How Chris Bavota made Dead Dicks with creative partner Lee Paula Springer, and where Red Acres fits

September 2018. Chris Bavota and his filmmaking partner, Lee Paula Springer, are driving home from some bad meetings at the Toronto International Film Festival, and somewhere on that drive they decide to make their own movie, ready in time for Fantasia. That’s Bavota’s account to Rue Morgue.

an uncommonly smart, engrossing and dramatically ambitious independent horror/drama

The film is “Dead Dicks,” and I’ll get to what I thought of it near the end.

Here’s my read. Bavota and Springer went from a film their makers say friends and family helped pay for to a second feature on Telefilm Canada’s list of funded low-budget projects. The sources don’t say what Telefilm weighed, so that’s an observation, not a cause.

Bavota and Springer wrote, produced and directed “Dead Dicks” together, according to Screen Daily, and Postal Code Films, their own production banner, puts its premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal on July 25, 2019. Calgary Underground’s program calls them a Canadian filmmaking team, and Rue Morgue’s review describes them as Montreal-based. The Hamilton Film Board’s schedule for its Supercrawl booth lists them in a September 13, 2025 slot as writers, directors and producers.

I conducted my interview with Bavota by email in October 2026. Nothing in this piece rests on his answers; where a public page confirms something he told me, I’ve cited the page.

Before Dead Dicks

Bavota began as a screenwriter, according to the Calgary Underground program, which credits him with the screenplay for “Ghastlies,” a feature directed by Brett Kelly and released in 2017. The Head on the Door Productions site lists him as a writer, with director Sid Zanforlin, of the 2012 short “Attack of the Brainsucker.” His first directing credit is the short “Even the Darkness has Arms,” which, he wrote, had its world premiere at the 2017 Fantasia Film Festival. Springer played the monster in that short, according to her Calgary Underground biography, and the same biography calls “Dead Dicks” her fourth feature-length screenplay and her directing debut.

Making the film

A February 2019 post from Postal Code Films says the project grew from a short into a feature over November, and that friends and family helped them raise the budget.

Rue Morgue talked to the pair in 2019, and the interview ran in March 2021. Bavota said the second draft took the holidays, and that the lead role was written for Heston Horwin, whom he’d seen in “Rock Steady Row” at the Chattanooga Film Festival. Rue Morgue’s review names Horwin, Jillian Harris and Matt Keyes as the stars.

One of the film’s big practical effects started small. Bavota said the starting idea was “literally just a water stain with a little crack,” and that Nina Anton then had the idea to build it and came back with “that massive thing.” Springer said much of the visual work was do-it-yourself because of the budget, with Bavota teaching himself a lot of the effects, and that a visual-effects artist also worked on the film.

A hard subject

Content note and spoilers: this section discusses suicide and gives the film’s premise, as the festival’s synopsis describes it. If you’re thinking about suicide, you can call or text 9-8-8 any time in Canada, or 988 in the US.

The film deals with a suicide attempt. The Calgary Underground synopsis has Richie discovering what looks like his own corpse; his sister Becca, a nursing student, rushes to his apartment and finds more dead versions of him, and the two try to work out why he keeps being reborn. Springer told Rue Morgue that the film opens with what she called an almost trigger warning, listing who to contact for help.

What critics said

Rue Morgue’s Michael Gingold, in his Fantasia review published July 29, 2019, called it “an uncommonly smart, engrossing and dramatically ambitious independent horror/drama.” He also wrote that it is “clearly made with extremely modest means” and just as clearly the work of “a cast and craft team with talent to burn.” Ricky D at Tilt Magazine called it “the surprise hit of this year’s Fantasia Film Festival.” PopHorror’s Rebecca Rinehart, reviewing it at the Blood in the Snow festival, wrote that the pair turn the darkness into “a charming, heartwarming tale of depression, self-sacrifice, shared trauma and sibling loyalty.”

Not every review is a pure rave, and even the admiring ones note flaws. Tilt calls a badly lit Skype scene and a bad credits font minor nitpicks that the film’s strengths outweigh, and PopHorror found the opening confusing. UK Film Review’s Darren Tilby gave it three stars after Grimmfest, calling the dialogue laboured at times and the CGI weak, though he also wrote that he felt Bavota and Springer handled mental illness “with care, mindfulness, and complete and, occasionally, brutal honesty.”

Postal Code Films’ July 2020 Blu-ray post lists an essay by Gingold among the extras on the Canadian edition, which it announced about a year after his review. Rue Morgue also published the interview quoted above.

After the premiere

Postal Code Films says the premiere played to a sold-out crowd and that the film won the “Audience Award for Best Canadian Feature,” and Screen Daily reported the same award. It also collected screenplay prizes: best screenplay at the Blood in the Snow Canadian Film Festival in 2019, where Bavota and Springer also took a Rising Star award and Horwin best actor; best script at the Other Worlds Film Festival that year; and best screenplay at Fantasporto in 2020, according to a Philstar report.

Red Acres

Telefilm Canada’s announcement of June 26, 2024 includes “Red Acres,” with Bavota and Springer as directors and screenwriters and Slykid Inc. as the production company. Postal Code Films’ post calls it their second feature and says they wrote the first draft more than six years before that post, before they developed “Dead Dicks” into a feature. So the second feature is really the older script. Nothing I read says why Telefilm funded it.

What I thought

That’s what the critics thought. Here’s me. Honestly, I thought “Dead Dicks” was excellent and equally unsettling, and there’s an undertone in its style that reminded me of the TV series “From.” I’ve also seen “Attack of the Brainsucker,” and it’s wonderful. The little girl at its centre made my skin crawl.

What I couldn’t confirm

• The exact name of the 2019 Fantasia award. Fantasia’s own awards page for that year was not available when I tried, so the name rests on Postal Code Films and Screen Daily, while Calgary Underground words it as best Canadian film.
• Whether Bavota’s writing credit on “Attack of the Brainsucker” appears everywhere. Screamfest’s page for the film names Zanforlin alone.
• Whether Bavota founded the horror film festivals The Return to Odd and Deep Red, as his Postal Code Films biography says. I found no festival page for either.
• Where “Red Acres” stands. As of October 6, 2026, none of the sources I read gives a release date, distributor, budget or production status.