Ed Polgardy
Production
Biography
Ed Polgardy, president of Black Hat Magic Productions, is an acclaimed comic book creator-writer-editor, an Emmy-Award-winning television producer-director, and a successful feature film writer-producer-director. Polgardy co-created the internationally acclaimed hit comic book series “From The Darkness” and “From The Darkness: Blood Vows”, and wrote the graphic novel adaptation of Quentin Tarantino's “From Dusk 'Til Dawn”. As Senior Editor at Jim Shooter's Defiant Comics, he developed, wrote, and edited several hit titles, including “The Good Guys” and “Dark Dominion” (penciled by “Spider-Man” co-creator Steve Ditko). Polgardy also held the Editor-in-Chief position at BIG Entertainment where he worked with celebrity concept creators John Jakes, Mickey Spillane, Tom Clancy, and Neil Gaiman. The resulting intellectual properties were licensed to Miramax, Alliance Entertainment, and ABC TV. Polgardy’s TV work includes producing and directing: “Today’s Environment”, starring Ed Begley, Jr., “Millennium”, hosted by Peter Weller, “The Best of Wine and Food”, featuring George Hamilton, “.COM” and “.COM Kids”, starring Mark Hamill, “Elegance with Ivana”, featuring Ivana Trump, “Women in Charge”, with Nancy Glass, “First Priority”, hosted by Hunter Tylo, “Healthy Solutions”, starring Mariette Hartley, and “Monsterama”, featuring Cassandra “Elvira” Peterson. Polgardy also helped create Price/Parker, a television production company where he developed, produced, and directed “Identity”, a female-empowerment show that aired on The Learning Channel. Moving into fictional programming, Polgardy produced “Oh Jerome, No” (starring Mamoudou Athie, Natasha Lyonne, and Georgina Campbell), a short-form television series—eight 12-minute episodes—that aired on “Cake” on Fox's FXX Network. As a screenwriter, Polgardy has had a number of his feature film scripts optioned and green-lit for production. Polgardy produced the motion pictures “Masked Mutilator” (featuring Brick Bronsky, Glenn Hetrick, and James DeBello), which he also co-wrote, “The Halfway House” (starring cult-film icon Mary Woronov), “The Ghostmaker” (starring Aaron Dean Eisenberg), “Window Of Opportunity” (with producing partner John Densmore, legendary rock-‘n’-roll drummer from The Doors), “Dark Desire” (featuring Kelly Lynch and Michael Nouri), “Megachurch Murder” (starring Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Corbin Bleu and Romeo Miller), "The Wretched" (featuring John-Paul Howard, Piper Curda, and Azie Tesfai), which was the number one movie in America for six weeks straight in the summer of 2020 and went straight into the top five on its first day of release on Netflix in the summer of 2022, and "Feed Me" (starring Christopher Mulvin, Neal Ward, and Samantha Loxley), which had its world premiere at LA's Beyond Fest in October of 2022 and racked up numerous awards on the international film festival circuit, including multiple Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director awards. He line produced “Boiler Maker” (starring John Savage), and co-produced “Laid to Rest” (featuring Lena Headey and Thomas Dekker). As a second unit director, Polgardy worked on “Death’s Door”, “Laid to Rest”, “Dark House”, “The Ghostmaker” and “The Wretched”.
Known For
A young man desperate to be connected to the people close to him resorts to devious measures to achieve that desire
Dark Desire
A killer dressed in a police uniform begins murdering innocent people on the streets of New York City.
Maniac Cop
An extremely sensitive young man in Brooklyn goes way too far in his quest to adhere to society's expectations of traditional masculinity.
Oh Jerome, No
A rebellious teenage boy, struggling with his parents' imminent divorce, encounters a terrifying evil after his next-door neighbor becomes possessed by an ancient witch that feasts on children.
The Wretched
A young girl wakes up in a casket with a head injury and no memory of her identity. She quickly realizes she was abducted by a serial killer and she must fight to survive.
Laid to Rest
When a teenager reveals that she is gay to her devout Mormon parents, they decide to send her to a conversion therapy home in Utah.
Trapped: The Alex Cooper Story
A group of college friends discover a 15th century coffin that allows them to experience the world as ghosts. While their first adventures in the spirit world are playful and innocent, the "Box of Shadows" soon brings out the group's most dangerous impulses and desires. The friends find themselves pulled into a world of evil where they learn the line between life and death is there for a reason.
The Ghostmaker
While urban exploring in an abandoned amusement park, three cosplaying girls accidentally unleash the vicious holiday beast known as Krampus. With the help of Santa Claus, can these girls stop Krampus from his killing spree?
Slay Belles
Young girls are disappearing in and around the Mary Magdalen Halfway House for Troubled Girls.
The Halfway House
Following the death of his wife, a broken man spirals into an abyss of night tremors and depression and finds himself in the home of a deranged cannibal who convinces him to take his own life in the most horrific way imaginable.
Feed Me
Five soap opera divas as they reunite to shoot the final Christmas episode of their long-running sudser. The producer, Alex and director Nell, who happen to be old college friends, do their best to keep things on the rails but as the ladies come together, old rivalries resurface that threaten to tear the production apart.
Ladies of the '80s: A Divas Christmas
As a group of intrepid explorers descend upon King Island in search of elusive female heroine Tarzeena, an evil scientist schemes to use his revolutionary radio brain control devise to transform her into the ultimate love slave. With her loyal gorilla Tabonga by her side, Tarzeena stands as the undisputed queen of King Island. But the malevolent Dr. Mortimer is eager to have this island queen all to himself, and he's willing to resort to some hi-tech tomfoolery in order to make that happen. Of course all's fair in love and brain surgery, and as Dr. Mortimer attempts to capture Tarzeena so that he can insert the device in her head, a group of bold adventurers arrive on the island to find out once and for all whether this feral female heroine truly exists.
Tarzeena: Jiggle in the Jungle
After popular and charismatic megachurch leader Hamilton Spears commits suicide, his teenage daughter Hannah's life goes off the rails. The only thing keeping her together is her new boyfriend, Oliver. When she finds evidence pointing to a church conspiracy and threats toward her father, she is determined to prove that Hamilton's death was murder not suicide. As she gets closer to the truth, she realizes her own mother may be involved in her father's murder...and that the boy she is falling in love with is the son of his killer.
Megachurch Murder
After accidentally killing an opponent in the ring, a professional wrestler takes a job at a group home for youth offenders. But when a psychopath wearing a wrestling mask begins butchering the teenage residents, their rehabilitation will become a no-holds-barred battle for survival. Originally filmed in 1994 but completed in 2019.
Masked Mutilator
When a television psychic begins to get real results, the cast and crew of the show find themselves trapped by vengeful spirits.
Death's Door
A small-town deputy is pulled into a rash of missing children’s cases only to discover that the skin-changing Wretch is back and has been preying upon the families of his community for a century.
The Wretched Devours
Monsterama: A Tribute to Horror Hosts was a documentary focused on horror hosts; screened on the horror channel Monsters HD in 2004.
Monsterama: A Tribute to Horror Hosts
Julia, better known as Jewel to her friends and family, is a teenage runaway who is unwilling to live within the rules and boundaries set by her parents. She has run away once before, and her father's connections have kept that quiet. This time, however, an election cycle is about to begin and the scandal of a runaway daughter has congressman Robert Jennings desperate. Desperate enough to have half the NYPD out quietly looking for his daughter, and desperate enough to pay privately to have her found and brought back home. The problem for those looking for her, though, is that she is no longer on the streets, and is instead imprisoned in an underground bunker, having been kidnapped by a sadistic serial murderer. Jewel knows exactly how much longer she has left to live, but will it be long enough for anybody to find her?