If an independent, low-budget horror flick has come out of Pittsburgh in recent years, chances are Steve Rudzinski was behind it.
Rudzinski, a local filmmaker with a long list of credits and a Pittsburgh City Paper Best Of PGH win to his name, recently released Curtains for Christmas. His newest — now available to view on his Patreon and streaming soon on Tubi — is a real seasonal head-spinner, coming out in the summer, but ready for spooky season, while skewering (literally) Christmas films.
Curtains for Christmas centers around Holly (Aleen Isley), a woman obsessed with holiday rom-coms, who meets a man who shares a similar love. But Holly has a deadly mission to model her life after her favorite films, through violent means if necessary. Rudzinski praises the film for having “a female killer as the lead as well as some positive LGBTQ+ rep with two of the featured couples.”
For Rudzinski, the film, which is equal parts silly, referential, and gory, sometimes all at once, was a happy accident.
“2024 was supposed to be a year off for me,” Rudzinski, who, beyond writing and directing, also acts in, produces, and edits many of his films, tells City Paper. He adds that he just finished “what felt like a rapid-fire film-and-release schedule” of several other projects: CarousHELL 2, Amityville Christmas Vacation, Shingles the Movie, and CarousHELL 3.
“I wanted to take a year off relaxing and enjoying the results of my work, not having to worry about the process of pre-production, production, and post-production,” he says.
But when Isley brought up the idea for a female slasher based on holiday rom-coms, he couldn’t resist. “Before she even finished pitching it to me I was already signing because I knew this was such a fun film that we had to make,” he says.
The love for movies and, more specifically, the love for making movies, drove much of the process behind Curtains for Christmas. It also presented a challenge for Rudzinski, who had to stick to one genre while paying homage to another, the latter of which required some research.
“It's hard to name specific titles because Aleen and I both watched dozens and dozens of Christmas rom-coms leading up to writing the script, not to mention I just already consider Christmas movies as a favorite genre, so I was probably influenced by many more movies than I'm even aware of,” Rudzinski explains.
There’s a clear love for the process in Rudzinski’s work, a desire to fight for making films you love with people you love. He cites Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead as the moment he realized massive budgets and studio backing are not always necessary for making something commercially viable, as well as creative and entertaining.
The spirit and the consistency that infuses Rudzinski’s work are refreshing, especially at a time when Pittsburgh’s film scene is trying to get back to where it was pre-COVID. Rudzinski’s commitment to funding and shooting projects in the area — he says Curtains for Christmas was shot in Pittsburgh, Bridgeville, Coraopolis, and Washington — also creates jobs for local actors, camera operators, effects artists, musicians, and other filmmaking professionals. More importantly, it demonstrates that anyone can do this, which, ideally, contributes to making a city an attractive place for creatives and artists.
As Rudzinski put it, “Even when I'm hired by a client to produce and direct a film, I'm arguing for shooting my films in the Pittsburgh area.”
Rudzinski says 2025 will mark his 15th year of making independent films. When he first started filmmaking in 2010, his original goal was to have 10 releases in the next 10 years (a goal he already surpassed, he notes.) He chalks this up to a system he believes allows him and his crew to produce films in a reasonable amount of time and within a small budget, and this applies to Curtains for Christmas.
“Like always, I came up with an outline knowing what I have to work with, what amount of money I reasonably could raise, then wrote a great script that I know ahead of time how I'm going to film,” he explains. “We stick to our schedule, we finish on time, and if I'm editing myself I'm usually doing that at the same time as filming. So that also helps prevent there being a long period of time between shooting and release. I think all of this adding up is what helps me be consistent with releases.”
