Inspiration can come from the most unlikely of places. For husband and wife filmmakers Shane Brady and Emily Zercher, it happened while they were on hold with the FBI.

While buying a house during the pandemic, the pair was scammed into sending a down payment to a hacker. Once notified, they immediately took action — although as Zercher tells it, they wanted to go much further.

“We were on hold with the FBI fraud department, which is something that they tell you to do,” she says. “They have hold music that will drive you insane. Shane’s on hold with the bank, and we had the actual hacker’s address and full name on the receipt of our wire. So I knew who it was. I knew their address. Because I was on hold for way too long with this terrible music, I announced that I have the hacker’s address: I will just go there myself, and I will hack him up with a machete. I realized in hindsight it may not be the smartest thing, but it created the seed of vengeance that was planted.”

The duo put their creativity to work, and the result is “Hacked: A Double Entendre of Rage Fueled Karma,” which recently wrapped a festival run that included screenings at FilmQuest, Celluloid Screams and Soho Horror Fest. The film, which follows the plight of the fictional Rumble family in a based-on-reality setup, is kinetic, cathartic and filled with snappy in-jokes and an infectious “let’s put on a show” energy that sprung from the project’s development.

“We found out how many other people had been victims where their money had been stolen,” Brady says. “I’m sure you get those texts daily that say, ‘If you don’t pay this toll right now, we got you.’”

“We also learned that when people hack into other people’s stuff, they will never be prosecuted for it because it’s a fingerprintless crime,” Zercher adds. “So not only does it happen all the time and everyone is upset about it, everybody’s hands truly are tied.”

In addition to a script filled with flights of fancy and dreams of delivering ultraviolet justice, the filmmaking evokes the loss of control the couple faced after the incident. Brady, who edited the film, says he carefully considered the feature’s flow.

“The rough cut that I showed a lot of my friends was an hour and 55 minutes,” he says. “Across the board, they all had a version of the note: ‘This feels like a 90-minute movie.’ So I literally set a timeline marker to 90 and started hacking away. I felt like the movie started getting richer and becoming more … I don’t take offense when there’s a Letterboxd review calling it ‘The TikTok movie.’ It’s fast-paced, it’s insane, but I take it as a compliment for two reasons. Number one is that the goal audience is the younger generation and those dealing with technology. Furthermore, by leaning into this frenetic-paced world, that’s what Emily and I were dealing with. We felt crazy. We felt insane. And everywhere we looked for help or closure, it was a joke. Then you make a movie that’s a joke.”

“Hacked” has recently been acquired for distribution by S&R Films, and the pair is excited for larger audiences to get the same jolt as at festival screenings. Ultimately, Brady says that the film has helped him to process and move past the robbery.

“I’ve been working diligently in my life to embrace suffering as a gift,” he says. “‘Right now, this is very bad, and what is happening is very bad, but maybe there’s a reason for it.’ Not to say that our future is preordained or our destiny is written in the stars, but perhaps the suffering that we went through is meant to allow us to bond with other people who have gone through similar things. Perhaps by us killing ourselves with work to make this movie a reality, it will help somebody else who got their money stolen, and they’re never going to get it back. It’ll help somebody through a really crappy day, and they want to put on a movie where they get to have that release and have fun and not take themselves so seriously.”

Watch the trailer for “Hacked” below.