About the Work

Stuart Wheeldon is an award-winning writer, director and producer based in Wirksworth, Derbyshire. His films blend psychological tension, folklore and memory, and are rooted in the landscape and communities of the Peak District.

He began in theatre, setting up a touring company at 19 before moving into film. Over more than twenty years he has made short films that have screened across the UK and Europe. In 2015 he founded Nine Ladies Film, an independent production company focused on psychological drama and indie horror.

His films include In Limbo, in which a psychology student investigates reports of the mysterious “Black Eyed Children”, and The Telephone, a slow-building study of what waits at the end of a ringing line. More recent work includes The Collector and Silent Shadows (both 2024), the short Ostinato (2025) and Until the Call (2026). In 2025 he completed The Wirksworth UFO Incident, a feature-length fictional documentary that mixes documentary texture with fiction to tell a local story with an uncanny edge.

Drawing on the influence of Powell, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Bergman and Tarkovsky, he favours atmosphere over spectacle, working with small casts, tight budgets and a distinctive sense of place. He is currently developing a feature, Vanished.