Misfits fascinate Atlanta filmmaker Bret Wood

7 Stages Theatre, 1105 Euclid Ave., Atlanta. 678-929-8103, http://atlantafilmfestival.com

See the movie trailer for “The Unwanted” at myajc.com.

Atlanta filmmaker Bret Wood likens sitting through a festival screening of his films to surviving his wedding: It’s both the happiest and most stressful day of your life.

“I generally spend the screening squirming in anxiety, trying to gauge the audience’s reactions, and still obsessing over the details that drive a filmmaker mad at this late stage in the process,” he says.

Wood will have another of these stressful, wonderful, wedding-like evenings when his latest film “The Unwanted” has its world premiere at the Atlanta Film Festival on March 31.

“The Unwanted” is a dark, Southern gothic tale of obsession and religious mania. Like Wood’s previous films, it was self-financed and filmed in the Atlanta area.

“I’ve always been drawn to stories of outsiders and people who don’t fit in with everyone else,” he says. “The more films I make, the more I realize that’s what I’m about as a filmmaker.”

His body of work includes the 2003 documentary “Hell’s Highway” about the filmmakers who created the lurid highway safety films of the ’50s and ’60s, the 2006 feature “Psychopathia Sexualis” about 19th century studies of sexual pathologies and the 2010 drama “The Little Death” about a conservative reformer who butts heads with a brothel owner.

“The Unwanted” was inspired by the early vampire novella “Carmilla” by Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu, published 25 years before Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” It tells the story of a father, his daughter and the unusual young woman who has been left in their care. The father keeps finding the two young women in puzzling and intimate situations. Eventually a towns person warns him their visitor is a vampire, prompting the father to take drastic actions.

“I started to wonder: What if she wasn’t really a vampire?” says Wood. “What if he just can’t process the fact that his daughter is a lesbian? For him, it’s easier to believe his daughter is the victim of a vampire. He can solve that problem. That was my twist on the story, to take that happy ending and question it.”

In Wood’s retelling, the action is updated to the present day and set in a small, isolated Southern town. Unlike in the original tale, we’re never quite sure if the visitor Carmilla (Christen Orr) is a vampire or not. It becomes a tale of religious fundamentalism and delusional fervor as the father, Troy (William Katt, star of the ‘80s TV show “The Greatest American Hero”), begins to imagine that his daughter, Laura (Hannah Fierman), is coming under the control of dark, demonic forces as she falls in love with Carmilla.

The movie was filmed mostly on locations in Atlanta. Much of the story takes place in an isolated country house: The actual house is on a big lot in Kirkwood shot to look like it’s in the country. Interiors in an Airstream trailer were shot on a set Wood built in his garage. Other scenes were shot at a horse farm in Hogansville and a mountaintop scene in Highlands, N.C.

Scouting locations around Atlanta has become more challenging since the big studios are shooting here now,” he says.

“Everyone expects a lot of money. If you say you’re shooting a movie, dollar signs pop up in their eyes and you have to explain it’s not that kind of movie.”

The film’s backdrop of small-town Southern fundamentalism is one that is especially resonant for Wood, having grown up in Chattanooga in the Pentecostal church. His parents were loyal churchgoers; his mom played the organ in church three times a week. For Wood, the environment was stifling.

“I didn’t have a bad home life, but the allure of movies was always kind of an escape for me,” he says.

Even though secular movies were frowned on in the Pentecostal church, Wood developed a love for horror and science fiction, searching through the TV Guide every Sunday and circling the movies he wanted to see that week. It wasn’t until he was in the ninth grade when he read a magazine article about John Carpenter’s “Dark Star” that it occurred to him that making movies was something he might be able to do.

“It said that the filmmakers would go to Woolworth’s to buy knickknacks and turn them into the props for a spaceship,” he says. “It just opened my eyes to the fact that you don’t have to be at a Hollywood studio with all these resources to make a movie.”

Wood attended college at University of Tennessee, but there was no film program so he studied broadcasting. After graduation, he got a job in New York with Kino International, a video and film distributer of current, classic and foreign art house films. There he met his wife, art and film critic Felicia Feaster (who writes for the AJC), with whom he eventually settled in Atlanta. Now a vice-president and executive producer for Kino-Lorber, he restores and transfers classic and foreign films onto Blu-ray and DVD, specializing in silent and early studio films.

“It’s geeky, but I love it,” he says.

A filmmaker married to a film critic sounds like a formula for some pretty tense evenings at home, but Wood says that it works for them.

“She claims I don’t welcome her comments and feedback,” he says with a laugh. “I think it’s hard for me to take criticism from her because, if she’s criticizing something, I know it’s true. She knows what she’s talking about. I’d be curious to know her analysis of my body of work. Maybe someday I’ll have a stiff drink and let her go.”

Until then, Wood is on his own in evaluating and promoting his own work, which he says is often a challenging task since his films, like “The Unwanted,” don’t always fit easily into a particular genre.

“If I tell people it’s a vampire story, will they be disappointed there’s no fangs or blood-sucking or stakes in the heart?” he asks. “Can I call it an LGBT film? It falls between a lot of categories. But I’m not interested in doing a conventional kind of anything. I want to make movies that are uniquely mine.”

And as long as he can keep making movies that are uniquely his, that’s enough for Wood. “I don’t expect to go to Hollywood or to be launched into the big time,” he says. “I always feel I just want to make one more movie. And if that movie lets me make one more movie, I’m content.”