{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Radio Chatskill","title":" For One Filmmaker, a Ghost Story Is Really a Story About Growing Up During the AIDS Crisis ","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":696,"description":"For Bobby Abate, making The Ghost at Skeleton Rock meant going back — to 1992, to the height of the AIDS crisis, to his own first sexual encounter, and to the paralyzing fear that followed.The short film, which Abate wrote and directed, follows 18-year-old Vinnie, who turns to a Ouija board after a first intimate encounter spirals into fear and shame. It screens Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at the Calicoon Theater as part of the second annual International Gay Film Series, paired with Kansas 1989, another LGBTQ+ short directed by Clayton Dean Smith.The screening is a special one: a works-in-progress showing, offering audiences a rare behind-the-scenes look at an unfinished film — and a chance for the filmmaker to gather feedback from his own community.\"It's a very special moment to be able to show that in Calicoon, where we filmed it,\" Abate said.A True Story, Rooted in Misinformation and FearThe film's supernatural premise is drawn from Abate's real life. As a teenager in Hamden, Connecticut, in 1991, he and a friend used a Ouija board to summon a spirit they believed could give people nightmares. When Abate had his first sexual experience shortly after, he woke up consumed by dread — not because of anything that had happened, but because of the AIDS crisis raging around him.\"I thought even kissing would get me infected,\" he recalled, \"because there was just no way — we didn't even have the internet back then.\"Without access to accurate health information, cut off from guidance by a church and family that offered condemnation rather than education, Abate found himself terrified that a moment he had long anticipated had become a potential death sentence. In the film, Vinnie turns back to that same spirit, hoping to use it to distance himself from the person he'd been with.\"What was supposed to be just a normal moment turned into a complete crisis,\" Abate said.Echoes of the Past in the PresentAbate, who now teaches film at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/q7XXsnSXT_u4mZLCn3chUorwDmUD_kWiB272D6emB18/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS80N2Uy/OGY5MWUwZThkYTEw/NDVkZGM2ZGZkZDIw/ZjliOS5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}