At the heart of Zombie Girl is a story that’s played out anywhere where there’s a kid with a video camera and a dream. In a perhaps less obvious way, it’s also about whether or not a kid at the age of 12, no matter how precocious they may be, can set themselves on the career path by which they’ll be known for as an adult. An intriguing question, although counter to a long held belief I’ve had that most people with that clear a vision are destined to falter rather than confound. So that brings us back to young Emily Hagins from Austin, Texas: will she be a falterer or a confounder?

If you don’t know the cinematic significance of Austin, then here it is in a nutshell: it’s the homebase of Robert Rodriguez, Ain’t-It-Cool-News and the infamous Alamo Drafthouse movie theatre. A perfect breeding crowd for burgeoning film talent there cannot be. Young Emily has been influenced by this fact by most of her 12 years. As a Lord of the Rings fanatic, she wrote to Peter Jackson, the filmmaker that helmed that epic trilogy. It was through Jackson Emily got in touch with Harry Knowles, founder of Ain’t-It-Cool-News, and through Harry Emily basically interned one summer with an independent horror film studio in Austin. Remember, she’s just 12 at this point.

Watching the young(er), naïve Emily, I’m kind of reminded of the eternal TV classic, Dawson’s Creek. Remember Dawson in the first season, how when he wasn’t pinning over Jen, he’d be trying to convince someone that his intentions to be the next Spielberg weren’t the ravings of self-deluded 20-something pretending to be a TV teenager. Emily certainly has that drive, much to the repeated exasperations of her still supportive mother. The title of the film comes from a feature length script that Emily begins the daunting task of filming on weekends and during school breaks. The project takes almost a year to film, and more than another year to edit.

What started as a simple, and yes fun, project ballooned into an almost Heart of Darkness For Kids like odyssey that tested the limits of endurance, patience and the parental temperament. But in all seriousness, you couldn’t ask for better parental guidance than Megan Hagins, the nurturing and empowering spirit of the mother-daughter relationship is as integral to the themes of this film as the mechanics of filmmaking. Anyone that’s ever tried to make a film of their own will be drawn easily into Emily’s pursuit, and the film, called Pathogen, can be translated as allegory to just about any creative pursuit.

Wisely, any portion of the finished film is either shown or needed. The biggest mistake in the recent comedy Hamlet 2 was that they should a huge portion of the finished play, which was a miscalculation because there was no way on Earth that it could be anywhere near as ludicrous as we had built up in our minds. Pathogen is available to buy online, but I’ve got to tell you, I don’t have a lot of desire to see it. I think the point of this film is to chronicle a kind of D-I-Y ideal, as embodied in the surprising visage of a young girl making a zombie movie. Inspiring, but also rather humbling, Zombie Girl is a work of inspiration told simply with limited interference from the filmmakers. It’s the next best thing to being on set yourself and a thoroughly engaging and surprising film.