Leaving DC

• A genuine one-man production: Josh Criss wrote, directed, produced, edited, handled the sound design, and starred as Mark Klein. The only other on-screen performer is Karin Crighton as Claire, a support-group member who comes out to visit for a weekend.
• Shot on a near-zero budget in and around Criss's own home in rural West Virginia. The authentic isolation on screen is real geography, not a location scout's pick.
• Criss has said the film grew from a real experience: after moving to West Virginia he was woken by a hideous animal scream in the night that he could never identify, and that incident fed directly into the film.
• Runs a lean 75-77 minutes and leans on meticulous sound design and an audio recorder left at the window rather than jump scares, building dread through nighttime disturbances instead of gore.
• The framing makes Mark the editor of his own footage, not just its subject, so the film can quietly cut and rearrange evidence the way an unreliable narrator would. One stretch jumps from 8/25/2012 to 9/3/2012, a gap of nearly two weeks Mark's editing glosses right over.
• Accepted into the Nevermore Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina, and went on to find a found-footage audience on streaming, reportedly watched tens of thousands of times via word of mouth.

Mark is doing this to himself. The OCD framing isn't set dressing, it's the engine: a man whose compulsions demand documentation, control, a security system, a gun, a recorder on the sill every night. Read that way, the nighttime threat is the externalized shape of an anxiety disorder eating a man alone in the woods, and the cat skull with the carved B is a sign he can't stop assigning meaning to.

The footage lies because the man cutting it lies. Mark edits his own video, and the conspicuous jump from 8/25 to 9/3 is the tell. Whatever actually happened in that missing stretch, he chose not to show it, which means everything we do see is curated by a narrator with a reason to hide. The horror isn't what's outside the window, it's what he scrubbed before posting.

The threat is real and rural, and the city man simply doesn't speak the language of the woods. The animal scream, the skull, the figure circling at night, the carved letter, all read as territory being marked by something or someone already living there. Mark's whole arc is an outsider mistaking a place that was never empty for one he could escape into.

Mark Klein trades twenty years of D.C. for a house buried in the West Virginia woods, filming video updates for the OCD support group he left behind. Then he finds a cat's skull nailed to a tree, the letter B carved above it. Something starts circling the house in the dead of night. A security system, a handgun, a recorder propped on the windowsill, and still the noises come. He keeps the camera rolling and edits the footage himself, which is precisely the problem.