Emily Hagins So Does Not Suck!

We freakin' love Emily Hagins, so much so that we were floored, delighted, and borderline ecstatic when news came over the transom that the 18-year-old Austin filmmaker recently secured her debut distro deal with bigtimers MPI Media for her most recent film, My Sucky Teen Romance.

According to Variety Daily, MPI picked up all North American rights to the SXSW-debuted film, Hagins third.

We first encountered the precocious and plucky teen film wonderkid back in the heyday of South Austin video store Pedazo Chunk (which was, at the time, run by Dannie Knowles, li'l sis of Ain't It Cool News's Harry Knowles). Hagins was a gangly, horror movie-addicted 11-year old at the time, but very quickly went on to make her first film, the biozombie outbreak thriller Pathogen just a year later. The fact that she made her first feature film at age 12 while we're 45 and our dog Mogwai has more IMDB credits than we do blows our mind to this day.

Hagins achieved notoriety and a solid boost up the PR ladder in 2009 with the release of Justin Johnson, Aaron Marshall, and Erik Mauck's Zombie Girl: The Movie, a documentary on the making of Pathogen and Hagins' impressive learning curve. The young director followed that up with The Retelling before heading into the heretofore completely-overlooked-by-Hollywood-and-television genre of teen vampires with My Sucky Teen Romance. Well, okay, there was Buffy, Twilight, and multiple Fright Nights, but Hagins' film -- not to mention her perseverance, skills, and wit -- trump anything Hollyweird has done in ages. Here's looking at you, kid.