The Drowning Place, the new supernatural psychological horror film written and directed by Christopher J. Hall, is heading to the Catalina Film Festival, where it will screen on Saturday, September 26, 2026, at 9:30 a.m.
Set within the universe of Whisper Lake, the film follows Ella, a woman haunted by the guilt of failing to prevent a drowning years earlier.
When she returns to the lake where the tragedy took place, she discovers that the past may not be as buried as she believed. The water seems to remember the secret she has spent years trying to suppress, and something beneath the surface appears ready to reclaim what it believes belongs to it.
Blending supernatural horror with psychological tension, The Drowning Place uses its isolated lakeside setting to explore memory, grief and the ways unresolved guilt can take on a life of its own.
As Ella is forced to confront what happened, the lake becomes more than simply the backdrop of the story. It emerges as a presence in its own right — part witness, part judge and part threat.
The Catalina Film Festival screening marks another stop on the film’s festival journey, introducing the project to audiences as Hall continues expanding the mythology first established through Whisper Lake.
Written and directed by Hall, The Drowning Place is produced by Maris Lidaka and stars Geri Courtney-Austein. Rachel Dusa serves as cinematographer, while the original score was composed by Dario Forzato.
The film initially developed as an exploration of the larger world surrounding Whisper Lake before evolving into a standalone story centered on one woman, a devastating memory and a body of water that refuses to let the past remain hidden.
For Hall, the project also continues a career that has moved across film, television and digital entertainment.
He wrote the pilot and directed three seasons of the horror series Fight of the Living Dead, which accumulated more than 20 million views, and directed four seasons of Summer Break, the AT&T-sponsored YouTube series that generated hundreds of millions of views.
A Los Angeles native who studied theater at Kenyon College, Hall began his entertainment career as a production assistant on The Sopranos. He later worked in visual effects on The Matrix trilogy and Constantine and served as an assistant to director Breck Eisner on The Crazies.
With The Drowning Place, Hall returns to horror through a story that treats guilt not simply as an emotion, but as something capable of becoming tangible and impossible to escape.
Completed in the United States in 2026, the English-language film continues its festival run with its upcoming Catalina Film Festival presentation.
The Drowning Place screens Saturday, September 26, 2026, at 9:30 a.m. as part of the Catalina Film Festival.