Trivia / The Sudbury Devil

• Actor-Shared Background: Drew Shuptar-Rayvis appears as an Algonquin warrior in a flashback. Outside of filmmaking, Shuptar-Rayvis is an Algonquin historical consultant and living historian, and much of his garb and accoutrements would be sourced from his profession where he wears traditional dress.
• Creator-Chosen Casting: According to Rakich, he wrote the film's script with all of the actors for each character already in mind, and it was then simply a matter of getting all of them on board, which he did.
• Descended Creator: As with most of his body of work, writer and director Andrew Rakich appears late in the film as Mr Gavett, and also plays the Day Star's physical form.
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • The actors describe how making the film was a physically exhausting shoot and how they very quickly began to share the understanding of the misery their characters felt in the cold, dark, rainy woods, which only lent itself to their performances.
  • Linnea Gregg and Kendra Unique were instructed to "hunt" one of the other cast members while remaining out of sight during filming (they ultimately chose Benton Guinness) in order to better assume the role and mindset of two witches stalking their prey in the woods before they began filming their scenes.
• Invisible Advertising: Due to it being a micro-budget indie movie which didn't receive a wide theatrical realease and wasn't released on any streaming service, basically all promotion for the film has come from history YouTube channels (AKA Andrew Rakich's friends and acquaintances) reviewing the film and from Rakich himself on his own channel. On top of that, only a small portion of Rakich's dedicated YouTube audience was actively following the film's release, leading him to create a minisode of his most popular series Checkmate, Lincolnites! in order to spread the word to his larger audience.
• No Budget: The film's budget was less than $4500, not even meeting its crowdfunding campaign of $6000 due to the atrocious luck of launching right as the COVID-19 Pandemic hit, which Rakich compares to launching a crowdfunding campaign in December of 1941. At the same time in a tremendous stroke of luck, Rakich's YouTube channel blowing up after the fourth episode of Checkmate, Lincolnites! brought with it a steady stream of donations, narrowly giving the team the micro-budget they needed.
• Production Posse:
  • Both Linnea Gregg and Kendra Unique previously worked with Rakich in his web series Frozen '50s Man. Additionally, Unique and Rakich first worked together on Rakich's first feature film, Alien, Baby!
  • The film's editor Eduardo Urueña co-directed Alien, Baby! with Rakich.
  • Benton Guinness was an old friend of Rakich's from acting school, and he appears in a photograph in costume as Col. Vincent "Clawhammer" Witcher in Atun-Shei Films' video on him.
• Schedule Slip: Director Andrew Rakich was planning on shooting the film in 2020, but the COVID-19 Pandemic postponed its filming until 2021, and they were forced to pause production several times. It finally premiered on September 9th and 10th 2023 after a year in post-production.
• Troubled Production:
  • As detailed under No Budget, the film almost didn't get funded to begin with due to the tremendous improvidence of trying to crowdfund its budget right at the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic. If the Atun-Shei Films YouTube channel hadn't taken off in 2020, the film might have been delayed well into the 2020s or even become Vapor Ware instead of the already substantial Schedule Slip it suffered anyhow.
  • While filming, the crew had to wrangle with the weather being uncooperative, the woods of New England being bitterly cold and generally a pretty oppressive atmosphere to shoot a film in. Most notably, Carl Sailor (Reverend Russell) collapsed from lack of oxygen while they were filming Goodenow's description of what he saw in the woods, which scared the shit out of everyone and led to some dark jokes about the film potentially having The Production Curse due to the witches of New England being displeased with the crew filming in the woods. Sailor was ultimately ok and just needed some rest.
• What Could Have Been: In earlier drafts of the script, Russell was an overt sexual predator and generally more villainous figure. In the final film, he's more of a walking representation of the oppressiveness and complacency of Puritan high society and his personal negative traits are heavily downplayed.
• Write What You Know: Many of the character names are lifted directly from gravestones in Sudbury Cemetery that Rakich was already familiar with, including one which merely says "Flora—a colored woman".

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