Ryan Mackfall

Ryan has worked in music video, live performance capture, and documentary for over a decade. He has filmed Slayer, Green Day, Train, Defeater, Caspian, Deftones, Mastodon and Robert Plant, shooting in venues including the Royal Albert Hall and Wembley stadium, in addition to major cities from Melbourne to Santiago to Los Angeles. His long-form music videos include collaborations with some of the world’s biggest artists and record labels through his company Crashburn. These productions have a total of over 100 million views through streaming platforms. and include music videos for Bruce Dickinson, Trivium, and The Amity Affliction. Backwoods, an adaptation of a short story by H.P. Lovecraft saw Ryan shift to narrative drama. The film premiered in the USA at the Rhode Island International Film Festival, winning the H.P. Lovecraft Award in 2019, before making its UK premiere at the BIFA and BAFTA qualifying London Short Film Festival in 2020. The film was subsequently licensed for release on BluRay by the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, and was included both in the film and as an extra on the BluRay release of Kier-La Janisse’s definitive folk horror documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched in 2021. Backwoods made its online premiere through the independent cinema platform Director’s Notes in 2022. Ryan is focused on narrative-driven stories with elements of cosmic or folk horror, bringing his dark fever dream unease into stories designed to stay with an audience long after they leave their seats. He is developing the screenplay of his first feature film, C-H-A-I-N, combining themes of time travel, folk horror, climate change, and biodiversity decline. The landscape of his native Cornwall, in the far south west of the UK, has informed and inspired his work, bringing forth primal energies and birthing stories that speak to growing modern fears of forced displacement and moral betrayal. He cites Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, David Fincher and Jonathan Glazer as influences.