(short experimental animation, in production)

A 200-year old pub in moss-covered rural eastern Pennsylvania with a backyard full of canal workers’ corpses; a field of mysterious small hissing gas geysers in Acadia, Maine; a former Baptist Punishment Yard in Virginia replete with whipping posts; a small corner of Salem, Massachusetts; a patch of Idaho littered with unusually pointy rocks; Ft. Worth, Texas’ infamous tenderloin district, haunted by Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and Butch Cassidy — more than fifteen unusual places in the United States are - or once were - named “Devil’s Half Acre.”

DEVIL’s HALF ACRE offers a haunting, humorous, disturbing and moving cartography of an American colloquial institution. Filmmaker Enid Baxter Blader will create a 3-minute short animation featuring hand-painted interpretations of each site’s uniquely devilish features.

Moving from west to east, each place’s animation will be preceded by a hand painted-animated title. Using a mixture of antiquated stop-frame animation techniques and shot through a 100-year old box camera, the piece will move through visual spaces created as mediations on each place.

Blader, who grew up outside Devil’s Half Acre, PA, sets her delicate imagery against a strong, original score.