Tabloid Witch Awards (established 2004) has named DISREGARD THE VAMPIRE – A MIKE MESSIER DOCUMENTARY as BEST HORROR DOCUMENTARY 2020. Our thanks to Thomas M. Sipos & associates at Tabloid Witch Awards for this wonderful honor.

To enjoy this project, which has now won eleven awards overall, with accolades for the doc itself, the preview, and photography from the project, click the play button on the video right here:

To see MORE of the Outstanding Award Winners from TABLOID WITCH AWARDS, please click on their link here: http://www.tabloidwitch.com/2020.Tabloid Witch 2020 Awards

For the online announcement of all the Winners, check out the release of information from

Hollywood Investigator 2020 Tabloid Witch Award Winners announced

AWARD HISTORY OF DISREGARD THE VAMPIRE: A MIKE MESSIER DOCUMENTARY

The 40-minute piece has also won Best Documentary Awards from  Shawna Shea Film Festival, Diabolical Horror Film Festival,  and the Independent Horror Movie Awards (April 2018): http://www.horrormovieawards.com/ 

The doc also won the Best Direction Award from the Great Message International Film Festival of India in 2019.

A Vampire Photo is Worth…

The promotional photo from Disregard the Vampire – A Mike Messier Documentary has won three awards in total from  Anatomy: Crime – Horror International Film Festival, MedFF, and Hope Film Awards.

The same photo was also named a FINALIST in The ModelNMovie Festival out of India! ModelNMovie

The photo was shot by Chris Hunter in his Collective Thought Media Studio in Newport, Rhode Island USA as Messier “directed” the photoshoot. 

Great assistance in the look of the shot came from HMUA (Hair & Make Up Artist) Kaitlyn Ciampa.   Messier reports, “The Disregard the Vampire promotional photoshoot was scheduled weeks in advance, but we were hit with an unexpected snowstorm the morning of. Katie especially was coming from quite a distance and I was leaning towards rescheduling the shoot myself but she and the three original Actors who showed up (Jose, Anna, and Geena) were so dedicated and professional, it was ‘on with the show’ … or, in this case, to be exact, ‘on with the photo shoot’.”

Jose Guns Alves, who plays Joe in Disregard, was also present, and very encouraging, for individual and group shots, and one of his photos with the two Actresses, has also done quite well as our movie poster image. This image, coupled with the poster design by Tim Labonte of Stand Still Pictures, has won Best Poster from MedFF Summer 2017 and was named a finalist in AltFF Spring 2017

Geena Matuson (appearing on the left in the photos) helped greatly by color correcting and editing the raw images of the photos. The photos themselves feature Geena herself as Valentine and Anna Rizzo as Ginger and aims to capture the moment of seduction between Vampire and recruit.

For Messier’s part, he encouraged the Actresses to strike poses that would capture the spirit of the film and provoke interest from anyone who saw the stills, as we were still in pre-production mode, months before screening. It should be noted, that our new lead Actor Scorpio had yet to be referred to us by Mike’s long-term friend JoJo Gator of Gator Bait Management, at the time of this photoshoot (the full story of Scorpio’s arrival into the project is a major plot-point of the finished documentary.)

Mike states, “Often, people think of photography as an individual art, or in some instances, a collaboration between a photographer and a model. In the case of our Disregard the Vampire photograph, this was truly a group effort, and I am very pleased with the results. To me, this can be an iconic photograph… if enough people see the film!”

Towards that end, all reading this are encouraged to watch the movie and are also encouraged to SHARE the link on their social media outlets. Missed the link earlier in this post? Here it is again:

Even the doc’s promotional trailer has won an award from Canada’s Yes Let’s Make a Movie Film Festival

This brings the Award count to a total of eleven for a project that was in great jeopardy of never even being fully filmed after the first day of principal shooting after the originally scheduled lead actor could not appear due to an unexpected death (not his own).

Reviews of the documentary can be read by Andrew Buckner,  Kirk Fernwood, and  Mike Haberfelner.

In his review, Buckner states, “The chain of events in Disregard the Vampire are also breathtaking. It reminded me a lot of German director Warner Herzog’s similarly exhilarating Burden of Dreams (1982). They both illustrate the feverish dedication it takes to make a dream of telling a tale through the cinematic medium resonate into fruition. This is often when the impossible odds of doing so constantly pile up. Yet, Burden of Dreams, which concerned Herzog’s shooting of Fitzcarraldo (1982), saw the completion of an undertaking from start to finish. Disregard the Vampire lets us peek into a development that is still in production. In many ways, this is even more captivating and awe-inspiring. This is because its promise and potential are still in an infinite state.”

As chronicled in the doc itself and the reviews, the original Disregard experience, while a struggle of ego and misadventure balanced by teamwork and inspiration,  has led Mike to a greater epiphany with his revisioning of the original story into the revamped creation of the written works of Distance from Avalon as a stage-play, screenplay, and novella and the subsequent Avalonia Festival which has grown to include Theater and Photography competitions. https://filmfreeway.com/APC

The short teaser from Distance from Avalon, also edited by Eileen Slavin, has been featured in fourteen film festivals internationally and has won an Award itself from the Great Message International Film Festival.

Although many of the particulars involved in the original Disregard the Vampire project have grown apart with the passage of time, now freeing Distance from Avalon to be marketed as a “project fully without attachments” in regards to cast and crew, Mike says of his relaunched vision with its new title and advanced themes, “My time in Avalon has not ended.”

We shall see.

2022 Update:

Mike recently filmed Seduction of Distance, a monologue extracted from the A Distance from Avalon story.