When filmmaker Matthew Ragsdale connects over video against the sunlit, peaceful gravestones of Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery, the setting feels less like a coincidence and more like an overture. It is precisely the kind of macabre, contemplative environment that informs his latest work, Appearance Executed—a visceral, psychological descent selected for the inaugural Out of the Cellar Horror Film Festival at the historic Chabot Theater in Castro Valley, California.
Clocking in at an intense twelve minutes, Appearance Executed—written, directed, photographed, and edited by Ragsdale—operates as both an intoxicating sensory homage to vintage European cinema and a timely post-mortem on modern male projection.
The Gaze of the Transgressor
At the center of Appearance Executed is a deceptively simple narrative device: a priest stumbles upon four young women in the midst of a secluded ritual. Unaware of his presence, the women casually discard their daily street clothes and don ceremonial dresses to enact a pagan rite.
Rather than leaning into standard creature-feature tropes, Ragsdale grounds the entire narrative within the warped, claustrophobic psychology of the voyeur.
“It’s kind of from his point of view, because we never really learn anything about the other girls—that’s on purpose,” Ragsdale explains. “They’re just existing, doing their thing… but to him, it’s a transgression. His arousal turns to hatred. He’s projecting all this hatred, creating villains out of them, and they have no idea he’s spying on them.”
Ragsdale frames this dynamic through the contemporary lens of misogyny and aggrieved male entitlement, subverting the traditional horror victim-villain dichotomy. The women are not monsters stalking the woods; they are simply people existing in their own space. The terror stems entirely from what the observer projects onto them—the toxic friction where repressed lust curdles into sanctimonious disgust.
Echoes of 1970s European Auteurism
While the themes pulse with contemporary cultural relevance, the visual language draws straight from European cult and art-house cinema of the early 1970s.
Ragsdale explicitly points to the subversive, surreal atmosphere of Joël Séria’s 1971 French cult classic Don’t Deliver Us from Evil (Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal) alongside the dreamlike, erotic vampire poetry of French auteur Jean Rollin.
“I was inspired by ’70s European horror… specifically director Jean Rollin,” says Ragsdale. “A lot of his work from the ’70s was a big inspiration—the erotic stuff, but where there was still real artistic vision there.”
To capture that eerie, liminal feel, Ragsdale intentionally stripped the visual environment of obvious contemporary signifiers. There are no buzzing smartphones or digital distractions. The imagery shifts from textured outdoor naturalism to stark, theatrical staging where figures emerge from pitch-black voids, giving the short the timeless resonance of a dark fable.
The priest’s clerical collar serves as immediate visual shorthand, carrying decades of cinematic and theological weight:
“Him being a priest was something that came later,” Ragsdale notes. “In a short film, you think: What visual tells the story? You see the collar, and immediately you understand the sexual suppression, the oppression, and all that guilt.”
Building the Spirits of Transgression
A seasoned actor and multidisciplinary creator who cut his teeth in stage productions and performance art, Ragsdale has spent the past year deep in a hyper-focused creative sprint. Working independently, he has been writing, shooting, and cutting a succession of short-form gothic and folk horror pieces designed to capture underground grit without sacrificing formal composition.
His ultimate plan is to assemble these short works into a definitive physical anthology collection, titled Spirits of Transgression.
“I’ve been making a lot of folk horror, gothic horror short films—just bam, bam, bam, making them,” Ragsdale says. “What I hope to do is put them all together on a DVD called Spirits of Transgression and just self-release it. Here’s my current work. Here’s my style: folk horror and underground grit mixed together.”
Festival Details
Horror aficionados and indie cinema purists can experience Appearance Executed on the big screen during the Out of the Cellar Horror Film Festival, which runs across two nights:
- Dates: Friday, November 13 and Saturday, November 14
- Feature Screening: Saturday, November 14
- Venue: The Chabot Theater, Castro Valley, California
- Tickets & Festival Schedule: Visit outofthecellarfilms.com
