INTERVIEW: Profile of Chad Calek from ‘American Ghost Hunter’

Chad Calek is a revolutionary, the type of person who reinvents the rules and sidesteps the commonality of Hollywood. An alum of TV’s Paranormal State (both in front of and behind the camera), Calek has several new projects he is actively promoting in the coming weeks.

His collaboration with Ryan Buell, also from Paranormal State, is called American Ghost Hunter, a documentary currently available online; it will be released on DVD in September. This July, Calek will also head out to several cities to offer intimate screenings of his new film, A Blood Red Sky.

These next few weeks are the result of many years in the business and many years of realizing a revolution was necessary. “I was directing different music videos and commercial films,” Calek said recently during a phone interview. “The [first] film I ever actually wrote was a terrible film called The Private Public that was eventually bought by Showtime. It was a romantic comedy … first thing I ever did in my life, and, you know, that just kind of got me into the game.”

Shortly thereafter, Calek decided to combine his filmmaking with his passion for paranormal investigation. He freely admitted to growing up in a haunted house in a small town in Iowa, and the revisiting of his family’s negative “haunting” experience is the subject of American Ghost Hunter.

Calek first ventured into filming the paranormal with the well-received Terror Normal: The Ghost of the Waverly Hills Sanatorium. “[M]yself and eight of my friends went to Waverly Hills, and we did an excessively long investigation, a filmed investigation,” Calek said. “This would have been, gee, seven or eight years ago now. And we put it out online for free, and it took off. It was just people loved it. It logged an excessive amount of views, and one of the people who saw Terror Normal was Ryan Buell.”

Because of their friendship, Calek would have joined Buell for the first season of Paranormal State, the hit A&E series that has since ended, but he was busy elsewhere. “[Steven Spielberg] had got a hold of me first and hired me to work on the development of an online original series and social network called Rising, which was his paranormal online baby, and I worked on that for 18 months,” he said. “It was great for me because I had the opportunity obviously to work with somebody that I learned a tremendous amount from, and it was an incredible job. … That’s why I wasn’t a part of season one of Paranormal State because I was already under contract with Spielberg and Rising. So once that contract was up, Ryan was like, ‘Hey, you know, now you’re out of contract.’”

Calek said he was able to work with Buell on more than 25 episodes of Paranormal State. He eventually directed a few episodes in season four of the reality series and then became regular series director in season five. From there, it was a journey into his family’s past.

“How we got into American Ghost Hunter is, it is my real-life story,” he said. “It is something my family has been dealing with for a very long time, and it was something that I felt if documented properly could be extremely helpful for individuals who suffer negative hauntings. … I think hauntings are widely misunderstood. I think Hollywood does its job, which is to make everything very over-dramatic and very Halloweenish, if that’s a word, and I don’t think people had ever really seen what a real negative haunting is, what it looks like, what it feels like, the many different layers to it, many different layers of emotion and trust and fear and rationale that go out the window. There’s just a lot that goes on with it, and Ryan and I, while working on Paranormal State, were truthfully growing tired of kind of the formulaic approach to televised programming.”

Calek said making more episodes of Paranormal State did not interest him. He was looking for something real, raw and honest. The two producers made a conscious decision to step away from the Hollywood system of filmmaking, although there were attractive offers on the table.

“We had two different production companies come to us and try to buy the rights to my life story,” he said. “You can be in it, but you don’t direct it; you don’t produce it. We’ll just pay you, and then you have access to my family and all that stuff. … So we eventually just turned everybody down and said, ‘You know, when we’re done with season four of Paranormal State, we’re going to make this movie.’ And it was initially supposed to be kind of like this Sherlock Holmes-ian unraveling of my family’s past.”

What Calek discovered was perhaps more startling than what he expected. He had not realized that his family members were still, as he said, dealing with the negative haunting in Iowa. “I thought the activity and all the different things going on with my family had subsided,” he said. “But I discovered there, you know, on camera as it was going on, that there [is] a lot more to this story.”

After filming the documentary, Buell and Calek finished their run on Paranormal State. Calek said he was ready to leave the series, even “at what some deemed to be the height of the show’s success.” The decision let down some viewers, leaving them “romantically heartbroken,” as Calek put it. Venturing off into American Ghost Hunter offered him a chance to build a paranormal investigating / original filmmaking platform for movies that interested him and his increasingly robust fan base.

The result of this transition is A Blood Red Sky, Calek’s latest film that is set to tour the nation this July in select cities. Here’s how the director summed up the project: “It is a thinking man’s movie. It is a very layered, complex film that isn’t difficult to follow but is may be difficult to swallow at times. There’s just a lot going on, but [it] is a film essentially about the power of the mind, global consciousness … psychokinetic ability. Is it real? Does our mind really have the ability to alter reality? Is the book The Secret bullsh**, or is it real? If you put it out there in the world, does it come back to you?”

The formula of distributing A Blood Red Sky is based on American Ghost Hunter’s success. Rather than releasing the movie on TV or in theaters, Calek and his team tour the nation, screening the film and taking questions from the audience. It’s a model of distribution cemented by Kevin Smith and his success with Red State and his latest Jay and Silent Bob’s Super Groovy Cartoon Movie.

With American Ghost Hunter, besides the 77-city tour, “we built our own online digital distributor, so you can watch it on pay per view on your computer, and we just now opened up preorders for the special edition DVD, which will be out on Sept. 18.”

That tour averaged 50 to 100 people per night, and the results were impressive to Calek. “It mattered to people,” he said. “It was hard-hitting.” The upcoming tour for A Blood Red Sky promises more fans.

“And that really kind of tells us that people are liking what we’re doing,” he said. “In four months time, with A Blood Red Sky, the trailer has over 110,000 views. So everything that we did on American Ghost Hunter seems to be translating very well to the public on a much larger scale with A Blood Red Sky, which is incredibly heartwarming because we are truly independent, 100 percent. Everything we do is hand to mouth. It’s do-it-yourself ethics. And to see the public embrace that true independent spirit is something that I hold very, very near and dear to my heart. I am very, very proud of not only the films we’re making, but I’m very proud of the process and the way in which we have essentially fired Hollywood and built our own machine.”

It appears this formula of creating and distributing without outside pressure is the future for Calek and company.

“I’m not going to finance the film, take all the risk, and suffer and bleed over it for two-three years, and have them give you crumbs on the front end, nothing on the back end if it’s ever successful,” he said. “I don’t want to ask anybody for permission to make the film. I sure the f*** don’t want to ask anybody for permission to release one. So I figured, you know what, I would rather take my time, build my own machine, work really hard so these two hands determine my future.”

He added: “I shouldn’t have to let somebody else completely take over everything and control it. That’s the most important aspect. After working in television for so many years on Paranormal State, I’m just done with the censorship stuff, man. I’m done with the TV stuff. I’m done with a table full of executives arguing over the stupidest sh** imaginable. I’m done being told you can’t be who you are, and you can’t laugh in this scene, you look too happy in this scene, and oh my God, you said a swear word here. It’s just I’m done with all of it. That’s not who I am by nature. So for me, it made a lot of sense to go back in and build something that I was proud of, that I believe could become its own baby.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

American Ghost Hunter is currently available online by clicking here.

Revised: July 2014