For all the alleged damage done to the young and malleable by easy access to media and the arts, it can be said that there’s also a positive upshot. So proves Zombie Girl, a documentary about filmmaker Emily Hagins who completed production on her first horror movie, Pathogen, before the age of 13.

Blessed with irresistible subject matter, co-directors Justin Johnson, Aaron Marshall and Erik Mauck craft a portrait of Emily as a girl who has been obsessed with the moving image since early childhood, benefitting from her enabler mom, Megan, who took her to her first Lord of the Rings marathon when she was 10 years old. As we learn in Zombie Girl, when Emily attended one of Harry Knowles’ 24-hour Butt-Numb-A-Thon events in her hometown of Austin, she took a special liking to Australian gore flick Undead. Shocked that the tween actually enjoyed the guts and gore on display in that film—including a scene portraying a live episiotomy—Knowles went on to mentor the young protégé at the behest of director Peter Jackson, to whom Emily had written an inquisitive advice-seeking letter some time prior.

Pathogen’s beleaguered production schedule, beginning with the completion of the script, makes up the bulk of the story. Seeing Emily direct her cast of attention-challenged children and 12-year-olds while dealing with the stops and starts dealt to her by the school year, homework, and meddling parents, is a treat—not only because she’s so competent and mature for her age, but because the other kids are a riot, surprisingly comfortable in front of the camera and curiously media savvy in their own right. Even with two sets of cameras on them—Emily’s and that of the documentarians—the cast members of Pathogen remain bright, clever, and cool, just like their director. If they are in a hurry to grow up, at least they’re doing it right.

It is to the filmmakers’ credit that Emily is not treated with undue reverence here; Zombie Girl takes great care in depicting her as realistically as possible, leaving her foibles and errors intact, and capturing her honest reactions as she reluctantly learns from her own mistakes. As you might expect, she makes a lot of them—but refreshingly, she’s the first to admit that she’s got a lot to learn.

Although there is a dearth of actual footage from Emily’s finished film on display in the documentary, the very fact that the 6th-grader is seeing a feature film through to fruition is more important than the quality of the production itself. For that reason, Zombie Girl is a huge success—inspiring as it is entertaining, and hopeful, too, because if our pre-teens have this much ambition, the future is going to be just fine.