Shelley Duvall returns to movies in Glen Cove filmmaker Scott Goldberg's feature 

Shelley Duvall's heralded return to acting after 20 years is in a low-budget feature by a Glen Cove filmmaker, joined by two other screen icons.

Duvall, Dee Wallace ("E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," "The Howling") and Edward Furlong ("Terminator 2: Judgment Day") joined star Chiko Mendez in writer-director Scott Goldberg's psychological horror-thriller "The Forest Hills," screening Sunday at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington. A Q&A with Furlong, Mendez, Goldberg and two of the producers follows the 2:30 p.m. showing.

Goldberg, 40, owner of North Fork Wedding Films & Photography and a longtime maker of short films, says he wanted to work with Duvall because "I'm a fan of 'The Shining,' " Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror opus in which she played the terrorized wife of Jack Nicholson's driven-mad novelist. "So once we had the budget to decide on who would be involved, she came to mind."

But the 73-year-old Duvall — filmmaker Robert Altman's muse in movies like "Nashville," "Thieves Like Us" and "Brewster McCloud" — had left Hollywood in 2002, due to both distaste for the business, in which she had become a pioneering TV producer, and to be near her cancer-stricken brother in their native Texas. She sadly resurfaced in 2016 in an episode of the syndicated daytime discussion show "Dr. Phil" that was widely criticized as exploiting her apparent mental illness.

But that appearance solidified something for Goldberg. "She looked different but it was still Shelley Duvall," he says, and he wanted to work with her. "I finally got the chance to on this project."

What made Duvall, who shot her scenes in Texas, choose this as her comeback? Goldberg isn't sure — he was one of multiple producers on the film who'd phoned and texted the actor, who he says had no access to a computer; it was cinematographer Scott Hansen, an executive producer with Goldberg and others, who got her formal yes.

But what was supposed to be a single scene of her speaking to the camera became, at her request, more expansive. "She expressed she wanted to act with someone on camera," says Goldberg, "and so I came up with scenes and sequences that I felt could best fit her into the story."

"The Forest Hills" centers on Rico (Mendez), who is tormented by nightmarish visions that include his mother (Duvall) after suffering head trauma while camping in the Catskill Mountains. His friend Billy (Furlong) tries to help. Wallace plays the owner of a cafe, while Stacey Nelkin ("Halloween III: Season of the Witch") plays a caseworker; Felissa Rose ("Sleepaway Camp") a physician; and Marianne Hagan ("Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers") a high school principal.

The cafe scene was shot upstate in Saugerties, but Long Island provided a house each in Deer Park and Mount Sinai; a cemetery in the Mount Sinai-Port Jefferson area; and Glen Cove High School, from which Goldberg graduated in 2000 before going on to a degree from Five Towns College.

Duvall's return to acting, says Goldberg, "is something I feel she didn't expect but welcomed. And when she's acting, she shows who she always was, and the wonderful actor she's always been.”