Dee Cooke’s cabin gets dark at night. With wood-paneled walls and a lone staircase, it’s hard to tell what’s shadow and what isn’t.

Two filmmakers saw it as the perfect setting for their horror movie.

“Sight Unseen” will premiere at the Maine International Film Festival in Waterville at 9 p.m. Saturday with a second screening at 3 p.m. Sunday at the Maine Film Center. The horror film, shot entirely at the cabin in Belgrade, follows the story of three adult siblings reuniting at their estranged father’s cabin after his mysterious death, only to discover that they are not alone.

The 87-minute film was directed by Stephen Parkhurst, who grew up in Pittsfield, and co-written with screenwriter Oriana Schwindt. The married couple live in New York but decided to film in Maine, where a mutual friend introduced them to Cooke, a Belgrade resident with a family cabin on Great Pond.

“I will say, these two, they rewrote the script to fit the cabin,” Cooke said. “And to really use some of the eccentricities of the cabin.”

The basement written into the original script was swapped out for Cooke’s attic and adjoining staircase. A trap door swings shut at the top, forming a thin barrier against whatever might be crawling, cartwheeling or slithering up the staircase.

“The thing that creeps me out the most is people or entities, ghosts, whatever, moving incorrectly,” Schwindt said. “And movement on stairs — spoiler — in a way that is incorrect for the human form, I was like: ‘We have to.'”

The film uses the setting of the haunted house to explore adult sibling dynamics, millennial angst, and the inheritance of both property and trauma. Parkhurst said he wanted to combine horror with the universal experience of losing a parent and having to confront years of unresolved baggage.

“It felt like something neither of us had really seen, which is kind of using the haunted house framework as a metaphor for the housing crisis, millennial financial precarity,” Parkhurst said.

He also promises at least two great scares.

Cooke, a part-time actress and real estate agent in Belgrade, ended up playing the part of a neighbor and real estate agent in the film.

“Sight Unseen” had a budget of $85,000, raised through a Kickstarter campaign and the bulk of Parkhurst and Schwindt’s wedding fund. The small crew filmed over the course of 12 days in September, leaving Parkhurst less than a year to edit the film and submit to the festival by the spring.

Most of the crew stayed at Cooke’s cabin while filming. The key grip slept soundly up in the attic, Schwindt said, but other cast members were plagued by late-night visions and a growing fear of staircases.

“One of our crew who was sleeping at the cabin says that she saw a ghost one night,” Schwindt said.

“She was playing the ghost,” she added. “She had ghosts on the brain, for sure.”

For more information, go to the festival’s website.