What’s a family movie without a little blood and gore? That’s the theme of the ironically titled Family Movie, starring and directed by Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, which opened the 12^th Annual Bentonville Film Festival in Northwest Arkansas.

The famous couple attended the screening Tuesday night with their kids, Sosie and Travis, who co-star and produced the film along with their parents. BFF founder Geena Davis, Frances Fisher, and filmmaker Catherine Hardwicke were among the bold face names on hand for the event. Bacon calls the film “our love letter to horror, to independent film and most of all family.”

The twisted tale sees Bacon playing Jack Smith, a schlock horror film director trying to make a final low-budget film, Blood Moon, starring his wife Ellen (Kyra Sedgwick) and daughter Ula (Sosie Bacon), with production assistance from sound man and Muay Thai kickboxer son Trent (Travis Bacon). The family project is interrupted by the appearance of a corpse – that of an annoying neighbor (played by John Carroll Lynch) with a habit of buzzing his woodchipper in the middle of the family’s filmmaking efforts.

“Honestly, it was beyond-our-wildest-dreams wonderful,” Sedgwick told Deadline of the family collaboration. “We conceived of it together and we hired the writer (Dan Beers) together and we really produced it together. But I think you never know what it’s going to be like to work with people until you’re boots on the ground. And I’ve worked with Kevin and Sosie, but I hadn’t worked with Travis as an actor and he’s wonderful. It was a cohesive group. We saw things similarly, but everyone brought something unique to the table.”

Some of Sosie’s earliest memories of spending time with her dad on set come from another horror-tinged film, Hollow Man, the 2000 Paul Verhoeven feature in which Bacon played a scientist who develops a serum that renders him invisible, leading him to act out his worst instincts.

“There’s a really funny picture of us on Hollow Man where Travis is wearing the Hollow Man mask or dad’s wearing it and it’s just absolute mayhem in the [production] trailer,” Sosie recalled. “Things are just wackadoo.”

Wackadoo describes the happenings in Family Movie, where the death toll keeps mounting as the blood moon rises. Perhaps the sanest character is Trent, who shows off his musical chops in a bar scene, thrashing some vocals with a metal band. Travis Bacon composed the score for Family Movie, inheriting musical ability from his dad; when he isn’t busy with film projects, Kevin Bacon performs with his brother Michael in the Bacon Brothers band.

“I think [my dad] was one of my first influences of wanting to play guitar and then [I] kind of found my own way in music,” noted Travis, who has gravitated toward metal while Kevin Bacon is known more for roots and rock. “I think if you compare the music the two of us make, there’s not a ton of similarities besides the instrumentation.”

Bacon calls Beers’ idea for the Family Movie script “the right combination of twisted, sweet, hilarious and bloody.” The Bacon-Sedgwick clan made it in Round Top, TX (which despite its diminutive size, hosts the annual Round Top Film Festival).

“When we finally got to shoot, everyday was a thrilling challenge,” Bacon writes in a director’s statement. “Crazy storms, scorpions, snakes and a lot of blood. Our incredible cast and crew brought their skill, energy and snake boots every day. They, like the family in the movie, had lived and worked in the world of super low budget film making and were committed to supporting our vision of doing the kills and stunts practically.”

Whether Family Movie will make a killing at the box office remains to be seen. At a Q&A after the Bentonville screening, Bacon commented, “We’re trying to figure it out in terms of getting it into theaters.” Sedgwick said, “We’re having exciting conversations, but we don’t have anything to share right now.”

Added Bacon, “You would be kinda surprised how long the process has taken and how hard it is to put something like this together and make it. We’re going to keep pushing ahead and hopefully get it onto screens… We want the movie to be in theaters. That’s our [objective].”

Bentonville Film Festival, with a lineup that includes fiction, nonfiction, shorts and episodics including multiple world premieres, runs through Sunday, June 21.