How to make a horror film with no money, no script, and lots of friends

“It started as a simple idea — this nurse brings cake to weird people, and they die — and then it became something else entirely, this kind of dark, psychological, surreal journey.”

I’m speaking via video call with Rob James and Bruce McClure, the filmmakers behind District Nurse, an independent horror feature first released in 2017 but only widely available online in 2025. I stumbled upon it by accident — McClure is currently a public relations specialist who had reached out to Design Observer with a client pitch, and it was on his LinkedIn profile. Intrigued, I clicked. Quickly transfixed, I watched it in one sitting. It felt like I’d discovered a rare and unfamiliar artifact, though try as I might, I struggled to summarize it to my colleagues. I asked McClure for a meeting right away.

It was James, who is based in Gloucester, England, near where much of the shooting took place, who took the first stab at explaining, starting with the nurse-and-cake premise. After a few polite blinks from me, McClure reassured me that there is no one right way to describe the film. “It’s homemade, it’s lo-fi, shows you what you can do with not much money, not much talent, some might say. It got laughs at the cinema because it is dark — it’s meant to be humorous as well,” he said.

In addition to defying easy explanation, the final cut eschews traditional structure, mixing surreal images with a narrative that loosely follows a couple set on murdering children. (Or are they?) There’s a nod to post-partum depression, a detective hot on the trail of something, kidnapped women, a missing baby, and madness involving plastic dolls and entrails. There’s also a film within the film, featuring actual person-on-the-street interviews of good-natured national park visitors earnestly sharing “reports” of a woman who gave birth to a sea creature in the California desert.

Who wouldn’t want to meet the minds that came up with all of that?

The film was a labor of love that turned into real labor; what was expected to be a four-day shoot for a ten-minute short turned into 24 shooting days of wrangling a lively amateur cast over two challenging years. Editing the unwieldy footage took another three years, a complex team sport that found McClure sleeping on James’ floor more nights than he’d care to recall.

“I should say that this is not a way to make a film,” says James. “In no sense of the word — trying to make a film without a script.” There were scripted snippets, scenes, and no shortage of ideas, of course. “Bruce wrote a lot of dialogue. But in terms of a start, middle, and an end? No.”

District Nurse was entirely self-funded, with practical effects and natural locations (mud, fields, caves, carcasses, decaying houses) lending a grim realism. Without a budget, there were no cost overruns, but the creators’ artistic drive to follow their inspirations compelled them to keep going and going and going.

 “We had bits — lines, images from our minds, the deepest recesses—and then based on what we’d shot, we started to weave some serious sort of weirdness together,” says McClure. The process became so unexpectedly (should it have been?) grueling that until our interview, the pair hadn’t spoken much since the film’s release. “There was some friction,” says McClure, with an infectious grin. James shrugs. “Shooting it was a hell of a lot of fun… Editing took a hell of a long time. Once it was done, I just wanted a bit of my life back. But enough time has passed — we could revisit another project,” he says.

McClure, who grew up and still lives in Scotland, claims unique horror bona fides. 

“I’m in Wicker Man country… the original [horror film] from the 70s was shot around here, so I’m coming to you live and direct from those environs.” In fact, the “wicker man,” a giant straw figure which is burned as part of a cult ritual in the lauded film, was torched and shot at the edge of what was once his grandfather’s property. These early experiences imprinted on McClure. (In fact, one reviewer at the time called the film, “The Wicker Man on ketamine.”)

“This area had something. It’s very rural, lots of farmland,” he says, citing a local culture some outsiders consider “weird.” And it can be creepy by day. “There are very few scenes in The Wicker Man that are at night because horror — the real horror — exists during the day. That’s why District Nurse, other than a shot of the moon, is all daylight.” 

Can you edit? Do you have lights? 

Their creative collision began around 2011, when James, then, as now, a busy videographer, responded to McClure, not yet a public relations person, in his particular hour of need.

“I was running a record label, and there was a song called “Olympic Torch,” by Antoni Maiovvi, who’s a real good guy and lives in Connecticut now.” McClure pauses as James nods. “Anyway, I wanted a music video for this particular track, in the run-up to the 2012 London Olympics.” Script in hand, he’d hired a videographer who bailed at the last minute. “I put an ad somewhere, and Rob picked up.” McClure got to the point. “Can you edit? Do you have lights?” James, a jack-of-all-filmmaking, ticked every box. “And best of all, he was free.”

They ended up creating a six-minute film, shot over 48 hours, that incorporated a variety of unusual elements and starred a veritable flash mob of amateur actors. “Paddling pools full of baked beans, a family having an English breakfast, a flying sausage…and there are ladies in bikinis in the paddling pool….and then we turned it into a revenge thriller with a slow-motion shootout,” explains McClure, asking James to add his thoughts.

James picks up the story. “No,” he says. “It started with a robbery in a shop, and then it ended with a massacre. And then in the middle, it was just good fun, very light, really.” 

Both versions are correct, yet both fall short in some respects. 

“Olympic Torch” owes a debt to the campy, irreverent UK music scene both cherish, but showed early signs of the dark, quasi-comedic alliance yet to come. (Spoiler: it is a nod to the Olympic spirit only in the broadest possible sense. As in, not really at all.) The audience at local venues laughed in all the right spots — the “shootout” was conducted with ketchup squirt bottles, for example, which the pair took as validation for their narrative instincts.

More short films, club promos, and music videos followed, including “The Dagger Brothers ‘Beast Tour 2009’ Rockumentary, actually a 2012 mockumentary, “which was just us wandering around speaking to people, interviewing people on the street, and just getting into all sorts of scrapes, really,” says James. 

Wandering around and speaking to people is a signature strength of theirs. 

All of their work has been done on the cheap and routinely draws on a community of good-natured friends (and their kids) as actors and crew who just, well, go with it. Whatever “it” is. “It’s amazing — in a good way —what you can get people to do if you just ask, especially if they’ve already signed up for your project.”

Then came Sight, a short film released in 2013 (tagline: shot for £20), and their first foray into legitimate horror. “It’s a really, really sinister little short film featuring the same kids from the ‘Olympic Torch‘ video, who also appear in District Nurse,” says McClure. “We’ve worked with them so long, they’re basically adults now,” says James. “We paid them in sweeties, I think.” 

There’s empathy under the horror

For all its surrealist aspirations, District Nurse includes a thread of true-life tragedy. 

The film’s opening voiceover is a police report, adapted from a real event in 2015, in which the local Bristol police enlisted the public for help finding a missing woman and newborn infant. The story hit close to home for the filmmakers. “It’s taken from an actual police transcript — the missing woman — we knew her, she had appeared in one of our earlier films,” says McClure. The woman had a history of psychiatric illness and had left the maternity hospital unexpectedly with her daughter. Both were later found dead. 

McClure was moved to add the element to the film already in progress, which both extended the shoot and deepened the message. “It haunted me, so we used that transcript at the start,” McClure explains. Also, his mother shared a diary entry with him that revealed her struggle with post-partum depression. “She wrote about wanting to throw me out a window,” he says. “Those two threads — grief, fear, and madness — fused together in the film.” Later, an audience member at an early screening asked him if he was a misogynist. “I said, ‘No! My mother lived it.’ There’s empathy under the horror.”

That said, McClure is surprisingly squeamish.

James likes sci-fi and isn’t put off by a little blood and guts. “Alien is a favorite,” he says. But McClure doesn’t have the constitution for it. “I haven’t watched The Substance because I don’t like gore,” he says. “I can write horrible things, but I don’t really like seeing it.” He respects the genre and enjoys using film to explore human darkness, though he’s quick to say their work, while meaningful, doesn’t compare to real life. “The real horror is all around us… traffic accidents, civil war in Sudan at the moment,” he says. “All the stuff we’ve been through in history — the horror is already here.”

McClure only recently posted District Nurse on social media and he regrets not sharing it earlier. Despite what must have initially felt like an impossibly long stretch from release date to first media interview, he and James immediately lapsed into a comfortable banter during our call, finishing each other’s sentences, ping-ponging back and forth with inside jokes, memories, and funny anecdotes. And now, after time apart and a post-pandemic period of steady employment and relative calm, the pair appear to be gearing up for their next lo-fi adventure. 

Perhaps a sequel?

Something is in the works, possibly for 2026, says McClure.  “We do have a basic idea. It will be shot around [Scotland] because you can do a lot in this area — there are lots of decrepit buildings and weird little places.” Until then, District Nurse continues to reach new audiences, gathering fresh fans for the filmmakers. Count me among them. There’s something about its free-range style that feels oddly perfect for these times; a truly handmade offering, deeply considered, filled with unselfconscious performances, now set free in an increasingly artificially generated world. “It’s fair to say that it looks so much better than I thought it would,” says James. “And actually getting it finished was a real achievement. There are so many projects that don’t get finished.”