When Hundreds of Beavers plays at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre, employee Matt Carr doesn’t just watch the movie. He watches the audience.
“I’ll step in the back of the theater, get on top of the balcony,” he says. “It’s so fascinating to watch a cult film being born.”
In Duluth, Minnesota, Zeitgeist Zinema programmer Jody Kujawa saw audiences flip for Beavers, but “assumed this [would be] one of those indie movies that stayed indie,” he says.
Instead, “it gained traction, and it didn’t stop gaining traction.”
When the movie’s star, Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, was chasing beaver mascots through the wintry woods of northern Wisconsin, he and director Mike Cheslik didn’t realize what the future held.
“We knew we had something kind of special, but we didn’t know that it was going to [be] this instant cult classic,” remembers Tews.
Hundreds of Beavers is a largely dialogue-free movie about a fur trapper trying to win the hand of a merchant’s daughter. The price? The title says it all.
Viewers have marvelled at the physical comedy that unfolds as Tews tests his wits against wily critters played by the filmmakers’ buddies wearing mascot costumes.
“I haven’t met someone who has watched this movie all the way through and then gets back to me to say, ‘It wasn’t for me,’” Carr says.
After photography wrapped in 2020, Cheslik holed up executing “something like 1,500 effects shots,” Tews explains. The result is akin to a live-action Looney Tunes short, but one that carries on for 108 minutes.
When Beavers tickled the film festival circuit, the filmmakers made the unusual decision to distribute the movie themselves.
“If we had gone with a traditional distributor, it certainly wouldn’t have been in theaters very long,” Tews says. “It probably would have just disappeared” into the bottomless hole of streaming content.
Instead, the filmmakers booked the film on tour—and brought the beavers.
“Ryland would come out and fight somebody in a beaver costume during the movie,” remembers Carr. “It was like you were adding theater and vaudeville and professional wrestling to a sold-out screening of a black-and-white, slapstick, Buster Keaton kind of movie.”
“People around the world, they got beaver fever,” muses Tews, speaking via video call from his second Beavers tour of the United Kingdom and Ireland. “What can I say?”
While it’s earning raves in Dublin and Liverpool, Hundreds of Beavers is quintessentially Midwestern.
“There’s a handful of little gags throughout the movie to allude to the fact that it takes place in the Midwest,” said Carr, noting one scene that suggests that mascot mayhem created Green Bay, Wisconsin.
“The way we made the movie was very Midwestern, because there was no studio involvement,” says Tews, who grew up in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin.
Making the movie on a $150,000 budget required a Midwestern work ethic, too.
The filmmakers and their friends would “get up at the crack of dawn and go out and do a really hard day’s work,” Tews says, “but then the end result is making something that’s really silly and fun and satisfying.”
Hundred of Beavers is screening in select Midwestern states in December. It’s also available to buy or rent on Apple TV or Prime Video. Check out the screening schedule here.