Blood Rails

Albino Mass Murderer Loose in the Woods in Westhampton?

By Dan Rattiner

If you thought you saw an albino serial killer limping around the Hamptons and the North Fork during the past few weeks, you would have been correct. It was, however, just scenes from a horror movie being made here, produced and directed by Frank Zagarino and starring, among others, Lou Martini of “The Sopranos,” David Shark of “The Young and the Restless” and a cast of twenty, which includes six high school kids, or, as Zaparino says, “six actors from New York City who can pass for high school kids.” The cinematographer is Jerry Lively, a well-known Hollywood figure who has shot such horror hits as Friday the 13th and Warlock.

The scenes for the movie were shot aboard the South Ferry — and in Peconic Bay (when the serial killer escapes) — at the “Lickety Split” ice cream parlor in Mattituck, a wooded area in Riverhead near the home of Brian Stark and at a house in Westhampton in the woods near the railroad tracks. The shoot lasted three weeks and the film should be ready for distribution sometime next year.

Frank Zagarino, the director and producer, explained the plot to me.

“An albino serial killer is being transferred from a hospital upstate to a more secure hospital prison on Long Island when, during the transfer of the prisoner on the ferry, he escapes into the bay. Three teenagers think they shot him during the escape and so, to celebrate, they go to the home of the aunt of one of them, a home that has not been inhabited for fifteen years because people think it is haunted. In this house, the kids have a party and a séance. They find that they are very, very wrong to think this house is uninhabited.”

Zagarino not only produced and directed the 90-minute horror film, but starred in it as the albino.

“And yes, I had to jump into the Bay,” he says.

He’s produced several horror and suspense films in the past and has acted in more than 40 films during the last 25 years while filmmaking in Los Angeles. Most of the films he was involved with are B-Movies. He’s currently living in Mattituck.

“I thought I had been in Los Angeles long enough,” he told me. “I was originally a Long Islander, attending school in Merrick before I went to LA. Our family has owned a summer home in Mattituck since 1946. I’d been out here every summer as a kid and I love it out here. So I decided to move here and raise my own family here.”

Zagarino and his wife, actress Elizabeth Giordano, moved here in 2002 and founded the Frank Zagarino Acting School in Mattituck. Soon thereafter, they rented space in Riverhead and Frank has been teaching there ever since. Currently, there are about fifteen students at the school, which is in the Vail-Leavitt Theatre at 18 Peconic Avenue, Riverhead.

Among Zagarino’s considerable acting credits are Baby It’s You, made in 1983 and starring Rosanna Arquette and Francis Ford Coppola, the Barbarian Queen, a 1985 film in which he played Argan, Striker, made in 1987, in which he played Slade, ShadowChaser in 1995, where he played the character Romulus, several sequels of ShadowChaser, in which he played an Android, Airboss, made in 1997, where he played the lead character, Frank White, and Convict 762 where he played one of the two leads, who are the only men still alive on a planet far, far away. He’s also appeared in TV soap operas, including “Dynasty.” He’s worked with Sylvestor Stallone. And he’s been an actor in another 34 films.

His last movie-making effort in LA was as producer, director and star of the film Never Look Back, released in 2000, directed by Bert Young and co-starring Charles Durning.

Here on Eastern Long Island, Zagarino forsees a big future for filmmaking.

“The scenery here is very diverse. The place is beautiful. And there is considerable interest in movie making. I hope to produce two or three films a year here. I am particularly interested in filming a movie called Satellite Summer, a script I have seen about a piece of a satellite that three eleven-year-old boys watch fall into Peconic Bay. They retrieve it and then are pursued by the maker of the satellite, who wants it back. But the real plot of this movie is about three eleven-year-olds coming of age. If I make that, I predict it will be another Stand By Me.”

Two years ago, Zagarino went to the parents of a thirteen-year-old girl taking his acting classes at night and told them he thought she had tremendous potential. Today, Taylor Gildersleeve is completing her junior year at Mattituck High School but is also coming to the end of the first year of a two-year contract to play the character Sidney in the TV soap opera “All My Children.” She was in 89 episodes this first year and will be in 130 episodes the second.

“There are several others at the acting school who have this much talent,” he says. “And I am encouraging them too.”

Frank Zagorino is a welcome addition to the East End scene.