About.
Myskatonic is a genre film, television, and media production company formed in 2019 by writer/director Ryan Mackfall and writer/producer Kingsley Marshall to produce the award-winning Backwoods, an adaptation of a short story by H.P. Lovecraft. Since then, we’ve produced short films, documentaries and music videos for major record labels, and developed a slate of feature films, episodic drama, and documentary series for television, with several writers under option.
At Myskatonic, we’re passionate about the power of genre filmmaking conventions and how these can serve as a Trojan horse to convey political ideas. Across our slate, we’re interested in exploring the feelings of displacement and change that dominate global political discourse. While Backwoods, Whisperer, and The Birdwatcher use horror conventions to drill into the origins of xenophobia, Howlsavla Gwav, C-H-A-I-N, There Were Nine Children Left, Analogue, and ghost story anthology series Tales of the Waning Light align elements of folk horror – the power of nature and the rural landscape – to the existential dread of a generation faced with the danger of technological shifts and catastrophic climate change. In our work, we ask our audience to consider how one character’s loss of identity is directly related to the accelerating loss of land and plant life, the drivers of global migration, and how our unending demand for natural resources directly aligns with a diminishing sense of ourselves and our communities.
In our documentary work, we look inward at film itself, at Hammer’s use of Cornwall as a setting and location in our special feature, The Land Demands Blood, a commission for John Gore Studios, and, in the series Nevermade, where we consider the working practices of filmmakers and their unrealised projects.
What connects these stories is how our characters look behind what initially appears innocuous – a book, a recording, a retreat, a map, a drawing, a screenplay - to pull the curtain on reality and reveal their own fears and prejudices, and those of our audience.
Ryan Mackfall has over 15 years of experience in documentary and music video and live performance, working with some of the biggest global artists (including Nicole Scherzinger, Bruce Dickinson, Green Day, Train, Trivium, and Caspian) and shooting in the world’s most recognizable venues, including Villa Park, Wembley Stadium and the Royal Albert Hall, in addition to documentary work for organisations including Virgin and the European Space Agency.
Kingsley Marshall has over a decade of experience across a range of production roles in music video, shorts, and documentaries, including the archive documentaries Atlas Pool (Jane Darke and Andrew Tebbs 2025) and The Land Demands Blood (Ryan Mackfall 2026), together with a slate of feature films as executive or associate producer including Rose of Nevada (Mark Jenkin 2025), Ebony and Ivory (Jim Hosking 2024), Enys Men (Mark Jenkin 2023), Long Way Back (Brett Harvey 2022), The Tape (Martha Tilston 2021), and Wilderness (Justin John Doherty 2017). Working with writer Lucy Grace, Kinglsey has adapted her original story There Were Nine Children Left for the screen. He has also composed music for narrative shorts and documentaries, and is currently working on the score for the feature film The Crossing (Peter Stray 2026).
Myskatonic is committed to developing new and emerging talent and increasing the visibility of the UK’s regional film industry, as well as the history and culture of our home in Cornwall, to a worldwide audience.
Biographies
-
Writer/Directorryan@myskatonic.co
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5606217/
Ryan is based in Cornwall and has worked in music video, live performance capture and documentary for over a decade. He has toured with acts including Slayer, Caspian, Deftones, Defeater, Mastodon, and Robert Plant, shooting everywhere from Melbourne to Santiago, Los Angeles to Reykjavik, collaborating with some of the world’s biggest record labels and artists through his company Crashburn. His most recent music videos have been for Trivium and Bruce Dickinson, with recent live shoots having included Ozzfest at Villa Park in 2025, Green Day at London's Wembley Stadium, and performances from Nicole Scherzinger and Train at the Royal Albert Hall. He has directed documentaries for Caspian, the European Space Agency, and Hammer. His productions have total views exceeding 100 million through streaming platforms.
Backwoods, an adaptation of a short story by H.P. Lovecraft saw Ryan shift to narrative drama. The film premiered in the USA at the Rhode Island International Film Festival, winning the H.P. Lovecraft Award in 2019, before making its UK premiere at the BIFA and BAFTA qualifying London Short Film Festival in 2020. The film was subsequently licensed for inclusion in Kier-La Janisse’s definitive folk horror documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched through Severin Films, winner of the Audience Award at SxSW 2021. Backwoods made its online premiere through the independent cinema platform Director’s Notes in 2022.
The Birdwatcher premiered at FrightFest in 2025 and has since played over thirty film festivals worldwide, again winning the prestigious HP Lovecraft Award. Howlsavla Gwav, a film co-directed by Joe Gray, premieres at Offbeat Folk Film Festival in May 2026.
As a screenwriter, Ryan has developed the original folk horror feature films C-H-A-I-N and Analogue, is developing the H.P. Lovecraft adaptation Whisperer, co-writing with Lachlan Marks.
-
Writer/Producerkingsley@myskatonic.co
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm7050103/
Kingsley is a screenwriter, composer and producer based in Cornwall specialising in the production of scripted shorts and feature films, and documentaries. Kingsley has worked as an executive producer on the feature films Wilderness (director: Justin John Doherty) and The Tape (director: Martha Tilston) both released in 2021, Long Way Back (director: Brett Harvey) released in cinemas 2022, and the Film4 production Enys Men (director: Mark Jenkin), which premiered in Cannes as part of Director’s Fortnight in 2022, and was released by the BFI in the UK and Neon in the US in 2023. He is an executive producer on Mark Jenkin’s feature Rose of Nevada (2025), which premiered at the Venice Biennale in August 2025, and is released in the UK by the BFI in April 2026 and US by 1-2 Special in June 2026. He worked as an associate producer on Ebony and Ivory (director: Jim Hosking 2024) and the feature-length archive documentary Atlas Pool (dir: Jane Darke and Andrew Tebbs 2025).
He established Myskatonic with Ryan producing Backwoods (2019), The Birdwatcher (2024), Howlsavla Gwav (2025), the Hammer-commissioned documentary The Land Demands Blood (2026), and the music video Rain on the Graves (2024). He is developing feature films, the anthology ghost story drama series Tales of the Waning Light, and the documentary series Nevermade for television. The feature films Whisperer and C-H-A-I-N, secured support from the Screen Growth fund in 2023. A feature film co-production with writer Carl Grose and o-region, Horse Piss for Blood, secured BFI Early Development funding in 2022.
As a screenwriter, Kingsley collaborated with Lucy Grace to adapt her story There Were Nine Children Left for the screen. As a composer, Kingsley has written music for a number of short films, and is currently working on his first feature film score, for The Crossing (director: Peter Stray 2026).
Kingsley has written extensively on filmmaking and filmmakers, including on David Lynch published by Palgrave, Routledge, Lexington Books, and on music in film for the University Press of Mississippi, Peter Lang, Bloomsbury, and Edinburgh University Press.
Kingsley completed the BFI Creative Producers Lab in 2021, Create UK’s Selling Screen and Foundations schemes in 2022, and the Create Growth scheme in 2024. He is a BAFTA member, a member of FIAT/IFTA, and a BIFA voter.