Starring: Linnea Quigley, Dino Tripodis, Nick Baldasare, Shanna Thomas

In the small town of Copperton, Ohio, Paul Henson, a former big-city journalist, buys a small local newspaper. He quickly falls into a wide-reaching conspiracy of ritualistic murder and cult mind control when he discovers that the entire town may be under the spell of a Satanic reverend and his flock. As the clues and corpses pile up, Henson and his family are thrust into a life-or-death struggle to expose the truth and stop the demonic cabal’s reign of evil.

This never-before-seen “Satanic Panic” opus from the late 1980s is often cited as the ‘lost’ Linnea Quigley movie and boasts several impressive feats as a low budget regional feature, including gruesome effects, kinetic action set pieces, effective score and a memorable lineup of eccentric Midwest characters. Heartland of Darkness (sometimes also referred to as Blood Church) was shot in 1989 by director Eric Swelstad on 16mm but had been lost in obscurity and distribution false starts for over 30 years.