Nicholas McCarthy

McCarthy directed the horror-thriller The Prodigy, released on February 8, 2019. The film was written by Jeff Buhler and starred Taylor Schilling and Jackson Robert Scott.

McCarthy was approached by French horror film directors Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo to make an English language version of their film Livid, but the project fell through. In 2016 an McCarthy was featured as part of the 17-disc Blu-ray set Feast, commemorating the life and films of Herschell Gordon Lewis. That same year he contributed a short film about the Easter Bunny to the horror film anthology Holidays.

At 2014's South by Southwest Film Festival the audience nominated home for an award in the Midnighters category.

His third short to play at Sundance, an 11-minute ghost story called The Pact, debuted in 2011. Shot in two days on a digital SLR camera, the short was optioned for a longer production. Within six weeks McCarthy expanded its script and was contracted to direct and edit the new feature-length version of the film. This 89-minute cut of The Pact premiered at Sundance in 2012 and was picked up for distribution by IFC. A wide release in the United Kingdom grossed $4 million, and the film was well received stateside with the Los Angeles Times later calling it "a crisply made haunted house movie that benefited from its grab-bag approach." McCarthy immediately got to work on his next film, originally titled Home, which premiered at Austin's South by Southwest Film Festival in 2014. Before distribution, McCarthy changed the film's name to At the Devil's Door at IFC's suggestion. That same year McCarthy served as executive producer on a sequel to The Pact starring the first film's original leads, but written and directed by Dallas Hallam and Patrick Horvath.

At the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, McCarthy's original short version of The Pact was nominated for a Short Filmmaking Award in the category of U.S. Dramatic Film.

In 2007 McCarthy married college friend Alexandra Lisee, a television, film and video producer who also produced McCarthy's first short for Sundance. They have a daughter, Agatha.

He soon formed the Alpha 60 Film Collective with fellow cinephiles Neil Matsumoto and Cecil Castellucci. Named for the fictional computer villain in Jean-Luc Godard's film Alphaville, the group collaborated on making numerous short films, which they showed at the Echo Park Film Center. McCarthy's 12th film for Alpha 60, entitled Maid, was envisioned as a Spanish language documentary that evolves into a Korean musical in under six minutes. Upon seeing the short, a scout from the Sundance Film Festival invited McCarthy to submit his work to Sundance. This invitation prompted McCarthy to make "Cry for Help," a short film about a drug dealer who dies and meets a zombie version of Jesus Christ in heaven. With family support and crowd-funding at parties, McCarthy and his friends raised the $15,000 needed for production, and the film screened at Sundance in 2005. His next short film, Chinese Box starring Sam Ball and Petra Wright, was shot for just $300 and played at Sundance in 2009. Each film toured the festival circuit and netted interest from producers, but no offers for further production.

In 2000 McCarthy moved to Los Angeles where he slept on a couch in his sister's home before renting a Sunset Boulevard apartment for $500 a month. The following year he worked briefly as an office assistant for a company that made video documentaries about the making of feature films, and McCarthy is credited for working on docs about The Silence of the Lambs, The Princess Bride, Starship Troopers and Robocop.

Nicolas McCarthy (born November 10, 1970) is an American film director and writer based in Los Angeles. A lifelong lover of film, McCarthy struggled for the first decades of his career, receiving his first break into the motion picture industry at the age of 40 with the release of his 2012 feature film The Pact. In 2014 he released At the Devil's Door, establishling himself primarily as a maker of horror film.