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GREENSBORO — Emily Edwards is one twisted sister.

Check out her latest film, “Bone Creek.” It’s a cinematic tale about a college student with a camera who gets lost in the woods and finds a log cabin where she doesn’t need to be.

But it’s more than that. It’s about cats turning into women, witches disappearing into smoke, and an Uncle Israel who makes moonshine, talks about Indian justice and turns on a TV by plugging it into the ground.

Edwards loves that stuff.

She’s a north Alabama native, attuned to all things Southern gothic. She grew up in the shadows of a haunted plantation and attended a local university where professors dressed up like Colonel Sanders and wrestled bears.

Today, she teaches broadcasting at UNCG and loves making movies and documentaries that draw on the spooky South.

And “Bone Creek” does just that. It’s about magic and moonshine. And music.

Edwards recruited some of the Triad’s most talented musicians to create a soundtrack that feels as if it was plucked from a time capsule where scratchy 78 RPM records always live.

It’s that music, that rural mountain blues, in which a trash-can lid becomes an instrument and every instrument needs no plug.

That music gives “Bone Creek” its magic. You can hear it this weekend at Zion Bar & Grill, a small music spot near I-40.

On Friday night, you can see music videos drawn from “Bone Creek” and the musicians who made it sound beautiful. For no pay, they helped Edwards find her musical vision.

The soundtrack includes some well-known names from around here: Matt Hill, Julie Bean, Chuck Cotton, Theresa Drake, Scott Manring and Logie Meachum. But Max Drake, the longtime blues guitarist from Yanceyville, was the center of it all.

He helped produce the soundtrack, and he recorded it at UNCG and a studio off East Wendover. But he found it first in the kitchen of the 1858 farmhouse he inherited from his parents, with a $20 cassette recorder from Walmart by his side.

Drake and Edwards met last fall at an ice cream festival at Guilford College. Drake had heard about her movie, and he had been looking for her because he wanted to try his hand at making a soundtrack.

Plus, he needed a creative kick. On Easter weekend 18 months ago, he suffered a heart attack onstage at the Hideaway BBQ in Raleigh. He felt, as he tells people, “Godzilla coming down, pinching my heart between his two fingers and not letting up.”

Or something like that.

He got his heart repaired through surgery. He also quit smoking, started to exercise, swallowed 10 pills a day and walked a dog he named Etta Willa around the farmhouse where he spent most every weekend as a kid.

But he started losing interest in playing music, and began curling up in a chair, feeling sorry for himself.

At age 56, he felt life was done.

Not so fast, his wife Theresa told him. She got him listening to old-school gospel and bluegrass murder songs to get him into the mood for “Bone Creek.”

That worked.

He tapped his local-music network, and he watched scenes from “Bone Creek” on a tiny TV in the corner of his kitchen. Then, between mouthfuls of chicken wings, he turned his kitchen into a makeshift studio and searched to find the sounds he heard in his head.

Sounds from blues legends like Howlin’ Wolf, R.L. Burnside, Bukka White and Skip James.
The day he got the copy of the movie soundtrack, “Popskull & High Art,” he asked Theresa to give it a listen. He went outside to pound nails. When he came back in, he heard something he’ll always remember.

“She said, 'That’s a really nice representation of a year’s worth of work, Max,’ and I don’t think anyone has said anything any nicer to me,’’ Drake says. “We’ve been together for 20 years, and when she says something like that she means it.

“And when she did, I thought, 'Wow, we hit it good.’”

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com