Ryan Nielsen was between projects, reading a collection of Shirley Jackson’s short stories, when he reached “The Renegade” and a single scene stopped him: a woman learning from a neighbor that her dog has been killing their chickens.
“When I was reading it, it was just like, I want to write this,” Nielsen told The Nerd Wire. “That moment just felt very cinematic to me.”
That scene became A Country Dog, a 22-minute short Nielsen wrote, directed and edited, which had its world premiere at AFI FEST on Oct. 23 in the festival’s Short Film Competition. In AFI’s description, a young family moves from the city to an isolated rural community, where their dog is accused of killing a neighbor’s chickens. Nielsen and producer Frank D’Argenio spoke with The Nerd Wire over Zoom a few hours before the screening.
A story that sounded like home
Nielsen had read “The Lottery” when he was younger but little else of Jackson’s work. What drew him to “The Renegade,” first collected in The Lottery and Other Stories in 1949, was how familiar its people sounded. He grew up in Iowa, and the townspeople reminded him of the people he grew up around, “for better or worse.”
He was careful not to turn them into villains. The film, like the story, is about people who “hold strongly to their values, whatever that may be,” he said. Reading their voices while living in Los Angeles was weirdly nice. “It felt like a world that I knew,” he said.
That familiarity decided where the film would be shot: just outside Nielsen’s hometown in Iowa. The production briefly considered Illinois, but Nielsen didn’t know the area or its people well enough to feel right representing them. “I know these people, I know this land,” he said. On a short-film budget, it also helped that nearly every house and store they shot in belonged to someone they knew, or someone a friend knew.
Bringing in the Jackson family
Nielsen started with a direct adaptation, just to see Jackson’s story on the page in screenplay form. As the drafts went on, he realized it would need to change. The story had to be moved into the present day, and much of Jackson’s tension lives in her character’s head. “Sometimes it’s really hard to just do direct adaptation of a story because so much is inner monologue,” he said. The question became how to create that feeling through the camera and the sound.
Once they had a script they liked, the filmmakers approached a publicist who works with the Jackson estate. That led to a long Zoom call with the family about Jackson’s work, the script and how it differed from the original. Laurence Jackson Hyman, Jackson’s son, who manages his mother’s literary estate, is an executive producer on the film.
The family knew the film was going somewhere slightly different. “Our ending is a little bit different. Our family’s a little bit different,” Nielsen said. They were supportive anyway. “They understood that when you’re taking a story and adapting it to the screen, you have to make changes,” he said.
‘Midwest nice’
Jackson’s horror is quiet: neighbors, gossip, the pressure to fit in. Nielsen said the challenge was making that frightening when audiences are used to horror built on loud sounds and creatures around the corner.
His answer was to make people sit with a conversation. Put two people in a room and let the audience slowly realize how differently they see the world, and how much pressure one is putting on the other. He traced it to something he knows from home. He called it Midwest nice: people really are nice, he said, “but sometimes things can be really coded.”
Some of the unease is technical, he said, built through lens choices, settings and the houses they found. The rest came from the cast, who read both Jackson’s story and the script and came to understand the tone. Getting everyone on the same page about what kind of film they were making is sometimes the hardest part, he said. The cast includes Gaya Verneuil, Lily Knight, J. Downing, Steve Kennevan, Joel Hade and Allison McBride, according to AFI.
Nielsen said it was a feeling he was naturally suited to. “It’s just a kind of unsettling feeling that I like when I go to movies,” he said.
Seventeen inches of snow
Asked about the hardest part of production, D’Argenio allowed that the dog might have been one of them, but said the bigger hurdle was the weather. They shot in November, when there usually isn’t much snow on the ground or temperatures below freezing.
Nielsen picked up the story. The plan was a dreary landscape. Then, five days before filming began, a storm dropped 17 inches of snow on the area. Their first fear was continuity: what if it melted between shooting days? It didn’t. Their first day of shooting was 14 degrees below zero, he said, and the warmest was about six below.
Instead of fighting it, they rewrote around it. His wife, a production designer, helped rework the look, and Nielsen moved the story to the holidays. “This movie takes place at Christmas now,” he recalled telling her. They changed parts of the script, the design and the art direction to match.
He called it one of those happy accidents that make a movie more than it was meant to be. “I can’t imagine it looking any different than it looks now,” he said.
More Jackson, and an Iowa mystery
Nielsen isn’t done with Jackson. He said he and his collaborators are writing a limited anthology series based on her stories, with each 40- to 50-minute episode adapting a different tale, set in different periods and places. The stories vary in tone, he said, but share the same lingering unease as A Country Dog.
They are also developing a feature about the disappearance of Jodi Huisentruit, the Mason City, Iowa, morning news anchor who vanished on her way to work in June 1995. The case remains unsolved. Nielsen described it as part investigative thriller, part slow-building horror about the paranoia and dread that settle over a community and the people who knew her. If A Country Dog is about a community turning on a dog, he said, this one asks what happens when it is a person who has disappeared.
A Country Dog screens in AFI FEST’s Short Film Competition as part of Shorts Program: Live Action 2.
More from The Nerd Wire: AFI FEST 2026: Lineup & Coverage
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