Charlotte Filmmaker’s Debut Draws from Dark Aspects of Religious Upbringing

Framed by a stained-glass window like a halo, a Southern pastor regales his congregation with a parable. His story is about a preacher out on a boat with two boys — his son and his son’s best friend. The boys fall into the water. The preacher, knowing his son is Christian and assured a spot in heaven, rescues the friend but lets his own son drown. 

“I was that boy that the preacher saved,” the pastor proclaims. 

He may mean his story to be a spiritual affirmation but its impact is ambiguous. The congregation stays silent as the pastor slams his Bible shut.

With that disquieting vignette, first-time director Jesse Lee O’Sheal opens his harrowing, slow-burning horror film Blood Covenant, which screens at Independent Picture House on Friday at 6 p.m. 

The showing will be followed by a Q&A with the 26-year-old Charlotte writer-director and a meet-and-greet with cast and crew. (The event also includes a screening of In the Dirt, a short by Winston-Salem filmmaker Noah Craton.) 

Growing up in Lincolnton, O’Sheal initially pursued a music career. While serving as vocalist, guitarist and songwriter for folk-inflected alt-rock combo Planet-Sized-Planet (PSP), O’Sheal also produced and directed music videos for the band. 

After PSP amicably split in August 2024, O’Sheal gravitated towards filmmaking, working on productions written and directed by his childhood friend and fellow musician Richard Valentine, co-founder of Charlotte-based Aerolith Films.

O’Sheal knew he wanted to make his own film but felt he had no story to tell. Inspiration struck when O’Sheal saw Longlegs, the 2024 Osgood Perkins horror film featuring a reclusive hoarder who was also a deeply religious woman.

“She was the kind of person I grew up with,” says O’Sheal, who had assumed his experiences being raised among Southern Christians were universal. “I watched that movie and realized how off-putting religious people can come across to the general public.” 

O’Sheal aimed to tell a story in which bad things happen to good people, and to convey it in a way that could be seen as a senseless tragedy by a secular audience or as a depiction of God’s will by the religious community O’Sheal grew up with.

‘Blood Covenant’ depicts faith rather than the supernatural

Blood Covenant follows the downward spiral of ex-police cadet Patrick. Unable to express grief after his mother’s death, Patrick grows increasingly isolated and alienated from those around him. He seems to be visited by God in the form of his own doppelganger, and the deity commands him to sacrifice his best friend and roommate Aaron. In the meantime, Aaron and Patrick’s two religious siblings try to reach out and help Patrick to no avail.  

Unlike Longlegs, there are no demons or other supernatural powers at work in Blood Covenant. One reason for that may be that the filmmaker no longer accepts or believes the cosmology that dominated his youth.

“Adam and Eve, Moses and the Tower of Babel — at some point I understood that I didn’t believe these things to have happened and this to be the way the world works,” O’Sheall says. “[At the same time], I had to balance my critiques of some of the religious beliefs … with wanting to properly display respect, admiration and love for this community.”

Several scenes in the movie are informed by O’Sheal’s upbringing in that tightly knit community. A sequence set in the police cadet classroom is one of those, with an instructor telling the class about a man who murdered his wife and children after they discovered he was having an extramarital affair. 

The scene is based on a true story in which Roger Self purposely crashed his car into a restaurant where his family was eating, killing his daughter and daughter-in-law and injuring other family members. 

“A Sunday school teacher ran his car into the Surf & Turf Lodge in Bessemer City,” O’Sheal recalls. “He was caught cheating and felt very guilty and thought God had abandoned his family. He killed his family, hoping to leave them innocent and himself to be punished.”

The film’s pre-credit sermon about the drowned boy is also drawn from life. 

“The story he tells is one that I had heard over and over growing up,” O’Sheal says. “That is absolutely my background and I wanted to perfectly capture that experience and show it to people.” 

Jesse Lee O’Sheal creates horror on a budget

After writing the Blood Covenant script over the course of six months, O’Sheal raised enough funds to start shooting. Valentine and O’Sheal’s girlfriend Heaven Carter Williams invested in the project, but the bulk of the film’s $3,200 budget was self-financed by O’Sheal. 

However, the filmmaker cautions cinematic neophytes emboldened by his movie’s apparently low price tag.

“I called in every single favor I had, from every single person who could do something for cheap or for free that was high quality,” O’Sheal says. “I humbly approached the filmmaking community with no knowledge at all.”

The production kicked into gear when O’Sheal connected with casting director Banu Valladares. Valladares found most of the lead actors including Joshua Kornmayer, who plays Patrick, and Victor J. Martinez, who plays Aaron. The bulk of the film was shot by Valentine and cinematographer Kaylan Love, cofounder of Aerolith Films with Valentine.

Authentic locations added to the project’s scope and realism. The off-kilter sermon about the drowning was shot at Charlotte’s Memorial United Methodist Church. O’Sheal secured the location because he works for Emerald School of Excellence, located on the second floor of the church on Central Avenue. 

A specialized secondary institution, Emerald School supports adolescents recovering from substance use disorders, while addressing coexisting mental health conditions including anxiety, depression and ADHD.

Read more: Emerald School Continues to Expand its Services in East Charlotte (2022)

In a location coup, the production scored the rights to use Rutherford Regional Hospital in Rutherfordton for several scenes. Actress and coproducer Charlotte Ware Epley, who plays Patrick’s hospitalized mother in the film, helped secure the disused wing of the hospital.

“The hospital used one half of [the wing] for desk work and the other half was completely abandoned since COVID,” O’Sheal says.

After doing a fair share of YouTube investigation, O’Sheal meticulously planned and storyboarded each sequence, shooting one whenever he would raise enough money to do so. Each shoot would be followed by downtime as O’Sheal saved up enough money to shoot again. 

O’Sheal’s painstaking planning was necessary because the nascent filmmaker has been diagnosed with aphantasia, a condition that renders him unable to visualize mental images. In effect, his mind’s eye can only reveal a blank canvas.

“When I close my eyes, all I see is black,” O’Sheal offers.

Neither his condition nor his paycheck to paycheck microbudget kept O’Sheal from bringing his cinematic vision to life. Shooting began in April 2025 and wrapped in March 2026.

Why bad things happen to good people

When it comes to a movie’s ultimate meaning, O’Sheal believes all works of film and their interpretations belong to the audience. That said, he has a favorite read for Blood Covenant. 

In a naturalistic interpretation, Patrick is clearly suffering from psychosis and is in need of medical care, but the reading that O’Sheal favors is that the film takes place in a world where everything, including God commanding Patrick to kill, really happens.

“I don’t see this as any different than other instances where God instructs people in the Bible to commit heinous acts,” posits O’Sheal, who points to the holy book’s approval of the Israelites’ genocide against the Canaanites as an example.

“The movie displays a logic that I’m not saying all Christians believe, but many I grew up with do,” O’Sheal maintains. “[It’s that] the reason bad things happen to good people is because it is a necessary part of God’s plan. Whatever bad thing happens, it’s been written to happen, and it’s necessary for the ending that God has chosen for us.”

This explanation goes back to why O’Sheal may still love and respect people who embrace this deterministic worldview but can no longer share their deeply abiding faith.

“I find that way of thinking truly and particularly disturbing, so much so I based this entire plot off of building a world where it’s true,” he says.

It’s this stark depiction of an unflinching and unempathetic morality that makes Blood Covenant’s realistic story so disturbing. 

The film eschews demonizing the devout who bend to what they perceive as God’s will, but it doesn’t shy away from depicting the terror of a universe without agency where all must yield to that God’s violent grace. 

In that way, Blood Covenant is an unflinching look at a worldview that elevates piety over pity.