INTERVIEW: The Prolific Bruce Wemple Isn’t Waiting For the Cavalry
**This article originally appeared in our May 2026 issue**
Stills from “Capture” provided by artist
“Deep down, I just want to make sure that whatever project I’m making is ultimately better than the last one, and ideally, significantly better.”
Bruce Wemple, with his recurring team of actors and crew, has carved out a niche for himself in the film landscape of 2026 by producing a steady stream of low-budget horror and sci-fi flicks. His most recent film, Capture, is Wemple’s 11th directorial credit since 2016.
Humble Beginnings
A Capital Region native and graduate of Bethlehem High School, Wemple did the film school thing at SUNY Oneonta and, like many artists, moved to Brooklyn looking for opportunities to get his start in filmmaking.
Also like many artists, the beginnings were inauspicious. He got a job at a production company making corporate training videos (you know the ones).
Their subject matter is perhaps best illustrated by the season two episode of The Office, “Sexual Harassment,” wherein Michael Scott renounces his status as office comedian. Of course, immediately after doing so he makes a “that’s what she said” joke after Jim goads him with “You always left me satisfied and smiling.”
So, Wemple was making sexual harassment training videos while living in Brooklyn and, let’s just say he wasn’t exactly fulfilling his creative ambitions. Nevertheless, he had a job and was able to meet a lot of people while working on these compliance videos.
“It was probably [around] 2015 that I wanted to make a feature, so I collaborated with a bunch of those people,” Wemple explained. “It was one of those things where I maxed out all my credit cards.”
This became Wemple’s debut feature film, Altered Hours. The sci-fi mystery follows a protagonist who is suspected in the disappearance of a girl he’s never met.
“I don’t think it ultimately changed my career or anything,” Wemple continued. “Maybe in the sense of meeting people and the experience, but I was still very much in debt and working my way out [of it] over the next couple of years.”
For his next feature film, Wemple decided to rent a cabin in the woods and make a horror movie The Evil Dead-style. He pitched a bunch of the actors he had met with promises of no money, but beer in the fridge, and together with his audio engineer and composer, Nate VanDeusen, they just went ahead and made the thing.
“That was really a game-changer for me because I realized there are a lot of hoops you don’t necessarily need to jump through,” Wemple explained. “[Altered Hours] was us trying to do everything by the book, versus this one where we said, ‘Let’s just go out, make a movie and see what happens.’”
While it wasn’t exactly guerilla-style filmmaking — they had permits and weren’t doing anything illegal — this new approach, put forth on 2019’s Lake Artifact, would inform their mindset moving forward and help Wemple and his crew become much more prolific over the next seven years.
Monstrous and a Distribution Deal
Anna Shields, who Wemple had worked with on his previous two features, had written a monster movie script that Wemple wanted to tackle for their next project. The crew headed north to Whitehall, New York — the self-proclaimed “Big Foot sanctuary” — and decided to incorporate Big Foot into the script as the monster, beginning work on Monstrous.
Now, if you’ll take a moment to recall the movie landscape during the late 2010s, monster movies were all the rage. In 2017, Tom Cruise had just done The Mummy, which is an unwatchable piece of trash, but it still made over $400 million dollars at the box office. In 2018, there was A Quiet Place (fuck yes), Annihilation (criminally underrated and also, fuck yes) and The Meg (an eminently rewatchable and enjoyable piece of trash). In 2019… you get the point. Monster movies were having a moment.
“That was the first time something got to a sales agent,” Wemple said. “They told us, ‘I know someone that can make money off this because it’s a monster movie,’ and they asked us if we would be interested in doing more. That’s the first time anyone ever offered us money to go make something.”
They got together with Uncork’d Entertainment and made seven feature-length films between 2020 and 2024, including 2020’s The Retreat, a movie about the Wendigo that takes place during a hiking trip in the Adirondacks and 2023’s The Tomorrow Job, a sci-fi movie where Albany and Schenectady provide the backdrop for time-travelling hijinks.
Corrupted Footage
“In 2024, we were working on this movie called The North Witch and we were shooting it in this really creepy location," Wemple recalled.
While filming, the crew discovered a trap door hiding underneath a couch and upon further investigation, found that it led down into an abandoned cave. (As Wemple is telling me this story, I feel like he and his crew stumbled into the plot of Zach Cregger’s Barbarian. Luckily, there was no deformed monster down there, just an abandoned cave.)
“When I was editing the movie, there was this moment where I’m editing in a dark room and there was a corrupted piece of footage that was all distorted and it scared the bejesus out of me. The weird thing is, I shot a Christmas movie with that same camera and same setup about a month after that and everything was perfectly fine, so something was weird [in that house].”
Wemple took this experience of the footage turning on him and built it into a horror movie that was largely influenced by the Japanese remakes he grew up with like The Ring and The Grudge.
This idea blossomed into Capture, which follows the story of an orphaned woman, played by Kaitlyn Lunardi, who inherits a home from the parents that gave her up for adoption when she was a child. Upon exploring the home, she finds a camcorder and a series of home movies that reveal some pretty disturbing shit about the parents she never knew.
As has been the case with many of Wemple’s projects, the Capital Region and surrounding areas play a key role in providing the backdrop for the film. The opening of the movie was shot at Madison Pour House in Albany and then transitions to the house Lunardi’s character inherits, which was shot at a house Wemple and his team found in Tannersville in the Catskills.
“The location is always the most stressful and hardest thing to find,” Wemple said. “Because it’s a haunted house movie, you’re looking for a place that’s going to define the entire movie.”
The Cavalry Isn’t Coming…
Wemple has been pumping out movies at a pace on par with the run that Nicolas Cage has been on (56 since 2011). I asked Wemple if there’s any concern about diluting the quality of the film, or if he had any thoughts on taking on a different model?
“The goal is always to try and make the next step up, but it’s not the only goal. I think that’s the trap a lot of people fall into — thinking that there is something around the corner and then they’re going to be making ‘real’ movies.
“Mark Duplass had this great speech where he’s talking about how the cavalry isn’t coming. He said, ‘There’s never a moment where it feels like now I’ve arrived.’ Deep down, I just want to make sure that whatever project I’m making is ultimately better than the last one, and ideally, significantly better.”
For the next project, Wemple wants to take a lot of the aspects he loved about Capture and bring them along. He was especially proud of the sound design and the way they really leaned into the elements of a haunted house; how every footstep can signal oncoming danger. He hopes to be shooting his next movie this summer and has no grand designs beyond making sure that he improves upon what he did with Capture.
Capture is available to rent or buy on Prime Video or wherever you digitally rent your movies. Following the rental window on VOD, it will then be available for streaming. To watch any of Wemple’s other projects, follow his IMDb page to see where they are streaming.