William Victor Schotten has shelves overflowing with DVDs and Blu-rays in his home.

“Why don’t I stream the films online? You can find anything you ever need on all these streaming services,” the Hubbard native said. “But I want to know about how the film was made, and the story behind it. How did these guys get together? Some of my favorite Blu-rays aren’t because of the movies but because of the stories about how the film was made.”

That’s why Schotten turned what could have been a 15-minute bonus featurette on the physical release of his film “The Abiding Nail” into the feature-length documentary “Recommissioned: From Films of Fear to Films of Faith.”

Schotten wrote, directed, executive produced and shot the faith-based drama “The Abiding Nail” in 2022 after more than a decade of making low-budget horror films like “Dead Life” and “Below Ground.” Those movies secured distribution deals and were available on the shelves of stores like Hollywood Video in the early 2000s, when home video rental was king and streaming didn’t exist.

After a battle with addiction, Schotten found God and wanted to wed his faith with his love of filmmaking, but he didn’t want to make a traditional faith-based film.

“That’s always the big rub on Christian films. When you watch them, you’re like, ‘This is not how it is. This isn’t how life is. That’s not what a party looks like, that’s not what an abusive husband looks like,'” Schotten said. “I’m probably going to get myself in trouble for saying this, but filmmakers tend to make them on the consumers of Christian films’ sensibilities, what they’re comfortable in seeing. Why does every Christian film look like a toothpaste ad, right? Because that’s what they’re used to and what they’re comfortable with

“I was making ‘The Abiding Nail’ for the secular audience. I mean, I don’t see any point in making these quote, unquote Christian films or that genre just to entertain Christians. There’s plenty of stuff out there for them to be entertained by. Why can’t there be a gospel message in a really good movie? Why does that gospel message always have to be tucked into an after-school special? … I just want to make real movies with gospel messages. I don’t want to make like quote, unquote Christian films, because non-Christians aren’t seeing them, you know? Why can’t that film be for everybody?”

Schotten’s film about a small town girl who finds success in Hollywood only to return home following a public breakdown caused by addiction issues found an audience without playing to those tropes.

“The Abiding Nail” won awards at several film festivals ­– Schotten won best director at the New York Independent Cinema Awards and best cinematography at both the Chicago Indie Film Awards and the Star International Film Festival; star Ashley Rozzi won best actress at the Boston Indie Film Festival and film was named best narrative feature at Cannes Art Film Fest, an online competition.

It’s a strategy Schotten followed because film fest awards were a way to attract the attention of a distributor back in his horror movie days. The big break for “The Abiding Nail” was getting to meet Rich Christiano of the Christiano Film Group, one of the leading distributors of faith-based films, at the International Christian Film & Music Festival, where Rozzi and costar Walter Valentine received acting nominations.

Schotten originally tried to pitch Christiano an idea for a new film, but he was more interested in hearing about “The Abiding Nail.”

“I didn’t need to submit to all those other film festivals,” Schotten said. “It didn’t bolster the value of the film. Rich is the one who bolstered the value with his distribution company. Neither Wally nor Ashley won, but what it did was gave us a place at the table so we could meet Rich Christiano, who did amazing things for ‘The Abiding Nail.'”

One of the things Christiano suggested was doing a Spanish-language dub of the film. “The Abiding Nail” has been viewed more than 1.5 million times on YouTube, most of which have been that Spanish version. It’s available to watch with commercials on Tubi and for rental from other services. Christiano Film Group released a DVD version, which for two days was the top-selling faith-based title on Amazon, and a Blu-ray version will be released later this year with “Recommissioned” as one of its bonus features.

“Recommissioned,” currently available on YouTube, will get a separate Blu-ray release, and that disc also will include “Decommissioned,” a documentary Schotten made about forays into horror films.

“Recommissioned” chronicles the making of “The Abiding Nail,” but it also looks at the spiritual journey of Schotten and his collaborators. That put him in a unique position – he was the director, but he also was one of the people being interviewed. More than once, Schotten fights back tears on camera recounting his own problems with drugs or talking about Rozzi’s history of domestic abuse.

“Every cell in my body doesn’t want to tell those stories,” he said. “This being my testimony and Ashley’s testimony and even Wally’s testimony, it’s not ours to keep … From a spiritual standpoint, it’s commanded of me to share my testimony, to go out and tell the world the impact Christ has had in my life.

“I’m not gonna lie, man, there was a feeling when that thing went live. You just want to crawl into the woodwork and just hide, because now everybody knows. We just sort of laid all the cards out on the table. It is weird to be the subject or part of the subject and the director of the documentary, but it’s not really telling a secret and it’s not really a documentary. It’s testimony. That’s what we do, we go around and tell our testimonies to people, and that’s why we did it.”