Matthew Lillard’s Find Familiar Spirits has an exciting new line: Macabre Spirits! The first release, which is a premium reposado tequila, is on sale now and comes with Mike Flanagan’s first horror novella, Rare, Fine & Limited.
A sinister story. A boldly crafted tequila. Rare, Fine & Limited brings you a new way to celebrate the darkness. From the imaginations of Matthew Lillard (Scream, Five Nights at Freddy’s), Justin Ware (Bloodsucking Bastards) and the award-winning Find Familiar Spirits distillers comes the world’s first tequila made by and for devotees of horror. This premium bottle is paired with the first-ever horror novella from the legendary Mike Flanagan (Fall of the House of Usher, Midnight Mass).
While at New York Comic Con this year, I had the chance to catch up with the actor and discuss how this horror-theme drop was inspired, what fans can expect from Rare, Fine & Limited, the bottle’s beautiful art, seeing the impact his work has on the community, and what’s next for Macabre Spirits. Keep reading for our full conversation!
So tell me about the inspiration for Macabre Spirits, and did the research you did for it teach you anything new about horror?
Matthew Lillard: So yeah, about two years ago, my buddy came to me and saw what I was doing in the Dungeons & Dragons space with a company I own with my partners called Beadle & Grimm’s. We make high-end box editions for Dungeons & Dragons and he was like, ‘I love what you guys are doing, it’s going direct to customer.’ He’s a screenwriter, we did a movie together before and he was like, ‘What do you think about doing that same idea with booze or alcohol, going direct to customer with alcohol?’ We have another partner who is in the alcohol space, and the three of us got together and we decided to launch this sort of Dungeons & Dragons-inspired whiskey. Well, very early on in that conversation, in the creation process of the company, we’re like, why would we stop with a D&D whiskey? This idea of providing high-end spirit experiences for fandoms is really exciting. It’s sort of a game changer in terms of how to build and market a product. Instead of being the biggest whiskey in the world, what happens if you’re the biggest whiskey in a space, two spaces, or ten spaces, right? And so, the idea of going, and what’s more exciting, like getting out there and trying to build a whiskey for everyone or trying to build something for a community that you personally adore. So that started the journey, we launched on October 2 of last year. Hugely successful and we’re super proud of it.
Can you believe it’s been that long?
I can, because I am a day-in, day-out. I’m an everyday CEO co-founder with my partner and so, we’re on the grind. I mean, we’re trying to build a huge company. The success has been off the train, to begin with, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. We have a lot of plans and we have a lot of things we want to do. So the action it takes, the energy it takes to build something like that out is something I’ve never done before, and I find it all-consuming and overwhelming, but yet incredibly rewarding. And so, we always had signaled from the get-go that the next drop would be a horror-themed something and about, I don’t know, February, we really started to dig into what Macabre was and how we wanted to approach, right? Our value proposition in every one of these flagship brands is what do we bring to a community, not what we take, right? And so, for this, we knew that we loved the idea of literary horror and the idea of creating a novella that forwards this tradition of an Edgar Allan Poe-type story, we just thought was really evocative and really sexy, and we loved it. And so, I just got done doing a movie with Mike Flanagan, a beautiful film called The Life of Chuck. I can’t wait, I love the movie. It’s beautiful, it’s great.
The fact that you and Tom Hiddleston are in it together, don’t even get me started.
Tom Hiddleston’s a dream. He’s a dreamboat. So yeah, I was like, well, who better to go to?
Yeah, Mike Flanagan is amazing.
He’s amazing, an incredible person. And so, I approached him, he’s sober and I was like, ‘I know this feels awkward, if it’s awkward at all, don’t worry about it,’ and he jumped at the opportunity and was thrilled. We expected like 10,000 to 15,000 words, and he delivered just under 80,000 words, and he fell in love with it. I kept getting these text updates, he’s like, ‘Listen, I’m at 15,000 words, it’s not enough,’ ‘I’m at 20,000 words, I’m gonna try to trim it down,’ ‘I’m at 30,000 words,’ and that just progressed. He fell in love with the story, we fell in love with it, and we couldn’t be more excited to bring his first-ever novella to the market.
Like I said, Mike Flanagan is a genius. What can you tell me about the story? What can you tease? What can fans expect from it?
Yeah, so Rare, Fine & Limited is the name of the story. What can I tease? I mean, the thing I will tease is that it’s everything you want it to be. We gave him this idea, this notion of literary horror, which means to me and us that it’s not the Jason Blum, gore-centric sort of Terrifier 3 version of horror. Macabre is more an aesthetic, it’s more evocative rather than gruesome. Mike Flanagan being Mike Flanagan walks a very precarious line between the two. I think it’s a throwback story, and what else can I tell really? I don’t really want to tell. I mean, at the back of the bottle, I do think that we do add this, is that the hero of the story is a guy who’s a very, very rich man trying to find his next great high and stumbles into a proprietor that offers him the opportunity of a lifetime. It’s really crazy and it’s really exciting, and the only place you can get it is with us and the bottle.
It’s a limited run but we will pay attention too. With Quest’s End, it’s 6,500 units and that’s it. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. This isn’t that. We’re gonna do a season of — so, Macabre Spirits, the first season of Macabre is an exploration of blue agave. So there’ll be multiple bottle drops that will have the sort of exploration of agave, which is the plant that tequila is derived from. And so, we have really cool expressions coming up and more stories to tell with more writers.
Next, tell me about the bottle. I know it’s an oil-painted design.
Yeah, so the bottle is beautiful. We custom-designed it. We’re really excited about it. We found this artist a couple of years ago, I went to the LA Art Fair and I found this random artist named Mia Bergeron, and my daughter, who’s an art major at USC, was like, this artist is amazing, and both of us started to follow her and to follow her gallery. For every version of Macabre Spirits, there’s a piece of art that is on the front of the bottle, that art was inspired by the story. So Mia Bergeron went out and painted an oil painting that she interpreted from the story that she read from Mike Flanagan. We love what she created. It was like this really sort of, again, I keep using the word evocative, but it was a really lovely interpretation of what she read. We couldn’t be more excited to present her on the first bottle. Her work is fantastic and our hope is to work with her again in the future. But yeah, so each time that piece on the front will change and we’re excited about that. But she’s great, she was great to work with. She’s out of Tennessee and she’s super talented.
Obviously, fans of the horror genre absolutely love you and since we are at NYCC, how does it feel to see the impact that your work has on audiences?
It’s humbling, there’s been a long journey. I’ve been an actor for a long time and I’ve been very, very blessed to have a modicum of success, and some of that success has been in this genre specifically, Scream, Thirteen Ghosts, and now, Five Nights at Freddy’s. Quite frankly, I haven’t done that much, but all of them seem to land in a fun way. I think, as an actor, you know, listen, I’m 54 years old, I don’t know how many more movies I have in my life, you’re rounding second, headed to third in a career and so, to have a position to even be remembered, let alone sort of in a way beloved by a community, is humbling. I’ve been talking about this a lot lately, and I’m trying to figure out a great way to articulate it; to me, the power of fame, the joy of fame, has nothing to do with like, fast cars or nice reservations, right? That’s a myopic sort of empty version of fame. The joy comes from understanding the impact you have on other people’s lives. That, to me, the ability to make people feel seen, the ability to sort of impact people’s lives in a positive way because of the movies I’m in, has been a revelation for me in the last 10 years. I mean, I think I always have had that to some extent, but now really owning that, and owning that you, for whatever reason, whether it’s Scooby-Doo, Scream, or SLC Punk!, there’s a movie out there that’s impacted people in a profound way, and you can sort of allow that to be a power for good, has been life-fulfilling in a way. It really makes the whole thing worthwhile.
So, what is it like to do such popular horror projects and be known for those roles when you’re not really a horror fan?
Yeah, I mean, it doesn’t, my job being known for what I do is not interesting to me in any way, shape, or form. I have a job, I have a very weird job. I put on makeup, I hit a little X in the middle of the floor, say somebody’s line, and I pretend and shit. I mean, that’s my job. Whether that is in space, in a horror film, or a romantic — I’ve never been in a romantic comedy in my life, but whatever that is, it’s irrelevant to me what the paint color is as long as I get a chance to paint. For me, I’m glad people love horror movies, but it’s not my genre of choice. Alright, last question, one more question. I like your questions.
Well, let’s do a little preview because that’s how we end all of our interviews. What can you tell me about what’s coming up?
For Macabre, we have a lot. We have our next author lined up. He is my favorite author in the world. He’s a friend of mine, which is nice, again, and I think that he’s an incredible writer, right? So I think that the thing that we’re hanging our hat on, the value add that we bring to the community is that we are committed to creating really awesome stories that bring you delicious expressions of blue agave, and our hope is that people find us. Our hope is that people tell their friends and are just as thrilled about opening their package as we are about creating it and delivering it to them. That’s my hope.