Writer-director Mario Ricciardi describes his film “Midwest Sessions” as a mix of science fiction, horror and more experimental fare, but don’t expect spaceships and expensive special effects.

Instead, the Boardman native drew inspiration from some of his favorite shows, such as “Twin Peaks” and “The Twilight Zone.”

“If you go back and watch some of those episodes, you’ll find a lot of it is just people talking, and they make it work in such an amazing way,” Ricciardi said. “It’s something you could aspire to from an independent level, to hope maybe one day you can get close to that.”

The 2015 Cardinal Mooney graduate fell in love with movies when he was in high school but didn’t see an obvious path to pursue it as a career. He majored in business at Youngstown State University and started Appleridge Productions, which has created commercials for Penguin City Brewing Company, YSU, various Mahoning Valley healthcare systems and other clients.

“After so much time doing our commercial stuff, I felt that we had stepped up our skill set to a place where I was ready to try something creative again,” Ricciardi said. “I didn’t quite have a 90-page story in my head, but I had all these little ideas. It was kind of brought together out of what were those little ideas that were kind of interesting to me, the topics that the themes, and then also taking what resources we had available like locations or actors, and trying to structure it around that.”

He summed up the plot of the 85-minute film as supernatural entities spawned from a long defunct steel mill prompt quirky locals in a nearby town to confront their personal shortcomings.

“Each of the characters has kind of a problem that they’re dealing with that are all kind of related to each other,” Ricciardi said. “I wanted to cross over characters from each story. Everyone kind of knows everyone else. It’s like, if you go downtown in Youngstown, you see a lot of people you know, but everyone’s kind of in their own group.”

It was shot with an all-local cast and crew over two years, mostly on weekends when everyone could make time for the project away from their day jobs.

The cast features Dan Hobel, Tim Shannon, Terry Shears, Bill Rees, Brenda Zyvith, Kevin Shannon, Emelia Sherin, Brant Rothbauer, Ken Miller, Christopher Corso, David Leach, Jim Osso, Kara Moyer, Samantha Gurd, Michael Huoy, Aaron Franks, Brady Sklenar, Damian Titus and Ricciardi.

“We’ve been fortunate through work to be able to make a decent amount of connections with our commercials, to hire on some people to work with us,” Ricciardi said. “The casting process was a mixture of all people we’ve gone to work with on commercials, and then some of the people they knew in their little contact list. I would say, ‘I’m looking for someone to play like a priest character,’ and my friend Emelia (Sherin), who’s a local actor, she would say, “I know this guy, Terry Shears. He’s a local actor. Let’s see if he’d be interested.’ I’d ask him, and we’d go from there.”

“Midwest Sessions” will have its first public screening at 7:20 p.m. Saturday at Boardman Movies 8.

“Movies 8 was extremely accommodating,” Ricciardi said. “They were excited to have an independent film there, and that meant a lot to me … We wanted to schedule a date in the fall, because the atmosphere of the film lends itself to Halloween, or at least a moodier, darker time of year as opposed to summer or spring.”

What happens with “Midwest Sessions” after Saturday still is a mystery.

“Based on interest, whatever we get response-wise from this weekend, we’re probably going to look at booking one more show time to give people a chance to come out and see it if they’re interested. It’s going to be submitted into some regional, local film festivals, but we have not quite crossed that yet. I’m just trying to get through Saturday.”