, at least in the eyes of the audience. Hersberger wasn’t interested in making “Force to Fear” “another “basic, by-the-numbers thing,” and Bruns said they “needed the second and third layer” of twists to keep the audience guessing. Griedel said she “loved the way Chad and Zane wrote” Nova as an enigmatic force of nature.
All three are excited that the film is finally accessible to stream on Amazon. This was Griedel’s first feature, and she said a VOD release makes it a lot easier to point friends and potential future employers toward her work. She thinks that Pittsburghers will appreciate the film’s “blue-collar grit” and has already felt more embraced by the local filmmaking community since “Force to Fear” premiered.
“I feel like the community got a little bit smaller for me,” she said. “It seemed big and I didn’t know many people. But after ‘Force to Fear,’ I feel like I started making connections ... and it really opened up the indie film community. Now I feel like we’re a part of it.”
