Glenn Douglas Packard has been in the entertainment business for 25 years; as the GBF to Hulk Hogan’s daughter Brooke in VH-1’s reality-series Brooke Knows Best, as a performer in the music group twONEty in Europe during the boyband crazy of the early ‘00s and as a world-class dance choreographer to everyone from Usher and Pink to the King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson.
Packard has made a name for himself in many facets of pop culture, and now he is adding another to the list: film director. Packard took his story of growing up gay on a Michigan dairy farm and his coming out to his family and turned it into the new horror film Pitchfork.
“I teach these Master Classes for dancing, and I tell these kids that they need to go after their passions and to do it well,” Packard says. “That’s the secret, find what you love to do and the rest of everything will just fall into place.”
Packard has been motivated by passion since he was that small boy on his dad’s Michigan dairy farm.
“I was going to be in the family business, be a dairy farmer,” he says. “But I always had that passion to dance. I was like the Footloose guy, going around dancing on the farm all day, that’s what I really wanted to do but boys just didn’t dance where I came from.”
Packard suffered a severe leg injury while working on the farm and was told by doctors that he may never walk again, let alone dance.
“They were supposed to amputate my leg, and I told God if he got me through it, I would leave the farm business and follow my passion,” Packard says. “The doctors saved my leg and I had to learn to walk again, but I didn’t stop dancing until I got to New York City and after a lot of hard work, and determination I became a choreographer.”
Packard choreographed Michael Jackson’s 30th Anniversary Celebration and earned an Emmy nomination for his work on the program.
“That’s when I caught the attention of Lou Pearlman, who helped to create NSync, Backstreet Boys and O-Town, and he got me into a boyband touring around Europe, performing for millions,” Packard says. “Then from Pearlman I met Hulk Hogan and his daughter, Brooke.”
Hogan and his family were filming Hogan Knows Best in the Tampa Bay area. During the two seasons of the show, Packard and Brooke Hogan became close friends, leading to Packard joining her on her own spinoff series Brooke Knows Best.
“They told me they wanted to talk about me being gay on the show and asked if I was out and open,” he says. “I didn’t realize the impact it would have on so many young gay people. It was a time when things were getting more mainstream, and I was flooded with emails and people’s stories.”
Hearing other’s stories led Packard to want to tell his own story, but he wanted to do it in a unique and personal way.
“I love the horror genre, so I decided I wanted to tell my story as a horror film, so that’s what I did. I had never made a movie before, but I just knew I could do it,” Packard says.
Packard had the idea of turning his coming out story into a slasher film nearly a decade ago and decided now was as good a time as any to move forward with it.
“I am the director, a co-writer (along with Darryl F. Gariglio) and the creator; I mean I came up with the story of Pitchfork eight years ago and it was so fun to finally release it,” Packard says. “I also produced the film along with Darryl, Noreen [Marriott] and Shaun [Cairo]; I choreographed the fights, cast it – I wanted to be involved in every aspect of Pitchfork.”
Pitchfork is a story of a young man named Hunter. Having recently shared a life-changing secret with his family, he recruits his friends to come with him from New York to the farm where he grew up as he faces his parents for the first time. As the college students enjoy the fresh air of Michigan farm country, an older, more dangerous secret slowly emerges. While Hunter navigates a new place within his conservative family, a vicious creature from their past descends on the farm, putting the unsuspecting city kids in mortal danger.
“This film is basically my coming out story [laughing], with a disturbing twist to it,” Packard says. “They go to this farm and all hell breaks loose. They are at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Packard was able to create a dark, scary and gritty horror film that appears to be a big budget studio flick on a minimal independent budget by gathering his friends in the business and shooting on location at the dairy farm where he grew up.
“It was exciting bringing these people who I have met over the last 25 years back to where I was raised to make this film. Pitchfork has a bloodshed out in the woods he brings his victims to, and this is a cabin I would play in with all my friends as a kid. The location is definitely one of the co-stars of the picture,” Packard says.
Pitchfork was picked up by home entertainment and theatrical film distributor Uncork’d Entertainment and has been slated to be released January 2017.
“We were lucky enough that within a year of finishing production on the film to get a worldwide distributor, and Uncork’d is one of my favorites,” Packard says. “If I can brag about it a bit, it has turned out to be a really gorgeous horror film. People won’t believe that this film came out of the budget we had. I’m very proud of it.”
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